The Valley of Bones Quotes

“I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“I wonder whether what we call politeness isn’t just weakness”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“The war seems to have altered some people out of recognition and made others more than ever like themselves,’ said Isobel.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“One’s associations with people are regulated as much by what they stand for, as by what they are, individual characteristics becoming from time to time submerged in more general implications.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“It seemed to me he was well rid of Maureen, if she really was disturbing him to the extent that it appeared; but being judicious about other people’s love affairs is easy, often merely a sign one has not understood their force or complexity.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“Some persons feel drawn towards those who dislike them, or are at least determined to overcome opposition of that sort.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“He seemed about to speak; then, as if he could not give sufficient weight to the words while we walked, he stopped and faced me.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“I knew myself incapable of writing a line of a novel – by then I had written three or four – however long released from duty. Whatever inner processes are required for writing novels, so far as I myself was concerned, war now utterly inhibited. That was one of the many disagreeable aspects of war. It was not only physically inescapable, but morally inescapable too.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“Romantic ideas about the way life is lived are often to be found in persons themselves fairly coarse-grained.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“I indicated that I wrote for the papers, not mentioning books because, if not specifically in your line, authorship is an embarrassing subject for all concerned. Besides, it never sounds like a serious occupation.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“Moreland used to say love was like sea-sickness. For a time everything round you heaved about and you felt you were going to die – then you staggered down the gangway to dry land, and a minute or two later could hardly remember what you had suffered, why you had been feeling so ghastly.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards, as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“Both she and Umfraville might be said to represent forms of revolt, and nothing dates people more than the standards from which they have chosen to react.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“The exaggerated dramatic force employed by Umfraville in presenting his narrative made it hard to know what demeanour best to adopt in listening to the story. Tragedy might at any moment give way to farce, so that the listener had always to keep his wits about him.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“I wondered whether I wanted to hear more. The Jean business was long over, but even when you have ceased to love someone, that does not necessarily bring an indifference to a past shared together. Besides, though love may die, vanity lives on timelessly. I knew that I must be prepared to hear things I should not like. Yet, although where unfaithfulness reigns, ignorance may be preferable to knowledge, at the same time, once knowledge is brutally born, exactitude is preferable to uncertainty.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“He spoke in that reminiscent, unctuous voice men use when they tell you that sort of thing more to savour an enjoyable past situation, than to impart information which might be of interest.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“His physical attitude suggested a holy man doing penance vicariously for the sin of those in his spiritual care.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“The popular Press always talk as if only the rich committed adultery. One really can’t imagine a more snobbish assumption.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“A company commander,’ said Dicky Umfraville, when we met later that year, ‘needs the qualifications of a ringmaster in a first-class circus, and a nanny in a large family.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“It’s no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor, than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan,’ Moreland had once remarked. ‘It just happens there are more of the former types.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“His own family regarded Robert as one of those quietly self-indulgent people who live rather secret lives because they find themselves thereby less burdened by having to think of others.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of the Bones

“The message of the bell, the singer's tragic tone announcing it, underlined life's inflexible call to order, reaffirming the illusory nature of love and pleasure.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of the Bones

“Even so, Vigny would say those in uniform have made the greater sacrifice by losing the man in the soldier—what he calls the warrior's abnegation, his renunciation of thought and action. Vigny says a soldier's crown is a crown of thorns, amongst its spikes none more painful than passive obedience.’ ‘True enough.’ ‘He sees the role of authority as essentially artificial, the army a way of life in which there is as little room for uncontrolled fervour as for sullen indifference. The impetuous volunteer has as much to learn as the unwilling conscript.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of the Bones

“...Even when you have ceased to love someone, that does not necessarily bring an indifference to a past shared together. Besides, though love may die, vanity lives on timelessly. I knew that I must be prepared to hear things I should not like. Yet, although where unfaithfulness reigns, ignorance may be preferable to knowledge, at the same time, once knowledge is brutally born, exactitude is preferable to uncertainty.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“It's no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor, than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan,’ Moreland had once remarked. ‘It just happens there are more of the former types.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of the Bones