Dawn Powell Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Dawn Powell

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. — Dawn Powell

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. — Dawn Powell

Bad weather friends were as undependable as fair weather friends in a crisis, the relationship in both cases being dictated by conditions of fortune instead of mutual tastes. — Dawn Powell

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. — Dawn Powell

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

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

You woke in the morning with the weight of doom on your head. You lay with eyes shut wondering why you dreaded the day; was it a debt, was it a lost love? -and then you remembered the nightmare ... This was no time for beauty, for love, or private future ... There was no future; everyone waited, marked time, waited. For what? — Dawn Powell

Love, dear friends, begins with curiosity. — Dawn Powell

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. — Dawn Powell

A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct. — Dawn Powell

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. — Dawn Powell

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. — Dawn Powell

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

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

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... — Dawn Powell

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'. — Dawn Powell

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

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

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

I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter. — Dawn Powell

That's the way people were. Nobody believed in the things you believed but yourself, nobody believed that even you were really sincere about it, people believed whatever was good business for them at the time. Nobody believed in anything but good business. — Dawn Powell

Friendship in youth represents sympathy without understanding; in age, understanding without sympathy. — Dawn Powell

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. — Dawn Powell

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. — Dawn Powell

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. — Dawn Powell

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

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. — Dawn Powell

It was frightening to wake up in the morning and know that love did not last, no matter how it was treated. — Dawn Powell

Oh, of course, it was a sad role, the lover no longer loving. But once the perfunctory sympathy was given him the heart went outfully to oneself, the real victim, the unloved. — Dawn Powell

The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power). — Dawn Powell

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

There was gray train smoke over the town most days, it smelled of travel, of transcontinental trains about to flash by, of important things about to happen. The train smell sounded the 'A' for Lamptown and then a treble chord of frying hamburger and onions and boiling coffee was struck by Hermann Bauer's kitchen, with a sostenuto of stale beer from Delaney's back door. These were all busy smells and seemed a 6 to 6 smell, a working town's smell, to be exchanged at the last factory whistle for the festival night odors of popcorn, Spearmint chewing gum, barber-shop pomades, and the faint smell of far-off damp cloverfields. Mornings the cloverfields retreated when the first Columbus local roared through the town. Bauer's coffee pot boiled over again, and the factory's night watchmen filed into Delaney's for their morning beer. — Dawn Powell

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly. — Dawn Powell

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! — Dawn Powell