Dawn Powell Quotes

What were you to do when you didn't know anyone who could help you, no one who could explain the way to the things you wanted- what could you do- you couldn't just take a spade, a few bricks, and a gerenium and see what happened. You had to be rich, you had to be educated; you had to be powerful to stop contagious ugliness from spreading.

For a genius to be a genius, he must have a selfless slave between himself and the world.

How serious is it to cut out that little section behind the brow that separates what a Nice Girl Sees and Hears from What Really Happens.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics-he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word used for this unqualifying affection is 'cynicism'.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

An evening up on the Empire State roof-the strangest experience. The huge tomb in steel and glass, the ride to the 84th floor and there, under the clouds, a Hawaiian string quartet, lounge, concessions and, a thousand feet below, New York-a garden of golden lights winking on and off, automobiles, trucks winding in and out, and not a sound. All as silent as a dead city-and it looks adagio down there.

Nothing in life was possible unless you were old and rich, until then you were only small and futile before your tormentors, desperately waiting for the release that only years could bring. You bodly threw down your challenges and then ran away in a childish panic when someone picked them up...

A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.

A capacity for going overboard is a requisite for a full-grown mind.

Yet better for one of my nature to have it that way than to have life a peaceful, placid flow of quiet contentment. I must have days of rushing excitement.

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

I realize more and more how instinctively pessimistic I am of all human kindness
since I am always so bowled over by it
and am never surprised by injustice, malice or personal attack.

Rage swept over her at being young, young and little, as if some evil fairy had put that spell on her. Why must you be locked up in this dreadful cage of childhood for twenty or a hundred years? Nothing in life was possible unless you were old and rich, until then you were only small and futile before your tormentors, desperately waiting for the release that only years could bring.

I think we will have a boy baby and he will be born on the 20th of August. Everyone else has a girl baby and at times I don't believe I should mind having a little Phyllis Dawn but Dearest wants a boy and I do.

There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love.

It was not a jolly place at all for a sun-loving soul

I want so much for my lover. At night when our beds are drawn close together I waken and see his dear yellow head on the pillow - sometimes his arm thrown over on my bed - and I kiss his hand, very softly so that it will not waken him.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

That's why I can never be happy with simple, good people", she thought. "It isn't enough to be honest and good-to be happy they must pretend. They really must!

Hold fast to whatever fragments of love that exist, for sometimes a mosaic is more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.

There is something more annoying than pleasant in finding neighbors from back home chiselling in on your own exclusive New York. It mitigates your triumph in having conquered the great city and brings home the ungratifying truth that anyone can do it.

She would like to be on a train named Nightfall going to some place where she'd be twenty-five years old.

I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.

No one but a person who has been guilty himself could read guilt in others so well.

Joe and Jojo and I had lovely day together. I love Joe so much - more and more.

Friendship in youth represents sympathy without understanding; in age, understanding without sympathy.

Sometimes she wondered if there could be a limit to these twilight voyages, if some day she would stray too far and there would be no bridge nor bell to bring her home.