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

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.
Edward Abbey
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The sense of justice springs from self-respect both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them.
Edward Abbey
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My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.
Edward Abbey
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Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.
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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Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)
Edward Abbey
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A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
Edward Abbey
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The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.
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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In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.
Edward Abbey
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I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.
Edward Abbey
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In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.
Edward Abbey
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The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.
Edward Abbey
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I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.
Edward Abbey
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Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
Edward Abbey
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To be alive is to take risks to be always safe and secure is death.
Edward Abbey
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If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture--that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves. E.Abbey
Edward Abbey
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As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.
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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I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
Edward Abbey