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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
Nature
Toady
Mimicking
Poetic
Poet

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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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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
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Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
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A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
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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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We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
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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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Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
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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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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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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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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 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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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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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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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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