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
Men
Worst
Sage
Days
Narrow
Grows
Companion
Wrong
Vice
Furtive
Evil
Vices
Injure
Others
Harm
Kindred
Best
Treated
Pretense
Good
Grow
Foe

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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 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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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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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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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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We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
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A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
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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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We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.
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The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
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A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.
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I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
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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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