Dance Night Quotes

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“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, Dance Night

“No one but a person who has been guilty himself could read guilt in others so well.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“She would like to be on a train named Nightfall going to some place where she'd be twenty-five years old.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“It was not a jolly place at all for a sun-loving soul”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“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...”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night