Edward Dahlberg quotes

Edward Dahlberg was an American novelist and essayist known for his contemplative and lyrical prose. His works often addressed themes of social justice, alienation, and the human condition. He earned a reputation for being a profound and sometimes controversial literary figure. Here are 41 of his quotes:

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

Edward Dahlberg

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

Edward Dahlberg

A strong foe is better than a weak friend.

Edward Dahlberg

The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.

Edward Dahlberg

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

Edward Dahlberg

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

Edward Dahlberg

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.

Edward Dahlberg

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

Edward Dahlberg

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.

Edward Dahlberg

To write is a humiliation.

Edward Dahlberg

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

Edward Dahlberg

We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.

Edward Dahlberg

Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.

Edward Dahlberg

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

Edward Dahlberg

Every decision you make is a mistake.

Edward Dahlberg

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

Edward Dahlberg

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

Edward Dahlberg

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.

Edward Dahlberg

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.

Edward Dahlberg

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

Edward Dahlberg

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.

Edward Dahlberg

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Edward Dahlberg