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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
Stink
Sage
Smell
Unless
Character
Wormwood
Stinks

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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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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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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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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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We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.
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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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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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A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
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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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A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
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We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
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Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
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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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Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.
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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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The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
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