Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.'… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying -- a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Me, I'm living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino's disease, which could lay me in the grave… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
