Quote

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

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Edward Dahlberg
Age: 76 †
Born: 1900
Born: July 22
Died: 1977
Died: February 27
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Shows
Stones
Rude
Soul
Bird
Paul
Untutored
Everything
Suffering
Birds
Raiment
Every
Show
Cast
Slain
Long
Evil
Stone
Mockery
Men
Moment
Casts
Trembling
Everyone
Suffer
Remarks
Moments
Souls
Feathers

More quotes by Edward Dahlberg

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Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
Edward Dahlberg
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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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The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
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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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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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A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
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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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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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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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I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.
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A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
Edward Dahlberg
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Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
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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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We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
Edward Dahlberg
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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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We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
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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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I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
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