A Dance to the Music of Time Quotes

“Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“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, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“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, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“If certain individuals fall in love from motives of convenience, they can be contrasted with plenty of others in whom passion seems principally aroused by the intensity of administrative difficulties in procuring its satisfaction.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“On most of the occasions when I visited the Ufford, halls and reception rooms were so utterly deserted that the interior might almost have been Uncle Giles's private residence. Had he been a rich bachelor, instead of a poor one, he would probably have lived in a house of just that sort: bare: anonymous: old-fashioned: draughty: with heavy mahogany cabinets and sideboards spaced out at intervals in passages and on landings; nothing that could possibly commit him to any specific opinion, beyond general disapproval of the way the world was run.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“I was relieved to find her attitude to myself suggested nothing more hostile than complete indifference.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“Anyway, what can one do here? I am seriously thinking of running away and joining the Foreign Legion or the North-West Mounted Police—whichever work the shorter hours.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“Wisdom is the power to admit that you cannot understand and judge the people in their entirety.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“...in those days children were rather out of fashion.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“This ideal conception―that one should have an aim in life―had, indeed, only too often occurred to me as an unsolved problem; but I was still far from deciding what form my endeavours should ultimately take.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“Widmerpool had tidied himself up a little since leaving school, though there was still a kind of exotic drabness about his appearance that seemed to mark him out from the rest of mankind.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“Stringham said: 'If you're not careful you will suffer the awful fate of the man who always knows the right clothes to wear and the right shop to buy them at.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“He [Widmerpool] moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“suggestion of public service, even”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 1: Spring

“These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement