Quotes by Edward Abbey

Certainly, I want to capture the readers attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybodys typewriter, even Tolstoys, even yours, even mine.

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal.

Why cant we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.

Perhaps I shouldnt call it shit. Thats a bit crude. I dont really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy.Strong words indeed. But Ive always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type . . .

In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two sincere and hard-working fellows actually preached.

The more we learn of outer space and inner space, of quasars and quarks, of Big Bangs and Little Blips, the more remote, abstract and intellectually inconsequential it all becomes.

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a books eventual fate.

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred great books - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.

To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?

Society is like a stew. If you dont stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

Our neoconservatives are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.

And the so-called political process is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests.

If you hope for any sort of dialogue and unity with all factions on the vaguely leftist or radical side of politics, you must cease from silly verbal abuse. If you dont want it, then we go on as we are, fractious and impotent.

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.