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Advice
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There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Ambition
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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
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Art
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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.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Authors & Writing
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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
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To write is a humiliation.
-Edward Dahlberg
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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
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Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Business
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Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Cats
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One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness, two of barrenness, and three of sodomy.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Conversation
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I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Criticism
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Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.
-Edward Dahlberg
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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
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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.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Decisions
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Every decision you make is a mistake.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Desires
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What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Enemy, Enemies
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A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Failure
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Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Genius
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Humanity
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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
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Intelligence
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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
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Legacy
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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
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Machines, Machinery
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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.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Madness
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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
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Marriage
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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
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One of the weaknesses in the cooperative is that it has never been sufficiently leavened by the imagination. This is a quick-silver faculty, and likely to be a cause of worry to any collective settlement.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Books by and about Edward Dahlberg