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Edward Abbey Quotes | Quotes said by Edward Abbey

  • Edward Abbey Quote #1

    [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true. ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #2

    [R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #3

    A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #4

    A house built on greed cannot long endure.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #5

    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 Quote #6

    A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #7

    A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #8

    Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

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

  • Edward Abbey Quote #11

    An empty man is full of himself.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #12

    Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #13

    Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #14

    Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #15

    Anarchism? You bet your sweet betsy. The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Much more.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #16

    And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #17

    And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #18

    As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #19

    As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #20

    As to the charge that I am a cranky old man, I plead guilty.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #21

    Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #22

    Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #23

    Beyond the river and ten miles east of the city the Sangre Mountains began to reveal themselves in more detail as the sun rose higher, the rampart of blue shadow dissolving in the light, exposing the fissured red cliffs, the canyons and gorges a thousand feet deep, the towers leaning out from the main wall, the foothills dry and barren as old bones, and above and behind these tumbled ruins the final barrier of granite, the great horizontal crest tilted up a mile high into the frosty blue sky, sparkling with a new fall of snow. The mountains loomed over the valley like a psychical presence, a source and mirror of nervous influences, emotions, subtle and unlabeled aspirations; no man could ignore that presence; in an underground poker game, in the vaults of the First National Bank, in the realtor's office during the composition of and intricate swindle, in the heart of a sexual embrace, the emanations of mountain and sky imprinted some analogue of their nature on the evolution and shape of every soul.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #24

    Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then —

    May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #25

    But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #26

    But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #27

    But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #28

    Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.

  • Edward Abbey Quote #29

    For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

  • Edward Abbey Quote #30

    Grown men do not need leaders.

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