Edward Abbey Quotes

477 Sourced Quotes

For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.

Edward Abbey
Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.

Edward Abbey
A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.

Edward Abbey
Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

Edward Abbey
Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.

Edward Abbey
My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving.

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea....

Edward Abbey
Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising.

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

Edward Abbey
Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be — a man.

Edward Abbey
It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.

Edward Abbey
The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for — for what? Someday we'll know.

Edward Abbey
What's more American than violence?" Hayduke wanted to know. "Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.

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

Edward Abbey
Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.

Edward Abbey
In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.

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

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

Edward Abbey
There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Edward Abbey
I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.

Edward Abbey