Edward Abbey Quotations | Page 4

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.

There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last

In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.

Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

Jesus don't walk on water no more; his feet leak.

Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.

It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.

Preacher to me: 'A dollar for the Lord, brother?' Me to preacher: 'That's all right, I'm headed his way. I'll give it to him when I see him.'

Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.

When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my checkbook.

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.

What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger.

What did Jesus say to the headwaiter at the Last Supper? 'Separate checks, please.'

The axiom of conditioned repetition, like the binomial theorem, is nothing but a piece of insolence.

Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.

Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.

Humility is a virtue when you have no other.

There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.

Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.

Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.

Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand.

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.

James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.

We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Everyone needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. For the terror, freedom, and delirium. Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crags to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.

The Latino military fare badly when they stumble into war with the gringos. But in the torture, murder, and massacre of their own people, they have always performed with brilliance and elan.

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.

Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.

When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.

Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.

A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.

Life is already too short to waste on speed.

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.

It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.

The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.

The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.' (Is there another gamut?)

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?

Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.

In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.

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.

Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?

In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)

There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.

Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.

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.

You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.

There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.

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?

The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.

Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses -- they tie -- who cares? And why?

In the dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is boss.

When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll never have time to regret it.

It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.

The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.

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.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.

The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.

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.

The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!

When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.

Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.

Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.

The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.

Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.

It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.

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.

I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.

I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.

Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.

I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long.

I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.

The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee- pad conservative....

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

There is a wine called Easy Days and Mellow Nights, well-known on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation. It is an economical wine, fortified with the best of intentions, and I recommend it to every serious wino.

Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool.

I find more and more, as I grow older, that I prefer women to men, children to adults, animals to humans.... And rocks to living things? No, I'm not that old yet.

We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races -- by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.

Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.

The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key. That’s the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn’t much matter whether you get where you’re going or not. You’ll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home. Right where you started.

Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.

The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.

Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.

Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles....

A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.

It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.