Quote

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

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
Word
Roots
Frontiers
Place
Sick
Cult
Look
Places
Forest
Looks
Poet
Primitive
Carlos
Mind
Poetry
Native
Admires
Strength
Forests
Frontier
Violence
Admire
Williams
Crazy
Violent
William

More quotes by Edward Dahlberg

Image
Every decision you make is a mistake.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
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
The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
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
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
Image
The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.
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
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
Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
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
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
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.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
Edward Dahlberg
Image
A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
Edward Dahlberg