Edmund Wilson > Quotes

“No two persons ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson

“I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.”
― Edmund Wilson

“No hay dos personas que lean el mismo libro.”
― Edmund Wilson

“I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.”
― Edmund Wilson

“There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.”
― Edmund Wilson, Memoirs of Hecate County

“Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals”
― Edmund Wilson

“She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.”
― Edmund Wilson

“What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.”
― Edmund Wilson

“The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since being shot by Booth was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg.”
― Edmund Wilson

“...an acquaintance with the great works of art and thought is the only real insurance against the barbarism of the time.”
― Edmund Wilson

“No two persons ever read the same book”
― Edmund Wilson

“It is a proof of the divergence of the tendencies of the socialist and the bourgeois pictures of history—and from now on there will be two distinct historical cultures running side by side without ever really fusing—that people who have been brought up on the conventional version of history and know all about the Robespierrist Terror during the Great French Revolution, should find it an unfamiliar fact that the Terror of the government of Thiers executed, imprisoned or exiled more people—the number has been estimated at a hundred thousand—in that one week of the suppression of the [Paris] Commune [of 1871] than the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre had done in three years.”
― Edmund Wilson

“In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real.”
― Edmund Wilson

“Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged.”
― Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump

“The experience of mankind on the earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena. . . . With each such victory of the human intellect, whether in history, in philosophy or in poetry, we experience a deep satisfaction: we have been cured of some ache of disorder, relieved of some oppressive burden of uncomprehended events.”
― Edmund Wilson

“While the romantic individualist deludes himself with unrealizable fantasies, in the attempt to evade bourgeois society, and only succeeds in destroying himself, he lets humanity fall a victim to the industrial-commercial processes, which, unimpeded by his dreaming, go on with their deadly work.”
― Edmund Wilson

“Dan, who was writing a book on the radical activity of the twenties and thirties, took the occasion of our trip to ask me about them. The whole thing seems to me so stale that I can't imagine anybody's now wanting to write about it, but we ran over the personalities and I told him a lot of stories. It seemed to me like that grisly museum of the early 1900's that I had had him visit at Niagara Falls: old stuffed two-headed calves, motheaten panthers attacking a stag, dried-up corpses from Indian graves, big bags made of rubber tires in which people had tried to shoot the falls--and around it all-powerful industrial life that no show of resistance could stop, which had ruined the landscape of the river and was crowding out everything else. ”
― Edmund Wilson, Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York

“No two person, ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson

“He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand.”
― Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930

“No two persons ever read the same book".”
― EDMUND WILSON

“No two people will ever read the same book in the same way." -”
― Edmund Wilson

“If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart, the fires which keep the poet alive as the citizen never lives, but which burn all the roofs of security!”
― Edmund Wilson, I Thought of Daisy

“If I could only keep up my spirit- if I could only play the game according to the sportsman's code which Rita had been trying to teach me so gravely and so sweetly- if I could only, I told myself, do that, then in the long run, all might be right between us- because I had not nagged her or wearied her, because I had proved myself her peer, as prompt to offer all for love and as brave to bear its passing. If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart, the fires which keep the poet alive as the citizen never lives, but which burn all the roofs of security!”
― Edmund Wilson, I Thought of Daisy

“[Northerners] took over the Southern myth and themselves began to revel in it. This acceptance was to culminate in Gone With the Wind, the enormous success of which novel makes a curious counterbalance to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But it began in the Century of the eighties with the stories of Thomas Nelson Page. Though Page had been only twelve at the end of the Civil War, so had had little experience of the old regime, he really invented for the popular mind Old Massa and Mistis and Meh Lady, with their dusky-skinned adoring retainers. The Northerners, after the shedding of so much blood, illogically found it soothing to be told that slavery had not been so bad, that the Negroes were a lovable but simple race, whose business was to work for whites. And Page also struck in his stories a note of reconciliation that everybody wanted to hear: he cooked up romances between young Northern officers, as gentlemanly as any Southerner, and spirited plantation beauties who might turn out to be the young men's cousins and who in any case would marry them after the war.”
― Edmund Wilson

“No two persons ever read the same book.

-Edmund Wilson”
― Edmund Wilson

“had taken place just before Grant’s visit, and Wilhelm was unable to receive him. “Here is an old man,” says Bismarck, — “one of the kindest old gentlemen in the world — and yet they must try and shoot him!”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“There is nothing about Lee that is at all picturesque, but his dignity and distinction are impressive, and this memoir helps us better to understand the reasons for his lasting prestige in the North as well as the South — why a New Englander who had served in the Union army like the younger Charles Francis Adams should have wanted to have a statue of him in Washington. The point is that Lee belongs, as does no other public figure of his generation, to the Roman phase of the Republic; he prolongs it in a curious way which, irrelevant and anachronistic though his activities to a Northerner may seem to be, cannot fail to bring some sympathetic response that derives from the experience of the Revolution. The Lees had been among the prime workers in our operations against the British and the founding of the United States. Robert’s father, “Light-Horse”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“If the Northerners were acting the Will of God, the Southerners were rescuing a hallowed ideal of gallantry, aristocratic freedom, fine manners and luxurious living from the materialism and vulgarity of the mercantile Northern society.”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“No two people ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson

“The celebration of current battles by poets who have not taken part in them has produced some of the emptiest verse that exists.”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War