Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire (1968)

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Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.

Edward Abbey
An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

Edward Abbey
To the east, under the spreading sunrise, are more mesas, more canyons, league on league of red cliff and arid tablelands, extending through purple haze over the bulging curve of the planet to the ranges of Colorado — a sea of desert.

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
When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.

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

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

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

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

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
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
In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.

Edward Abbey
Yes. Feet on earth. Knock on wood. Touch stone. Good luck to all.

Edward Abbey
Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they've wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables

Edward Abbey
The itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.

Edward Abbey
Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist.

Edward Abbey
[After supper] I put on hat and coat and go outside again, sit on the table, and watch the sky and the desert dissolve slowly into mystery under the chemistry of twilight.

Edward Abbey
There is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its name is progress.

Edward Abbey
In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)

Edward Abbey
To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

Edward Abbey
This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.

Edward Abbey
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

Edward Abbey