Always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.
– 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
Every decision you make is a mistake.
– Edward Dahlberg
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
I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.
– 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
It takes a long time to understand nothing.
– Edward Dahlberg
Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
– 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
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
One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness, two of barrenness, and three of sodomy.
– Edward Dahlberg
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
So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.
– Edward Dahlberg
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
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.
– 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
We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
– Edward Dahlberg
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.
– 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
We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.