Dawn Powell Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
'Hermann is such a good husband,' went on Mrs. Bauer. 'I've never had a care. When we were first married it was the same. What, doing the supper dishes when you're so tired, he'd say! No, no, Hulda, he'd say, I won't have you worn out like that. You wait and do them in the morning, he'd say.'

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

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
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
'He was a good husband. Always. If he had to go away on a trip he always said, 'Enjoy yourself, Hulda. Let things go. You can do them all when I get back.'

Dawn Powell
True gaiety is based on a foundation of realism. All right, we know we're dying, we know we're poor, that is off our minds—we eat, sleep, make merry but we are not kidding ourselves that we are rich and beautiful or that Santa Claus and two blondes will soon come down the chimney.... Gaiety should be brave, it should have stout legs of truth, not a gelatine base of dreams and wishes.

Dawn Powell