Quote

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

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Edward Dahlberg
Age: 76 †
Born: 1900
Born: July 22
Died: 1977
Died: February 27
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Fruit
Ambition
Sea
Ocean
Dead
Peril
Greatest
Precisely
Soul
Likely
Work
Seeking

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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.
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The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
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Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
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What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscledsuits dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb. These are plainly the product of sickness.
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A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
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We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
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Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
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I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
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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.
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Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.
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We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.
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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.
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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.
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A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
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There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment.
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The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
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