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They [the English] have a special word, civil, for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

Edmund Wilson

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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
Ordinary
Special
Word
Politeness
Elsewhere
Civil
English
Merely

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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.
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In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.
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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.
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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.
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There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.
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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
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Old-fogyism is comfortably closing in.
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The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.
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I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.
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The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
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In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.
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Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.
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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.
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If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
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It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive.
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His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.
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I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.
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I think with my right hand.
Edmund Wilson