American author (1927-1989)
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
A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Water", Desert Solitaire
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
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)
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
Contempt for animal life leads to contempt for human life.
EDWARD ABBEY
One Life at a Time, Please
The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
A pessimist is simply an optimist in full possession of the facts.
EDWARD ABBEY
Hayduke Lives
When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes -- disease and death and the rotting of flesh.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Down the River", Desert Solitaire
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
EDWARD ABBEY
Down the River
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
Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death.
EDWARD ABBEY
Down the River
Grab a woman. Help the movement. Liberate a woman tonight. You'll get stale out here in the woods, living like a bear. Your balls will shrink, your tongue grow stiff and heavy. Your mind will wither away. Whatever became of William Gatlin? Went mad flogging his bloody duff.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
All living things on earth are kindred.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Serpents of Paradise", Desert Solitaire
All gold is fool's gold.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
EDWARD ABBEY
Abbey's Road
We like the taste of freedom ... because we like the smell of danger.
EDWARD ABBEY
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Gather at the River", Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside