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

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Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.
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Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.
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Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
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Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
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Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
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There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.
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Without courage, all other virtues are useless.
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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.
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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.
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I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.
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Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy.
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I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.
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A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.
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In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.
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In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)
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I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact I work only under duress.
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Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)
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I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.
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I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.
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War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.
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