EDWARD ABBEY QUOTES IV

American author (1927-1989)

At that moment I was ready to forsake my other home, forsake my mother and father and little sister and all my friends, and spend the rest of my life in the desert eating cactus for lunch, drinking blood at cocktail time, and letting the ferocious sun flay me skin and soul. I'd gladly have traded parents, school, a college education and a career for one dependable saddle hourse. Later that night, of course, alone in bed, the deadly homesickness would strike me faint.

EDWARD ABBEY

Fire on the Mountain


All gold is fool's gold.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Tags: gold


Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

EDWARD ABBEY

Down the River

Tags: coffee


We like the taste of freedom ... because we like the smell of danger.

EDWARD ABBEY

Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside

Tags: freedom


Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Water", Desert Solitaire

Tags: growth


Oh! For love, for the painfully nourished, tenderly cherished, sweet frenzies illusion, the known-illusion within the globule of sentimental cynicism. For romantic love, then, I sacrifice honor, decensy, human kindness, charity, honesty, friendship and the future -- all, (ah!) for love!

EDWARD ABBEY

The Serpents of Paradise

Tags: love


A pessimist is simply an optimist in full possession of the facts.

EDWARD ABBEY

Hayduke Lives

Tags: pessimism


Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Cliffrose and Bayonets", Desert Solitaire

Tags: beauty


God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Tags: God


Everyone should learn a manual trade. It's never too late to become an honest person.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Tags: work


Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.

EDWARD ABBEY

The Monkey Wrench Gang


Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Tags: capitalism


Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

EDWARD ABBEY

The Journey Home

Tags: growth


Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely an illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Tags: diet, food


Love is a disease. A social disease. A romantic, venereal, medieval disease. A hangover from the days of the fornicating troubadours and the gentlemen in iron britches.

EDWARD ABBEY

The Serpents of Paradise

Tags: love


I love your letters. How far is that from saying I love you? Well--about a mile. Two miles.

EDWARD ABBEY

The Serpents of Paradise

Tags: love


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

"Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge", The Journey Home

Tags: beauty


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

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Tags: newspapers


A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)


The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Shadows from the Big Woods", The Journey Home