Quotes from Edward Dahlberg

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

A strong foe is better than a weak friend.

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

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.

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.

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

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.

A strong foe is better than a weak friend.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

To write is a humiliation.

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.