Edward Dahlberg (July 22, 1900 – February 27, 1977) was an American novelist, essayist and autobiographer.
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.
The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts -the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria -are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.
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.
We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.
It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.
Man is at the nadir of his stregth when the Earth, the seas, the mountains are not in him, for without them his soul is unsourced, and he has no images by which to abide.
Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.
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.
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.
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.
We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.
The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.
Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.
Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.