Edward Dahlberg Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

Edward Dahlberg
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.

Edward Dahlberg
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.

Edward Dahlberg
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.

Edward Dahlberg
A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.

Edward Dahlberg
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.

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

Edward Dahlberg
It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.

Edward Dahlberg
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.

Edward Dahlberg
There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment.

Edward Dahlberg
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.

Edward Dahlberg
Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.

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

Edward Dahlberg
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.

Edward Dahlberg
Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.

Edward Dahlberg
It takes a long time to understand nothing.

Edward Dahlberg
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.

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

Edward Dahlberg
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.

Edward Dahlberg
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.

Edward Dahlberg
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, man-eating idol, lucre.

Edward Dahlberg
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.

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

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

Edward Dahlberg
We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.

Edward Dahlberg
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.

Edward Dahlberg