Edward Dahlberg Quotes

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.

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

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

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

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.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

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.

A strong foe is better than a weak friend.

Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.

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.

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

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

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

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.

Every decision you make is a mistake.

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.

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.

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.

To write is a humiliation.

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

Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.

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.

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

Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.

One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness.

Man is at the nadir of his stregth when the Earth, the seas, the mountains are not in him, for without them his soul is unsourced, and he has no images by which to abide.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Who has enough credit in this world to pay for his mistakes?

Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice.