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I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

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
Obligation
Early
Literature
Certain
Inescapable
Wanted
Burdened
Always
Obligations
World
Cowboy
Alas

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
Edward Abbey
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One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.
Edward Abbey
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If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dream.
Edward Abbey
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Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.
Edward Abbey
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I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.
Edward Abbey
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When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.
Edward Abbey
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By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.
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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Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles.
Edward Abbey
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The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.
Edward Abbey
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I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact I work only under duress.
Edward Abbey
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I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.
Edward Abbey
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I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.
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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Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.
Edward Abbey
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How can I be so evil? It ain't easy.
Edward Abbey
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Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.
Edward Abbey
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J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty -- you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.
Edward Abbey
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The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.
Edward Abbey
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I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.
Edward Abbey