Dawn Powell > Quotes

“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

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

“All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.”
― 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

“There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love.”
― Dawn Powell

“I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.”
― 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

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

“Love, dear friends, begins with curiosity.”
― Dawn Powell, Whither

“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, The Locusts Have No King

“A capacity for going overboard is a requisite for a full-grown mind.”
― 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, Dance Night

“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, Dance Night

“No one but a person who has been guilty himself could read guilt in others so well.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“Friendship in youth represents sympathy without understanding; in age, understanding without sympathy.”
― Dawn Powell, The Diaries, 1931-1965

“Modesty's no credit to anyone-it's just a social grace.”
― Dawn Powell, Come Back to Sorrento

“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, Angels on Toast

“She would like to be on a train named Nightfall going to some place where she'd be twenty-five years old.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“It was not a jolly place at all for a sun-loving soul”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, Come Back to Sorrento

“Nothing will cut New York but a diamond.
​”
― Dawn Powell

“That’s why I ca 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, Come Back to Sorrento

“I used to think old age was a kind of feather bed you gradually sank down into, but it’s not. It’s a goddam stone wall you butt your head into till it cracks.”
― Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King

“Many men have triumphantly exploited a minuscule talent through life only to ruin themselves by muffing their deaths. Missing their proper exit cues they have hung around like dreary guests at a party, repeating themselves until it is made clear to all how little they ever had to say.”
― Dawn Powell, The Wicked Pavilion

“My great ambition has always prevented me from doing anything.”
― Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King

“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, Angels on Toast

“Once you have made up your mind to drop a person it is most inconsiderate of them not to come within dropping distance.”
― Dawn Powell, The Wicked Pavilion

“It was frightening to wake up in the morning and know that love did not last, no matter how it was treated.”
― Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast

“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, Dance Night