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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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Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Face
Cows
Faces
Literary
School
Fish
Every
Fishes
Always
Unity
Herd
Love
Requires
Obeying
Like
Direction
Herds
Critics
Critic

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.
Edward Abbey
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Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
Edward Abbey
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Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
Edward Abbey
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How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah.
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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My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.
Edward Abbey
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In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.
Edward Abbey
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If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.
Edward Abbey
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I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
Edward Abbey
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What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.
Edward Abbey
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Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.
Edward Abbey
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What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
Edward Abbey
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The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.
Edward Abbey
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All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.
Edward Abbey
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The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.
Edward Abbey
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In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.
Edward Abbey
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It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.
Edward Abbey
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Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.
Edward Abbey
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If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.
Edward Abbey
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Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
Edward Abbey