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Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent.

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
Possess
Mostly
Lovers
Pride
Usually
Taste
Talent
Art

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you the public will not believe you your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.
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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Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.
Edward Abbey
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In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.
Edward Abbey
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Simply because humankind have the power now to meddle or 'manage' or 'exercise stewardship' in every nook and cranny of the world does not mean that we have a right to do so. Even less, the obligation.
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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One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
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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All governments require enemy governments.
Edward Abbey
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Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
Edward Abbey
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Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.
Edward Abbey
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I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.
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
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Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.
Edward Abbey
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In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.
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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Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy.
Edward Abbey
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My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
Edward Abbey
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Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
Edward Abbey
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The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.
Edward Abbey