"Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)"
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Quote collection
Edward Abbey quotes (page 29 of 33)
653 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator."
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"The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything -- while the music lasts."
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"Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent."
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"Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs."
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"Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony."
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"John Updike: our greatest suburban chic-boutique man of letters. A smug and fatal complacency has stunted his growth beyond hope of surgical repair. Not enough passion in his collected works to generate steam in a beer can. Nevertheless, he is considered by some critics to be America's finest *living* author: Hold a chilled mirror to his lips and you will see, presently, a fine and dewy moisture condensing -- like a faery breath! -- upon the glass."
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"Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love."
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"Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done."
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"The author: an imaginary person who writes real books."
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"Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure."
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"I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way."
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"In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty."
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"It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?"
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"Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste."
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"If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally."
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"Life: another day, another dolor."
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"I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any."
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"In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority."
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"The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology -- the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically."
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