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The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.

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
Heroic
Tragic
Acceptance
Suffering
Sense
Others

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.
Edward Abbey
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Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.
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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Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.
Edward Abbey
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My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.
Edward Abbey
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Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.
Edward Abbey
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Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage and without courage all other virtues are useless.
Edward Abbey
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You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.
Edward Abbey
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Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure.
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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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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I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be.
Edward Abbey
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Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.
Edward Abbey
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Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.
Edward Abbey
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Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.
Edward Abbey
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Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.
Edward Abbey
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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?)
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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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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One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.
Edward Abbey