Edward Abbey
What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June?Collection: Stars
Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.Collection: Thinking
God is love? Not bloody likely.Collection: God Is Love
As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.Collection: Sloth
There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable alternative; the only sensible solution.Collection: Suicide
A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.Collection: Men
I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.Collection: Friendship
Wilderness and motors are incompatible and the former can best be experienced, understood and enjoyed when the machines are left behind where they belong -- on the superhighways and in the parking lots, on the reservoirs and in the marinas.Collection: Machines
If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.Collection: Men
The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.Collection: Book
Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.Collection: Photography
It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.Collection: Funny
In the dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is boss.Collection: Funny
Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'Collection: Children
Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.Collection: Men
Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.Collection: Males
The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.Collection: Beautiful
A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.Collection: Book
Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.Collection: Clouds
In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)Collection: Past
Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.Collection: Reality
One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers.Collection: Self
A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches - that is the right and privilege of any free American.Collection: Risk
Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses.Collection: Religious
The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.Collection: Punishment
We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Men
Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.Collection: Art
The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.Collection: Acceptance
War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.Collection: War
We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?Collection: Suicide
Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.Collection: Disorder
We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.Collection: Travel
We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.Collection: Feet
Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*.Collection: Desert
How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?Collection: Intellectual
So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probably be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes.Collection: Fun
The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.Collection: Country
A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.Collection: Fungi
Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.Collection: Reason
The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.Collection: Kitchen
Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.Collection: Government
Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.Collection: Passion
There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.Collection: Book
Life without music would be an intolerable insult.Collection: Would Be
Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.Collection: Sports
Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.Collection: Girl
Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.Collection: Beautiful
Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.Collection: Deny