1900-1977, American Author, Critic
A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
Edward Dahlberg – [Enemies]
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.
Edward Dahlberg – [Optimism]
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.
Edward Dahlberg – [Ambition]
Every decision you make is a mistake.
Edward Dahlberg – [Decisions]
Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.
Edward Dahlberg – [Failure]
Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
Edward Dahlberg – [Genius]
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 – [Critics and Criticism]
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.
Edward Dahlberg – [Writers and Writing]
I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.
Edward Dahlberg – [Conversation]
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 – [Intelligence and Intellectuals]
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 – [Critics and Criticism]
Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
Edward Dahlberg – [Misers and Misery]
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 – [Madness]
No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.
Edward Dahlberg – [War and Peace]
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 – [Proverbs]
Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.
Edward Dahlberg – [Virtue]
One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness, two of barrenness, and three of sodomy.
Edward Dahlberg – [Cats]
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 – [Living Together]
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 – [Critics and Criticism]
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.
Edward Dahlberg – [Vice]