Quotes from Edward Abbey

Wall pink like sliced watermelon, right-angled verticality, rising one hundred feet above the graygreen talus of broken rock, scrub juniper, blackbrush, scarlet gilia, purple penstemon, golden prince's plume. It is the season of spring in the mile-high tablelands of the canyon country. In America the still Beautiful.

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.

Much the same could be said of the tamarisk down in the canyon, of the blue-black raven croaking on the cliff, of your own body. The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.

and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism.

In honor of the occasion (May Day), I tack a scarlet bandanna to the ridgepole of the ramada, where my Chinese wind bells also hang, jangling in the breeze. The red flag flutters brightly over the bells – poetry and revolution before breakfast.

There's beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere. But when I think of where I want most to be, finally, it's the old hot dusty eyeball-searing head-aching skin-blistering throat-parching boot-burning bloody goddamned desert again. Why?

you could, if you wanted to, spend your entire life in a sitting position. When you weren't lying down.

It's only a story. None of it really happened. How could it? How could such people be? The prisoner is probably a professor. The sheriff loses the next election. The truck driver died of emphysema. And as for the cowboy, that character, why nobody even knows where he is anymore. Or even, to be honest, if he ever really was.

Wilderness, wilderness.… We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination. Why

An under-privileged juniper tree, living not on water and soil but on memory and hope. And almost alone. To the

Like all good cowboys dead and alive on fighting and grit and blood they thrive with a little strong whisky to keep hope alive.

The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.

Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.

O all brave cowboys dead and revived God only knows how you ever survived or stayed out of Hell with souls unshrived.

There comes a time in a man's life when he has to pull up stakes. Has to light out. Has to stop straddling, and start cutting, fence.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

Regrettably I have found it unavoidable to write some harsh words about my seasonal employer the National Park Service

High on the rosy canyon wall a wren sang out, flute notes falling in a bright cascade of quicksilver semiquavers.

More likely the BLM or the Park Service will bypass our trail with an electrical chair lift for crippled tourists.

I don't see the world getting any better; like you I see it getting worse. I see liberty being strangled like a dog everywhere I look, I see my own country overwhelmed by ugliness and mediocrity and overcrowding, the land smothered under airstrips and superhighways, the natural wealth of a million years squandered on atomic bombs and tin automobiles and television sets and ball-point fountain pens. It's a sorry sight indeed; I can't blame you for wanting no part of it.

Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere—particularly if they form loops. Loop drives are extremely popular with the petroleum industry—they bring the motorist right back to the same gas station from which he started.

I know, when a man's best friend is his dog that man needs help - professional help. I understand that and I acknowledge it and I say to hell with it.

Technology adds a new dimension to the process by providing modern despots with instruments far more efficient than any available to their classical counterparts.

It is no longer easy, on the South Rim, to get away from the roar of motor traffic, except by descending into the canyon.