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The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.

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
Never
Writers
Steinbeck
Mark
Wolfe
College
Faulkner
Went
Theodore
American
Twain
Best
Hemingway
Come
Jack
Even
London

More quotes by 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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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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Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.
Edward Abbey
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A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.
Edward Abbey
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You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.
Edward Abbey
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Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.
Edward Abbey
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The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
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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Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.
Edward Abbey
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My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.
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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The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.
Edward Abbey
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When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.
Edward Abbey
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Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?
Edward Abbey
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Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
Edward Abbey
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In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
Edward Abbey
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The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
Edward Abbey
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Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be -- a man.
Edward Abbey
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Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.
Edward Abbey
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Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.
Edward Abbey