Quote

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.

Edward Dahlberg

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Edward Dahlberg
Age: 76 †
Born: 1900
Born: July 22
Died: 1977
Died: February 27
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Others
Harm
Kindred
Best
Treated
Pretense
Good
Grow
Foe
Men
Worst
Sage
Days
Narrow
Grows
Companion
Wrong
Vice
Furtive
Evil
Vices
Injure

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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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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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I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.
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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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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
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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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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 strong foe is better than a weak friend.
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The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
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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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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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The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
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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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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.
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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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I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
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