Anthony Powell

Books do furnish a room.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

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

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.

I get a warm feeling among my books.

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.