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I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.

Edward Dahlberg

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Edward Dahlberg
Age: 76 †
Born: 1900
Born: July 22
Died: 1977
Died: February 27
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Smell
Unless
Character
Wormwood
Stinks
Stink
Sage

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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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I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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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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Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
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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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We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
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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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Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
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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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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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A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
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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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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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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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Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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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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