Quote

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

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
Life
Else
Entire
Like
Become
Spend
Anything
Balance
Wearisome
Book
Healthy
Specialty
Great
Books
Packing
Make
Literature
Wholesome
Would
Reading
Cookies
Men
Business
Lifetime

More quotes by 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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Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.
Edward Abbey
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Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.
Edward Abbey
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The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirit's weak.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game
Edward Abbey
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Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.
Edward Abbey
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And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.
Edward Abbey
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Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?
Edward Abbey
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The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.
Edward Abbey
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I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.
Edward Abbey
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If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dream.
Edward Abbey
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Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.
Edward Abbey
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James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.
Edward Abbey
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Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they've wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables
Edward Abbey
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We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
Edward Abbey