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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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Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Well
Defined
Nothing
Remain
Writing
Silent
Something
Silence
Good
Saying
Always
Times
Beautiful
Wells

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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.
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Books are like eggs -- best when fresh.
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Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true.
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Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role.
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A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
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Life: another day, another dolor.
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A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.
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Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
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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.
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Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rdworld black, lesbian, feminist, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.
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I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.
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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.
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By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.
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The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war.
Edward Abbey
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This is the most beautiful place on Earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.
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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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A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner.
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Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.
Edward Abbey
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A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.
Edward Abbey
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Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)
Edward Abbey