Quote

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.

Edward Dahlberg

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Edward Dahlberg
Age: 76 †
Born: 1900
Born: July 22
Died: 1977
Died: February 27
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Doe
Creation
Creations
Reason
Proud
Accident
Nothing
Wise
Beast
Writing
Results
River
Something
Humanity
Accidents
Men
Small
Rivers
Though
Result
Write
Horse
Utters

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A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
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A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
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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 a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
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Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
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I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.
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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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Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.
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