Top 655 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Abbey - Page 11

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.

The canyon country does not always inspire love. To many it appears barren, hostile, repellent - a fearsome mostly waterless land of rock and heat, sand dunes and quicksand, cactus, thornbrush, scorpion, rattlesnake, and agaraphobic distances. To those who see our land in that manner, the best reply is, yes, you are right, it is a dangerous and terrible place. Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noonday sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently.

The dog's life is a good life, for a dog.

In history-as-politics, the 'future' is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of statesmen.

The only thing left worth saving is wilderness.

Capitalism sounds good in theory but it just doesn't work.

Cold morning on Aztec Peak Fire Lookout. First, build fire in old stove. Second, start coffee. Then, heat up last night's pork chops and spinach for breakfast. Why not? And why the hell not?

In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.

The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.

Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.

Life: another day, another dolor.

A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.

Man was created to complete the horse.

Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.

Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.

The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values.

The desert wears... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting -- but waiting for what?

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.

The national parks belong to everyone. To the people. To all of us. The government keeps saying so and maybe, in this one case at least, the government is telling the truth. Hard to believe, but possible.

I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.

A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.

What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.

Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.

Suicide: Don't knock it if you ain't tried it.

To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?

I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.

I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.

I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks can not be saved. or anything else worth a damn. wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. for my own part i would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.

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I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.

It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God's obvious love for it.

In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.

Writing on the wall: Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth.

Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.

Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

Yes, there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing useful work, keeping their families together and taking an active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil (in one way or another) and defending what is good. Heroes do not want power over others.

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.

In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)

We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rdworld black, lesbian, feminist, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.

Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and at evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement—mating season.

There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.