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

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote _The Golden Ass_.
Edward Abbey
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Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers -- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.
Edward Abbey
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A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
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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I would prefer to write about everything what else is there? But one must be selective.
Edward Abbey
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God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.
Edward Abbey
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Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)
Edward Abbey
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Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.
Edward Abbey
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Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking namely, life.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.
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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The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient.
Edward Abbey
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Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.
Edward Abbey
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The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.
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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Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.
Edward Abbey
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If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.
Edward Abbey
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I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey