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The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

Edward Dahlberg

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Edward Dahlberg
Age: 76 †
Born: 1900
Born: July 22
Died: 1977
Died: February 27
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Toady
Mimicking
Poetic
Poet
Nature

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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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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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We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
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Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
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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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Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
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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 strong foe is better than a weak friend.
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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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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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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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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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A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
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The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
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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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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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Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.
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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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