Top 655 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Abbey - Page 10

Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation.

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.

John Updike: our greatest suburban chic-boutique man of letters. A smug and fatal complacency has stunted his growth beyond hope of surgical repair. Not enough passion in his collected works to generate steam in a beer can. Nevertheless, he is considered by some critics to be America's finest *living* author: Hold a chilled mirror to his lips and you will see, presently, a fine and dewy moisture condensing -- like a faery breath! -- upon the glass.

It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them.

It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?

In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.

There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.

If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.

Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.

Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.

A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter.

I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.

Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure.

Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.

A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationist.

Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.

Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through.

In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.

Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.

The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.

The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.' (Is there another gamut?)

To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.

Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers -- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.

In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.

Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end.

A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner.

The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.

My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.

I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.

How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah.

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.

The result of this bestial lust is an indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of all of my energies- wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing.

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything -- while the music lasts.

Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent.

Democracy -- rule by the people -- sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.

A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.

There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last

Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?

In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.

Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.

The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them?

Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.

The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology -- the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.

Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.

Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.

The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.

All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.

If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.

Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.

In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.

Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'

Nature, like Maimonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons.