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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Makes
Available
Inferno
Nature
Silent
Bearable
Mountain
Complement
Civilization
Refuge
City
Mountains
Needed
Wilderness
Cities
Desert
Complements
Knowledge
Easily
Completes

More quotes by Edward Abbey

Image
Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.
Edward Abbey
Image
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
Image
I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.
Edward Abbey
Image
Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?
Edward Abbey
Image
The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.
Edward Abbey
Image
Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
Edward Abbey
Image
Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.
Edward Abbey
Image
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage and without courage all other virtues are useless.
Edward Abbey
Image
Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role.
Edward Abbey
Image
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
Image
It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.
Edward Abbey
Image
My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: 'Yeah,' she said, 'I'll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don't give a damn.'
Edward Abbey
Image
I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
Edward Abbey
Image
I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.
Edward Abbey
Image
Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.
Edward Abbey
Image
The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.
Edward Abbey
Image
The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.
Edward Abbey
Image
And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.
Edward Abbey
Image
King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.
Edward Abbey
Image
The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.
Edward Abbey