Dawn Powell Quotes

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.

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

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

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

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

I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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

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

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

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.