EDWARD ABBEY QUOTES IV

American author (1927-1989)

Contempt for animal life leads to contempt for human life.

EDWARD ABBEY

One Life at a Time, Please

Tags: animals


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


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. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome -- there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.

EDWARD ABBEY

"The First Morning", Desert Solitaire

Tags: home


Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.

EDWARD ABBEY

"The Crooked Wood", The Journey Home

Tags: men


Where life is there is death, reasons the vulture, and where there's death there's hope.

EDWARD ABBEY

One Life at a Time, Please

Tags: death


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

"Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night", The Journey Home

Tags: cities


Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.

EDWARD ABBEY

The Monkey Wrench Gang

Tags: violence


I try to think of a favorite among my arid-country flowers. But I love them all. How could we be true to one without being false to all the others?

EDWARD ABBEY

Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside

Tags: flowers


To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.

EDWARD ABBEY

"The Dead Man at Grandview Point", Desert Solitaire

Tags: death


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


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

EDWARD ABBEY

Down the River

Tags: coffee


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)


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

EDWARD ABBEY

Hayduke Lives

Tags: pessimism


I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Serpents of Paradise", Desert Solitaire


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


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


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


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


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


The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Shadows from the Big Woods", The Journey Home