A Time to Be Born Quotes

“What specialist in mediocrity determined the prizewinners and ruled what measure of banality was required for success?”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“Saunders was thirty-three, old enough to have been disappointed a thousand times, but still young enough to be surprised.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“Fear suddenly gave way to impatience at the stupidity of crowds who reacted only to accidents, freaks, movie stars, kings.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“Success was in the takeoff, in the initial appearance of complete confidence in one’s adequacy.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“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!”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“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,”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“The ominous smell of gunpowder was matched by a rising cloud of Schiaparelli’s Shocking.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“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.”
― Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born