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.

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

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

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.

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

I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.

A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by 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'.

Love, dear friends, begins with curiosity.

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.

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

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.

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

Modesty's no credit to anyone-it's just a social grace.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

Nothing will cut New York but a diamond. ​

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.

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!

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.

My great ambition has always prevented me from doing anything.

Once you have made up your mind to drop a person it is most inconsiderate of them not to come within dropping distance.

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

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.

I'm not afraid of her," she said. "That's just the way old women are. I'm not afraid of anybody. I feel sorry for them, coming to me someday begging me to forgive 'em because they didn't realize I was going to turn out so rich and famous.

Suddenly he thought he had lived over stores long enough, he wanted someplace to stretch his long limbs, someplace where he belonged, where he wasn't always ducking to keep out of peoples' way. Gardens, chateaux- Morry saw them laid out like spangled Christmas cards- vividly colored invitations to a fairytale world. He felt homesick for spacious houses set in spreading lawns fringed with great calm shade trees-he was homesick for things he had never known, for families he had only read about, he missed people-old friends that had lived only in the novels he had read. Homesick... for a Lamptown that Hogan has just created out of six beers.

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...

If she cried about little things now and then, and he supposed she did, he did not know what it was and certainly did not want to find out. If he himself felt sunk he didn’t want anybody asking what was the matter with him, and Mary, even if she noticed, did not ask questions. If he suspected she disapproved of something he said or did-he was forever doing something wrong about her aunt and uncle-all she did was to stay in her room with a headache for a couple of days. It couldn’t have been a more agreeable relationship.

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 conyagious ugliness from spreading.

Listen, nobody has to give up anything unless they really want to or are too darned weak. If Mama really could have done anything she would have-if anybody wants something all she needs do is go and get it. There aren’t any excuses.

Nobody ever decided anything. Situations were solved only by other situations.

When he was braced alcoholically for his classes, there was never a passable female student that he had not considered hungrily and, properly loaded, approached. Even complaisant girls, however, either froze or fled at their professor's greedy but classical advances. An unexpected goose or pinch on the bottom as they were mounting the stairs ahead of him, a sudden nip at the earlobe as they bent over the book he offered, a wild clutch at thigh, or a Marxian (Harpo) dive at bottom, a trousered male leg thrust between theirs as they passed his seat to make them fall in his lap, where he tickled their ribs - all these abrupt overtures sent them flying in terror. Brought to his senses by their screams, Kellsey retreated hastily. Some of the more experienced girls, after adjusting their skirts, blouses, coiffures, and maidenly nerves, realized that this was only a hungry man's form of courtship. They reminded themselves that old, famous, and rich men played very funny games, and they prepared themselves for the next move. But Kellsey, repulsed, became at once the haughty, sardonic, woman-hating pedant, leaving the poor dears a confused impression that they were the ones who had behaved badly, and sometimes, baffled by his subsequent hostility and bad grades, they even apologized.

In crises of this sort the Dyckmanns had usually found it effective to stare into space, encouraging the long pause that might fetch the witty words, 'Well, dear, we must go.' But the Bairds were on an entirely different wavelength, and this was the fault of the Dyckmanns. With the removal of the bottles it had been the mutual impulse of the Bairds to shoot out the door, but their second thought was that they must not... (from "Dinner on the Rocks" (1954) by Dawn Powell)

The Grand Illusion "No one can create an illusion for you but you, and no one can free you from an illusion but you." John-Roger, DSS When I was on a trip to the USSR back in 1988 with J-R our group went to a Russian "Circus". I was anticipating lions and trapeze and tight rope walkers. What we saw there was much different than that, we saw a hypnotist. It was a huge arena that was filled to the gills and our group had our earphones in listening to the show through our group translator. As the "mesmerizer" hypnotized the entire hall he called out people to come down to the stage. Some in our group went down. Zombies alive!! I believe the translator was hypnotized as well. It was wild. I thought of this today thinking how we are in a world of illusion. The world that we "see" seems solid and firm but is made up of mostly space and vibration. We have hypnotized ourselves into believing we are victims or we are helpless, or we are stuck or fearful. It's like a strongman believing he is weak. Superman has touched Kryptonite. The kryptonite is our misbeliefs. We believe we are in a limited world and we are the victims of that world. In truth, we are part of God. We create our reality. We are powerful. You create, promote, or allow everything in your life. “The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you Don't go back to sleep! You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep! People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch, The door is round and open Don't go back to sleep!” -Rumi Wake up to the wonder. LLS Richard Powell Essence-into-form.com

Kind men don't work as prison guards." "I suppose not.

Fear suddenly gave way to impatience at the stupidity of crowds who reacted only to accidents, freaks, movie stars, kings.

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.

even in this educated age there are little people who cannot ride the wars or if they do are only humble coach passengers, not the leaders or the float-riders; there are the little people who can only think that they are hungry, they haven’t eaten, they have no money, they have lost their babies, their loves, their homes,

In a time of oratory how inarticulate they were, in an age where every cause had its own beautiful blonde figurehead, how plain these little individual women were!

It was a sucker age, an age for any propaganda, any cause, any lie, any gadget, and scorning this susceptibility chroniclers sang the stubborn cynicism of past heroes who would not believe the earth was round. It was an age of explosions, hurricanes, wrecks, strikes, lies, corruption, and unbridled female exploitation. Unable to find reason for this madness people looked to historical figures and ancient events for the pat answers.

The ominous smell of gunpowder was matched by a rising cloud of Schiaparelli’s Shocking.

Look at the jewels, the rare pelts, the gaudy birds on elaborate hairdress, and know that the war was here; already the women had inherited the earth.

All Vicky could do was to read the women’s magazines and discover how other heroines had solved this problem. The favorite solution, according to these experts, was to take your little savings out of the bank, buy a bathing suit, some smart luggage, put on a little lipstick, throw away your ugly glasses and go to Palm Beach or Miami for two weeks.

Success was in the takeoff, in the initial appearance of complete confidence in one’s adequacy.

Why, she isn’t even crying!” she heard people say at her mother’s funeral, as if it was for this moist tribute that people died. People were always wanting children to cry and prove again and again their helplessness, so that they might take advantage of it.

It was all very well for your Amandas to have been born grown-up, but a man, to be a great man, should have once been a boy.

Yes, Vicky decided, the female mind, in its eagerness to shine afresh every day, had to have a very rapid turnover. There was no attic treasure chest or ice box where the good education was stored, mothproof, mouse-proof, and shrinkproof. There was only a top dresser drawer where names, dates, fragments of facts were flung without mates as the information hurtled through.

You usually lost him on your tenth wedding anniversary to some girl in a bathing suit lying on a Miami beach with a lipstick and no glasses.

He thought of himself as an almost too complacent optimist, but the proof of his cynicism was that although he was never shocked by the depths of human sin, he was constantly staggered by the slightest evidence of human civility.

Saunders was thirty-three, old enough to have been disappointed a thousand times, but still young enough to be surprised.

What specialist in mediocrity determined the prizewinners and ruled what measure of banality was required for success?