Quotes from Edward Abbey

The cactus of the high desert is a small, grubby, obscure and humble vegetable associated with cattle dung and overgrazing, interesting only when you tangle with it in the wrong way. Yet from this nest of thorns, this snare of hooks and fiery spines, is born once each year a splendid flower. It is unpluckable and except to an insect almost unapproachable, yet soft, lovely, sweet, desirable, exemplifying better than the rose among thorns the unity of opposites.

Give me silence, water, hope Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes —Neruda

There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

Simply breathing, in a place like this, arouses the appetite.

Hinton walked blindly toward his truck, unwrapping his candy bar, while the cicada in the field and the frogs in the swampy ditch sang hosannas to the sky. PART TWO

I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.

Or Bakunin: "There are times when creation can be achieved only through destruction. The urge to destroy is then a creative urge.")

Serenity is for the gods—not becoming in a mortal. Better to be partisan and passionate on this earth; be plenty objective enough when dead.

What are you in for, Rev'rend, anyway? Me, son? My body's here but the spirit's free as a bluebird. Okay, then why is your body here? Well now, the Judge he calls it assault. I done hit a man and he falls down. Didn't hit him hard but he falls down like a log. Maybe he wasn't standin very good.

They won't break me. I've got a nimble and pliant will, and the powers of a chameleon. I'll conform for a year, or two years if necessary, and when I get out I'll be a wiser man. Maybe a sadder man. Possibly bitter, too—I hope not.

There is a certain primitive attraction in it," Bondi said, "but what about the future? Are we to spend the rest of our lives shooting animals, chewing skins, hiding out from game wardens and county sheriffs?

A suspension of time, a continuous present.

Stars which are unusually bold and close, with an icy glitter in their light—glints of blue, emerald, gold.

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.

Go thou my incense upward from this hearth And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light which it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.

I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.