Edward Dahlberg Quotes

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.

The majority of persons choose their wives with as little prudence as they eat. They see a troll with nothing else to recommend her but a pair of thighs and choice hunkers, and so smart to void their seed that they marry her at once. They imagine they can live in marvelous contentment with handsome feet and ambrosial buttocks. Most men are accredited fools shortly after they leave the womb.

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.

Woman is the most superstitious animal beneath the moon. When a woman has a premonition that Tuesday will be a disaster, to which a man pays no heed, he will very likely lose his fortune then. This is not meant to be an occult or mystic remark. The female body is a vessel, and the universe drops its secrets into her far more quickly than it communicates them to the male.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

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.

I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.

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

Every decision you make is a mistake.

I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.

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.

Who has enough credit in this world to pay for his mistakes?

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.

The Americans have always been food, sex, and spirit revivalists.

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.

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.

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.

Always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. Walt Disney Every decision you make is a mistake.