Edward Dahlberg Quotes (44 Quotes)

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers' back pages.

Every decision you make is a mistake.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser Iscariots than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.

We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.

Always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. Walt Disney Every decision you make is a mistake.

There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, maneating idol, lucre.

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscled suits dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.

A strong foe is better than a weak friend.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

The Americans have always been food, sex, and spirit revivalists.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.

Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.

We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.

Recognise the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness, two of barrenness, and three of sodomy.

I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.

The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.

One of the weaknesses in the cooperative is that it has never been sufficiently leavened by the imagination. This is a quick-silver faculty, and likely to be a cause of worry to any collective settlement.

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.

The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla.

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore.

Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.

Look at this poet William Carlos Williams he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places he is word-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what Violence This is the cult of the frontier mind.

To write is a humiliation.

The majority of persons choose their wives with as little prudence as they eat. They see a troll with nothing else to recommend her but a pair of thighs and choice hunkers, and so smart to void their seed that they marry her at once. They imagine they can live in marvelous contentment with handsome feet and ambrosial buttocks. Most men are accredited fools shortly after they leave the womb.

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.

Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.

The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.

No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.

What has a writer to be bombastic about Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.