Edward Dahlberg Quotes

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised.

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.

We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.

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

It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.

A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.

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.

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.