"There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time."
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Quote collection
Edward Abbey quotes (page 33 of 33)
653 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires."
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"The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization."
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"Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you."
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"In history-as-politics, the 'future' is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of statesmen."
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"We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)"
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"I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it."
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"Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world."
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"In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)"
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"Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and at evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement—mating season."
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"To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?"
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"Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither."
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"Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings."
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