Edward Abbey Quotes

477 Sourced Quotes

I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.

Edward Abbey
In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

Edward Abbey
I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. (Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!)

Edward Abbey
Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.

Edward Abbey
The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.

Edward Abbey
Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily
understand: Man is not a lovable animal.

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.

Edward Abbey
Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.

Edward Abbey
Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.

Edward Abbey
Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

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

Edward Abbey
We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement.

Edward Abbey
Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.

Edward Abbey
Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.

Edward Abbey
For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.

Edward Abbey
The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

Edward Abbey
How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas.

Edward Abbey
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.

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

Edward Abbey
I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.

Edward Abbey
England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.

Edward Abbey
A pretentious fad-chaser…the pom-pom girl of American letters.

Edward Abbey
Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.

Edward Abbey
I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.

Edward Abbey
Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.

Edward Abbey
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

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

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
We must save the city. It is essence and substance of us all-we cannot lose it without diminishing our stature as a nation, without a fatal wound.

Edward Abbey