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We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

Edward Dahlberg

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Edward Dahlberg
Age: 76 †
Born: 1900
Born: July 22
Died: 1977
Died: February 27
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
People
Cain
Outcast
Solitary
Gray
Solitude
Cities
Another
Live
Repelled

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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
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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.
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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.
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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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Evil, which is our companion all our days, is not to be treated as a foe. It is wrong to cocker vice, but we grow narrow and pithless if we are furtive about it, for this is at best a pretense, and the sage knows good and evil are kindred. The worst of men harm others, and the best injure themselves.
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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.
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A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
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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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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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A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.
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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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A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
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Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
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