War & Peace Quote by Dawn Powell

Powell draws a bright, almost cruel line between forces that crush us and follies we choose to clutch. Tragedy, in her frame, is impersonal: disease, war, death. These are the blunt instruments of history and biology, the big indifferent machinery that turns people into casualties. Comedy, though, is personal and petty in the most revealing way: vanity. Not mirror-preening vanity alone, but the ego’s insistence on starring in every scene even when the plot doesn’t care.

The sting is in that repeated word helplessness. Powell refuses the comforting hierarchy where tragedy is “deep” and comedy is “light.” Both are humiliations; they just expose different humiliations. Tragedy shows how little leverage we have against the universe. Comedy shows how little leverage we have against ourselves, especially the part that keeps mistaking desire for destiny. By listing love alongside greed, lust, and power, she needles the romantic exception we’re trained to grant: love isn’t automatically noble, it’s often just vanity with better lighting.

Coming from a novelist who anatomized social climbers, bohemians, and status-hungry Manhattan circles, the line reads like field notes from a long career of watching people talk themselves into ridiculousness. Her intent isn’t to downgrade tragedy; it’s to explain why comedy can cut so sharply. You can’t negotiate with death, but you also can’t easily talk someone out of their own self-mythology. That’s why comedy lasts: vanity is renewable energy.