Edward Dahlberg Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Americans have always been food, sex, and spirit revivalists.
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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.
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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.
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Evil, which is our companion all our days, is not to be treated as a foe. It is wrong to cocker vice, but we grow narrow and pithless if we are furtive about it, for this is at best a pretense, and the sage knows good and evil are kindred. The worst of men harm others, and the best injure themselves.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
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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.
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It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.
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I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
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Recognize 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.
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Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
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What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscledsuits; dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb. These are plainly the product of sickness.
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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.
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Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.
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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.
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Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised.
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We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.
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The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
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Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
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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.
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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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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.
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The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
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Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.
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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.
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A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
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We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.
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