Quote

The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.

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
Refuge
Civilization
Mountains
City
Needed
Wilderness
Complements
Cities
Desert
Completes
Knowledge
Easily
Inferno
Makes
Available
Bearable
Nature
Silent
Complement
Mountain

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?
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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.
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Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?
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I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.
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I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.
Edward Abbey
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The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
Edward Abbey
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Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.
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The only thing left worth saving is wilderness.
Edward Abbey
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I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.
Edward Abbey
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Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea.
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Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.
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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My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.
Edward Abbey
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Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.
Edward Abbey
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Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rdworld black, lesbian, feminist, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.
Edward Abbey
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The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyong reach it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.
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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The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chainsaws. It is not enough to understand the natural world the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
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
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One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.
Edward Abbey