Dawn Powell famous quotes

03-24-2025

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

#Love #Beautiful #Mosaics
All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.
-- Dawn Powell

#Ohio
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

#Running #Book #Track
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

#New York #Garden #Clouds
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

#War #Men #Vanity
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

#Girl #Baby #Believe
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

#Writing #People #Satire
Joe and Jojo and I had lovely day together. I love Joe so much - more and more.
-- Dawn Powell

#Lovely #Together #Lovely Day
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

#Years #Evil #Childhood
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

#People #Gossip #Vices
There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love.
-- Dawn Powell

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

#Mind #Overboard #Capacity
A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct.
-- Dawn Powell

#Forests #Rich #Instinct
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

#Artist #People #Needs
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

#Rushing #Peaceful #Contentment
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

#Kissing #Night #Hands
I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.
-- Dawn Powell

#Laughter #Oxygen
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

#New York #Home #Cities
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

#Age #Ingredients #Dupes
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

#Kindness #Pessimistic #Injustice

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