Edward Abbey Quotes

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.

The cactus of the high desert is a small grubby, obscure and humble vegetable associated with cattle dung and overgrazing, interesting only when you tangle with it the wrong way. Yet from this nest of thorns, this snare of hooks and fiery spines, is born once each year a splendid flower. It is unpluckable and except to an insect almost unapproachable, yet soft, lovely, sweet, desirable, exemplifying better than the rose among thorns the unity of opposites

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people — the following preparations would be essential:

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.

I do love you. I’d be one miserable and lonesome man without you around.

The night. The stars. The river.

Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and brush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock.

Within minutes my 115-mile walk through the desert hills becomes a thing apart, a disjunct reality on the far side of a bottomless abyss, immediately beyond physical recollection.

But it’s all still there in my heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure — they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days to come, like a treasure found and then, voluntarily, surrendered. Returned to the mountains with my blessing. It leaves a golden glowing on the mind.

The moment I stepped out the front door I was faced again with Manhattan. There it was, oh splendid ship of concrete and steel, aluminum, glass and electricity, forging forever up the dark river. (The hudson - like a river of oil, filthy and rich, gleaming with silver lights.) Manhattan at twilight: floating gardens of tender neon, the lavender towers where each window glittered at sundown with reflected incandescence, where each crosstown street became at evening a gash of golden fire, and the endless flow of the endless traffic on the West Side Highway resembled a luminous necklace strung round the island's shoulders.

Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)

"You can never go wrong cuttin' fence,' repeated Smith, warming to his task. (Pling!) "Always cut fence. That's the law west of the 100th meridian. East of that don't matter none. Back there it's all lost anyhow. But west, we cut fence,' (Plang!)