Quote

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

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
Better
Sound
Older
Medieval
Book
Words
Conflict
Attached
Catacombs
Made
History
Events
Centuries
Unavoidably
Time
Three
Already
Ages
Archaic
Power
Century
Fresh
Dante
Today
Least
Sounds
Endures
Music
Books
Smell
Smells
Ideas
Age
Endure
Transcend

More quotes by 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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Tofu and futons. The adepts of Orientalism seem to spend most of their lives reclining. They can't quite summon the energy to crawl up onto a chair. Even their Yogic exercises are carried out in a prone or sitting position.
Edward Abbey
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The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.
Edward Abbey
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God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.
Edward Abbey
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The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Books are like eggs -- best when fresh.
Edward Abbey
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For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!
Edward Abbey
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In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.
Edward Abbey
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Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand: Man is not a lovable animal.
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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Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
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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The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.
Edward Abbey
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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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Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.
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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Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.
Edward Abbey
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Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey