Quotes from Edward Abbey

They rested for a while. "How about a river trip?" he said. "You've been promising that for months." "This time I mean it." "When?" "Very soon." "What made you think of that?" "I hear the call of the river." "That's the toilet," she said. "The valve is stuck again." ***

We're not going to have any tyranny of the majority in this organization. We proceed on the principle of unanimity. What we do we do all together or not at all. This is a brotherhood we have here, not a legislative assembly.

We'll work it out as we go along. Let our practice form our doctrine, thus assuring precise theoretical coherence.

he responds to prejudice by cultivating a prejudice of his own against those whom he feels are even lower in the American hierarchy than he is:

The miracle of eggs. In the beginning was the egg. The chicken was an afterthought, a mere transmission mechanism for the production of further eggs. The world itself is egglike. Those astrophotos of galaxies, spiral nebulae—do they not resemble fresh eggs broken in the pan? The universe itself may be no more than one gigantic cosmic egg. And the function of mind? To fertilize that egg. Creating—who knows what grotesque and Godlike monster. Best not think about it.

Outnumbered, surrounded and overwhelmed, the Navajos will probably be forced in self-defense to malform themselves into the shape required by industrial econometrics. Red-skinned black men at present, they must learn to become dark-brown white men with credit cards and crew-cut sensibilities.

La planète est plus grande que nous ne l'avons jamais imaginée. Le monde est plus froid, plus ancien, plus étrange et plus mystérieux que nous ne l'avons jamais rêvé. Et nous, misérables créatures humaines avec nos innombrables outils et jouets et peurs et espoirs ne sommes qu'une petite feuille sur le grand arbre efflorescent de la vie.

take a long quiet walk straight into the canyons, get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it

We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we many never need to go there.

You just got here, sir." "I know but how do we get out?" "Same way you came in. It's a dead-end road." "So we see the same scenery twice?" "It looks better going out.

What little thinking I do is my own and I do it on government time.

Actually our ignorance and carelessness are more deliberate than accidental; we are entering Glen Canyon without having learned much about it beforehand because we wish to see it as Powell and his party had seen it, not knowing what to expect, making anew the discoveries of others. If the first rapids are a surprise to us it is simply because we had never inquired if there were any on this stretch of the river.

that the sound of Jack Burns singing one of Burns' own songs had been a form of illusion, the actualization of memory and possibly desire rather than a direct perception.

Omnivorous red devils with a vicious bite, they have denuded the ground surrounding their hill, destroying everything green and living within a radius of ten feet. I cannot resist the impulse to shove my walking stick into the bowels of their hive and rowel things up. Don't actually care for ants. Neurotic little pismires. Compared to ants the hairy scorpion is a beast of charm, dignity and

In the mixture of starlight and cloud-reflected sunlight in which the desert world is now illuminated, each single object stands forth in preternatural though transient brilliance, a final assertion of existence before the coming of night: each rock and shrub and tree, each flower, each stem of grass, diverse and separate, vividly isolate, yet joined each to every other in a unity which generously includes me and my solitude as well.

Wearing a headband doesn't make you an Indian. Looking like a weed doesn't make you organic.

the lids, have taken on a coral-pink, the color of the dunes.

Venus planet of love, rare as radium pure as platinum more precious than gold.

Somewhere under the heavy burden of water going nowhere, under the silence, the old rocks of the river channel waited for the promised resurrection. Promised by whom? Promised by Capt. Joseph "Seldom Seen" Smith; by Sgt. George Washington Hayduke; by Dr. Sarvis and Ms. Bonnie Abbzug, that's whom. But

A life without tragedy would not be worth living. We

For myself I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous

a bee in a cactus bloom will not be provoked; it stays until the flower wilts. Until closing time.

What he wanted was peace, order, and the reassurance of human voices.

you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus.