Edward Abbey Quotes

The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.

The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.

Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.

The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.

I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.

Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.

The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them?

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.

Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.

Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.

Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.

To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.

Appearance versus reality? Appearance is reality, God damn it!

Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.

What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.

Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation.

A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationist.

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.

The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.

Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.

My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.

The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it.

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

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

A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter.

If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.

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.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.

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 author: an imaginary person who writes real books.

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.

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.

No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.

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.

Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor.

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

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

Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent.

I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal.

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.

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

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

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.

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