She scarcely spoke at all and might have been one of those huge dolls which, when inclined backwards, say "Ma-ma" or "Pa-pa": though impossible to imagine in any position so undignified as that required for the mechanism to produce these syllables.

— Anthony Powell

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand. Later they dined at a restaurant quite near the flat.

— Anthony Powell

Some of the best of us are quite unambitious.

— Anthony Powell

Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend. A game in which, he says, “...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."

— Anthony Powell

 Susan poured herself out some more wine. She said: "You're nice. You must come and see me sometime. I live miles away from anywhere with my father. You'll like him."  "Tell me about him."  "He's a curious little man with a walrus mustache."  "What does he do?"  "He's a failure."  "Where does he fail?"  "Oh, he doesn't have any longer," she said. "He's a retired failure, you see. You must meet him."  "I'd like to.

— Anthony Powell

That was a good straightforward point of view, no pretence that games were anything but an outlet for power and aggression; no stuff about their being enjoyable as such. You played a game to demonstrate that you did it better than someone else. If it came to that, I thought how few people do anything for its own sake, from making love to practicing the arts.

— Anthony Powell

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

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

— Anthony Powell

There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.

— Anthony Powell

There is a strong disposition in youth, from which some individuals never escape, to suppose that everyone else is having a more enjoyable time than we are ourselves;

— Anthony Powell