Quotes from Edward Abbey

I like the name. Tukuhnikivats—in the language of the Utes "where the sun lingers.

Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.

In my case, saving the world was only a hobby.

And most significant, these hordes of nonmotorized tourists, hungry for a taste of the difficult, the original, the real, do not consist solely of people young and athletic but also of old folks, fat folks, pale-faced office clerks who don't know a rucksack from a haversack, and even children. The one thing they all have in common is the refusal to live always like sardines in a can—they are determined to get outside of their motorcars for at least a few weeks each year.

In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

The canyon world becomes each hour more beautiful, the closer we come to its end.

the best of all sauces is hunger

the only birds I can recognize without hesitation are the turkey vulture, the fried chicken, and the rosey-bottomed skinny-dipper.

Civilization is tolerance, detachment and humor, or passion, anger, revenge; culture is the entrance examination, the gas chamber, the doctoral dissertation and the electric chair;

I had no fear of drowning in the water—I intended to drink it all.

Is this at last the locus Dei? There are enough cathedrals and temples and altars here for a Hindu pantheon of divinities. Each time I look up one of the secretive little side canyons I half expect to see not only the cottonwood tree rising over its tiny spring—the leafy god, the desert's liquid eye—but also a rainbow-colored corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, pure disembodied intelligence, about to speak my name.

I am-really am-an extremist, one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls off into the depths of another.

The best of jazz for all its virtues cannot escape the limitations of its origin: it is indoor music, city music, distilled from the melancholy nightclubs and the marijuana...

Well, hell, use a ball bat. And strike first, from behind. Don't give him a chance to take it away from you. You don't want a fight, you want revenge." He grinned a little. "When you just want a fight you can always go home to your wife.

I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.

pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave accordingly.

Recall the Proverb: "Set not thy foot too often in thy neighbor's house, lest he grow weary of thee and hate thee.

Yet their song, if not a mating call or a warning, must be what it sounds like, a brooding meditation on space, on solitude. The game.

Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.

Shine, perishing republic.

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 and years to come, like a treasure found and then, voluntarily, surrendered.

Plainly, she is not coming back. I can tell by the pattern of the cracks in the plaster. There's a code there, a message. Like the secret message in the final bars of Shostakovich's fifteenth and last symphony. Faint cryptic signals, like the clicking of a telegraph key, against the remote and sustained monotone of the violins—a song from outer space. What was he trying to tell us?