From The Diaries of Dawn Powell 1931-1965

If anyone likes truth—and it seems to me the most beautiful form of art in the world—they not only like to get at real motives and the real character of other people but there is a release in finding out something about themselves, or even finding old cliché’s true. After a while a number of things unfold—the reason for the banalities of best sellers, the popularity of platitudinous books on living. Platitude is the stuff of life, the core of living, the cure for heartbreak, the ultimate answer to “Why?” Underneath the woes of the world run the firm roots of platitude, the song cues, the calendar slogans. “Darkness comes before daylight,” “Tomorrow is another day,” “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” “Jesus loves you.”

There is nothing permanent, nothing for the mind to fall on but this old bed of clichés after it has stormed through life trying to find its own answers, its own solutions, and finally its own heartbreak, its own stone wall. What comfort then in “Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary?” Little—but all there is.