Anthony Powell Quotes

If I'm not comfortable, I just look awkward.

I remember once acting really cool on a bus with this girl named Stephanie. When I got home, I realized that I had a really big zit on my forehead. If you have acne problems, you really shouldn't be acting like Don Juan. I should have been contrite - and apologized for exposing her to the angry pimple.

I'm not sure that I am able to feel embarrassment.

She's probably in denial that she's a great big ball of insecurity and I'm quite well aware that I am one.

I never want to be a showoff or attention getter or something that, truthfully, is kind of repulsive to me, but I get uncomfortable.

Shyness displays itself differently in me. I think it's more an awkwardness.

I always feel like I'm the young one, I'm the small one.

Mary Katherine Gallagher is an exaggerated version of me, how I felt when I was little.

I have to say that I am embarrassed about how emotional I am.

I don't really experience much embarrassment.

I feel like I go through an awkward phase almost every day.

Clearly I'm able to read emotions. But I do feel... What is it? Awkwardness. I'm not a slick dude. That's what it comes down to. The nakedness, the guilelessness... that's quite real.

Watching yourself on film, if you've never watched yourself on film before, you want to go crawl into bed and stay there for a week.

I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

If anyone ever saw me dance, they'd have trouble taking me seriously.

No matter what I do with my life, or how successful I am, I will always be a socially awkward penguin inside.

Lacey shrugged bashfully. “Do you think I’m superficial?” “Well, yeah.” I thought of myself standing outside Becca’s bedroom, hoping she’d take her shirt off. “But so am I,” I added. “So is everyone.

I have an inferiority complex, but it’s not a very good one.

Shyness is a curious thing, because, like quicksand, it can strike people at any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down.

I am deebly self-conscious, and bad.

It was so embarrassing, everytime I see it, I blush. Imagine if you saw yourselves like that. It's one thing to get dressed up and do the movie star thing, but I mean, it's my job to be outside of that and it's not like I'm on the outside when they're all watching me. [About the famous car wash scene from One Night at McCool's]

The Marquis believed himself to be hardened against flattery. He thought that he had experienced every variety, but he discovered that he was mistaken: the blatantly worshipful look in the eyes of a twelve-year-old, anxiously raised to his, was new to him, and it pierced his defences.

I don't like it when I outweigh my men.

Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power.

Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.