Edward Abbey - Life Quotes

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The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.

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
Reason is the newest and rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child of human history.

Edward Abbey
The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself — not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

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
I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.

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

Edward Abbey
I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life — if I live that long.

Edward Abbey
The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners — and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.

Edward Abbey
With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.

Edward Abbey
The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

Edward Abbey
The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

Edward Abbey
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Sometimes misattributed to Mark Twain

Edward Abbey
All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

Edward Abbey
The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.

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
One must be reasonable in one's demands on life. For myself, all that I ask is: (1) accurate information; (2) coherent knowledge; (3) deep understanding; (4) infinite loving wisdom; (5) no more kidney stones, please.

Edward Abbey
To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

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

Edward Abbey
Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.

Edward Abbey
Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles....

Edward Abbey
There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.

Edward Abbey
There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last

Edward Abbey
Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end.

Edward Abbey
There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love.

Edward Abbey
A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

Edward Abbey
I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets — the seventeen who got away.

Edward Abbey