A Quote by Edward Abbey

I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. — © Edward Abbey
I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.
I've always been someone who's believed in truth. I believe truth exists. I don't believe in relativism, a 'your truth, my truth' kind of a thing. However, I also believe that the truth must always be spoken in love - and that grace and truth are found in Jesus Christ.
Being happy or unhappy - is that really the most important thing? Knowing the truth would be a different kind of happiness - a more satisfying kind, I think, even if it turned out to be a sad kind.
Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.
Even through such simple acts as telling the truth, being kind, and encouraging others, we bring a smile to God's face.
It occurs to me to wonder: do I believe in any god, or even positively not believe, as James does? I believe in systems and methods. I believe in the beauties of philosophy and poetry. I believe that the work we do and leave behind us is our afterlife; and I believe that history lies, but sometimes so well that I can't bring myself to resent it. I believe that truth is beauty, but not, I'm afraid, the reverse. It doesn't seem sufficient to sustain one in life's rigorous moments. Perhaps I shall embrace Islam. Its standards for poetry seem very high.
The old saying of the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belongs statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The other kind, the so-called 'deep truths', are statements in which the opposite also contains deep truth.
If the Story is not accurate to reality, it's not any kind of truth at all. So it can never be 'my truth' or 'your truth,' even though we may believe it. It can only be our delusion or our mistake or our error, but it can never be our 'truth.'
I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role.
What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.
I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.
The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
Typically, people in the intelligence community are just going to kind of hunker down and do their job, do their mission. And I believe - I have great faith in them. I think they will continue to serve up truth to power even if the power chooses not to listen to the truth.
I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
Fact is fact. Truth is Truth. It does not matter how you feel. We do not listen to our feelings. We believe the truth of God's word.
The novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have an empathetic human quality, or 'emotional truth'. This quality is difficult to fully define, but I always recognise it when I see it: it is different from honesty and more resilient than fact, something that exists not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind that shows.
Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. "I don't have any whiskey," may be a fact but it is not a truth.
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