Edward Dahlberg quotes - page 2

We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism. (Edward Dahlberg)
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
The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
Edward Dahlberg
Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.
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
Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser Iscariots than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.
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 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
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
Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.
Edward Dahlberg
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)
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.
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
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, maneating idol, lucre.
Edward Dahlberg
Recognise 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
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