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.

— Edward Dahlberg

Edward Dahlberg Quotes

To write is a humiliation.

— Edward Dahlberg

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

— Edward Dahlberg

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.

— Edward Dahlberg

Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.

— Edward Dahlberg

What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscledsuits; dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb. These are plainly the product of sickness.

— Edward Dahlberg

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

— Edward Dahlberg

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

— Edward Dahlberg

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

— Edward Dahlberg

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

— Edward Dahlberg

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.

— Edward Dahlberg

We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.

— Edward Dahlberg

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

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

— Edward Dahlberg

Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.

— Edward Dahlberg

Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.

— 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

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

The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen; it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla.

— Edward Dahlberg

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

— Edward Dahlberg

Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.

— Edward Dahlberg
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