Quote

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

Edmund Wilson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edmund Wilson
Age: 77 †
Born: 1895
Born: May 8
Died: 1972
Died: June 12
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Social Critic
Writer
Red Bank
New Jersey
Insult
Shot
Shots
Since
Happened
Cruelest
Fall
Carl
Hands
Booth
Thing
Lincoln

More quotes by Edmund Wilson

Image
On the one hand, I have wanted to supply documentation on myself by including material relevant to my emotions and ideas in my youth and, on the other, not to let myself down by publishing inferior material. My poetry comes under the latter head. My only advice to the reader is to skip any verse that he sees coming.
Edmund Wilson
Image
I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.
Edmund Wilson
Image
In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.
Edmund Wilson
Image
It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive.
Edmund Wilson
Image
Only the curious will learn and only the resolute will overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.
Edmund Wilson
Image
The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the public its own ignorance and cheap tastes.
Edmund Wilson
Image
His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.
Edmund Wilson
Image
I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.
Edmund Wilson
Image
In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.
Edmund Wilson
Image
Old-fogyism is comfortably closing in.
Edmund Wilson
Image
Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.
Edmund Wilson
Image
If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
Edmund Wilson
Image
There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.
Edmund Wilson
Image
From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation
Edmund Wilson
Image
I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.
Edmund Wilson
Image
They [the English] have a special word, civil, for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.
Edmund Wilson
Image
The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.
Edmund Wilson
Image
I think with my right hand.
Edmund Wilson