Dawn Powell Quotations

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

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

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.

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

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?

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).

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.

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

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.

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