Edward Abbey Quotes

477 Sourced Quotes

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

Edward Abbey
Mr. Krutch's contribution... has been his recognition and communication of the discovery that the natural world must be treated as an equal partner. That a world entirely conquered by technology, entirely dominated by industrial processes, entirely occupied by man and machine, would be a world unfit to live in. Perhaps impossible to live in.

Edward Abbey
That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

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

Edward Abbey
The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern to the desert.

Edward Abbey
For I am not a naturalist.... If a label is required say that I am one who loves unfenced country. The open range. Call me a ranger... The only higher honor I've ever heard of is to be called a man.

Edward Abbey
All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.

Edward Abbey
So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probably be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes.

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

Edward Abbey
It has been said, and truly, that everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry, and fierce as the animals.

Edward Abbey
Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs-anything-but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.

Edward Abbey
The old moon, like a worn and ancient coin, is still hanging in the west when I awake.

Edward Abbey
The sun is touching the fretted tablelands on the west. It seems to bulge a little, to expand for a moment, and then it drops — abruptly — over the edge. I listen for a long time.

Edward Abbey
Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.

Edward Abbey
But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.

Edward Abbey
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.

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
We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, and trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails; all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!

Edward Abbey
For the rest of the afternoon, keeping to the shady side, we drift down the splendid river, deeper and deeper and deeper into the fantastic.

Edward Abbey
Appearance versus reality? Appearance is reality, God damn it!

Edward Abbey
Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.

Edward Abbey
Any good poet, in our age at least, must begin with the scientific view of the world; and any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet, must possess the ability to communicate to the rest of us his sense of love and wonder at what his work discovers.

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

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

Edward Abbey
I am sometimes forced to the conclusion that the whole truth is not always represented in certain of the orthodox attitudes. The intuitions of a lover are not always to be trusted; but neither are those of the loveless.

Edward Abbey
The sandstone walls rise higher than ever before, a thousand, two thousand feet above the water, rounding off on top as half-domes and capitols, golden and glowing in the sunlight, a deep radiant red in the shade.

Edward Abbey
Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

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

Edward Abbey