Quote

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

Edward Dahlberg

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Edward Dahlberg

Image
A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
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.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
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.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
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.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
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
Image
A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
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.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
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.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
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.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
Every decision you make is a mistake.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
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.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
Edward Dahlberg