Quotes by Edward Dahlberg

Edward Dahlberg

Edward Dahlberg

American novelist, essayist and autobiographer

Lived from: 1900 - 1977

Category: Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited States

Born: 22 july 1900 Died: 27 february 1977

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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Quotes 1 till 20 of 36.

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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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  • A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
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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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  • 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.
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  • Every decision you make is a mistake.
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  • Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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  • 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
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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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  • I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.
    ― Edward Dahlberg
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  • 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.
    ― Edward Dahlberg
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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 takes a long time to understand nothing.
    ― Edward Dahlberg
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  • Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
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  • 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
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  • No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.
    ― Edward Dahlberg
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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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  • Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.
    ― Edward Dahlberg
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  • One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness, two of barrenness, and three of sodomy.
    ― Edward Dahlberg
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  • 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.
    ― Edward Dahlberg
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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.
    ― Edward Dahlberg
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Questions and Answers

What are the most famous quotes from Edward Dahlberg?

The two most famous quotes from Edward Dahlberg are:

  • "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."

When did Edward Dahlberg live?

Edward Dahlberg was born in 1900 and died in the year 1977.