Quote

My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.

Edward Abbey

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Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Find
Likewise
Nothing
Truest
Enough
Deepest
Someday
Somehow
Ambition
Within
Ability

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.
Edward Abbey
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Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.
Edward Abbey
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The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.
Edward Abbey
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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?
Edward Abbey
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Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.
Edward Abbey
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Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
Edward Abbey
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In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.
Edward Abbey
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I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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A man's duty? To be ready -- with rifle or rood -- to defend his home when the showdown comes.
Edward Abbey
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If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.
Edward Abbey
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The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.
Edward Abbey
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Anarchism? You bet your sweet betsy. The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Much more.
Edward Abbey
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I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.
Edward Abbey
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Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
Edward Abbey
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Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?
Edward Abbey
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Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true.
Edward Abbey
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I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.
Edward Abbey