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The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

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
Ready
Life
Consolations
Like
Availability
Consolation
Alcohol
Suicide
Basic
Sex

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Wilderness begins in the human mind.
Edward Abbey
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If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.
Edward Abbey
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Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development?
Edward Abbey
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When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
Edward Abbey
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When I write paradise I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.
Edward Abbey
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We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.
Edward Abbey
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The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
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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In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.
Edward Abbey
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Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.
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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What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?
Edward Abbey
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All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.
Edward Abbey
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Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead symmetrical but stiff.
Edward Abbey
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War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.
Edward Abbey
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Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.
Edward Abbey
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Grown men do not need leaders.
Edward Abbey
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Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.
Edward Abbey
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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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Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
Edward Abbey