The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Anthony Powell

Only an atmosphere of quiet hard work and dull, serious conversation were appropriate to him.

hard-work, seriousness, widmerpool

In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.

ageing, aging, getting-old

One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.

For some reason Canon Fenneau made me feel a little uneasy. His voice might be soft, it was also coercive. He had small eyes, a large loose mouth, the lips thick, a somewhat receding chin. The eyes were the main feature. They were unusual eyes, not only almost unnaturally small, but vague, moist, dreamy, the eyes of a medium. His cherubic side, increased by a long slightly uptilted nose, was a little too good to be true, with eyes like that. In the manner in which he gave you all his attention there was a taste for mastery.

eyes, nose, physical-description

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.

characterization, hatred, meetings, mood

He [Widmerpool] moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.

curiosity, secretive

It was [Hugh’s] omnipresent fear that some woman might be foisted on him who would turn out to be an adventuress and would blackmail him. This preoccupation made it almost impossible for him to engage a secretary.

humorous, quotes

Some of the best of us are quite unambitious.

ambition, unambitious

Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep;

bedrooms, men, sleeping-habits

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

creative, imagination, writing

Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.

sex, templer-s-views-on-women, women

Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.

barnby, intelligence, women