"A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow."
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Quote collection
Edward Abbey quotes (page 32 of 33)
653 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature."
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"The dog's life is a good life, for a dog."
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"Man was created to complete the horse."
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"Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government."
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"Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze."
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"In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising."
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"Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed."
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"Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rdworld black, lesbian, feminist, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist."
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"Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace -- a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for."
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"What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most."
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"My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet."
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"The result of this bestial lust is an indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of all of my energies- wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing."
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"Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms."
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"Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve."
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"I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective."
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"The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink."
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"I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact."
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"Books are like eggs -- best when fresh."
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"Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart."
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