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8e3e801
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Books do furnish a room.
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furnishing
furniture
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Anthony Powell |
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5afcd95
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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.
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reading
books
learning
being-a-reader
biblioholism
bookishness
reader
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Anthony Powell |
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ec25420
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The latter's boast that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour.
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Anthony Powell |
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2970cd1
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There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
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poignant
insightful
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Anthony Powell |
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2da9389
|
One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.
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Anthony Powell |
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8ef084a
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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.
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poignant
insightful
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Anthony Powell |
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1f154e4
|
For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world - legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea - scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projec..
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dance
time
music
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Anthony Powell |
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71d8957
|
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.
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hatred
meetings
mood
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Anthony Powell |
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008df13
|
Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.
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Anthony Powell |
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cef1fbd
|
His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.
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wry
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Anthony Powell |
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fe44e32
|
It doesn't do to read too much,' Widmerpool said. 'You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.
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Anthony Powell |
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bebc368
|
He suddenly began to look wretched, much as I had seen him look as a schoolboy: lonely: awkward: unpopular: odd; no longer the self-confident businessman into which he had grown. His face now brought back the days when one used to watch him plodding off through the drizzle to undertake the long, solitary runs across the dismal fields beyond the sewage farms: runs which were to train him for teams in which he was never included.
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socially-inept
unpopularity
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Anthony Powell |
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9c95305
|
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 ..
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Anthony Powell |
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4e911b8
|
Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.
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women
templer-s-views-on-women
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Anthony Powell |
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7803ecf
|
I used to imagine life divided into separate compartments, consisting, for example, of such dual abstractions as pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity; and more material classifications like work and play: a profession or calling being, according to that concept--one that seemed, at least on the surface, unequivocally assumed by persons so dissimilar from one another as Widmerpool and Archie Gilbert, something entirely dif..
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Anthony Powell |
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1b7e8b4
|
Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of yea..
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poverty
dandy
artist
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Anthony Powell |
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35655b4
|
There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.
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love
unreality
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Anthony Powell |
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c064f44
|
But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned--or everything is--because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.
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Anthony Powell |
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a8c1019
|
Brains and hard work are of very little avail, Jenkins, unless you know the right people.
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Anthony Powell |
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9e76ddd
|
Where, as again Vaughan writes, the liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies.
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Anthony Powell |
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5599dcf
|
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.
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Anthony Powell |
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625200b
|
An exceedingly well-informed report,' said the General. 'You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life.
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success
|
Anthony Powell |
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24102c1
|
There is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.
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Anthony Powell |
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050dd14
|
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 coul..
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residence
uncle-giles
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Anthony Powell |
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976f88b
|
Silted-up residues of the years smouldered uninterruptedly--and not without melancholy--in the maroon brickwork of these medieval closes: beyond the cobbles and archways of which (in a more northerly direction) memory also brooded, no less enigmatic and inconsolable, among water-meadows and avenues of trees: the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence.
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Anthony Powell |
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43df416
|
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 synchronised, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand. Later they dined at a restaurant quite near the flat.
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sex
romance
seduction
|
Anthony Powell |
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7f0c91d
|
Do you think love flourishes at Stourwater?' 'I don't know,' said Moreland. 'Love means such different things to different people.
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Anthony Powell |
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6ecdac1
|
In fact, so far as 'love' was concerned, I had been living for some years past in a rather makeshift manner. This was not because I felt the matter to be of little interest, like a man who hardly cares what he eats provided hunger is satisfied, or one prepared to discuss painting, should the subject arise, though never tempted to enter a picture gallery. On the contrary, my interest in love was keen enough, but the thing itself seemed not p..
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Anthony Powell |
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69b5d90
|
He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, literally, affect my purchase of rare vintages, and a figure of speech intended delicately to convey his own dire want for the bare necessities of life. He remained silent for several seconds, as if trying to make up his mind whether he could ever bring himself to speak to me again; and then said..
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verbosity
wry
ironic
|
Anthony Powell |
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7e6dbc8
|
Feeling unable to maintain this detachment of attitude towards human- and, in especial, matrimonial- affairs, I asked whether it was not true that she had married Bob Duport. She nodded; not exactly conveying, it seemed to me, that by some happy chance their union had introduced her to an unexpected terrestrial paradise.
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marriage
sardonic
|
Anthony Powell |
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f6aca48
|
Well,' said Mrs. Erdleigh, speaking kindly, as if to a child who has proposed a game inevitably associated with the breakage of china, 'I trouble will come of it if we do.
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Anthony Powell |
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b52dcee
|
My brother is a strange fellow," said Bernard, speaking with terrible bonhomie."
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Anthony Powell |
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9951cc9
|
Such colourless phrases as he achieved were produced with a difficulty, a hesitancy, simulated perhaps, but decidedly effective in their unconcealed ineptness. Like most successful men, he had turned this apparent disadvantage into a powerful weapon of offense and defense, in the way that the sledge-hammer impact of his comment left, by its banality, every other speaker at a standstill, giving him as a rule complete mastery of the conversat..
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Anthony Powell |
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a93f62d
|
Self-love seems so often unrequited.
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|
Anthony Powell |
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c7c6cd0
|
T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.
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Anthony Powell |
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67405fc
|
Growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
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Anthony Powell |