Edward Abbey Quote Thread

This thread has a rule: you are not allowed to post or reply unless you include an Edward Abbey quote that has not yet been posted! Deletion imminent!

Now that the formalities are out of the way let's get to our important business:

"The ravages of alcohol are enough to drive any man to drink" - The Fool's Progress

"Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand, befouling God's sweet earth. The manly tradition." - Monkey Wrench Gang

A city man is at home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.
– Edward Abbey

Cowboys make better lovers: Ask any cow.
– Edward Abbey

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Edward Abbey

"If you can't take a piss in your own front yard you live too close to town."

I don't live too close to town.

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit"!

Leaving Saturday for some necessity.

Good Camping all!

Paul

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks--chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring

It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
– Edward Abbey

I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets – the seventeen who got away.
– Edward Abbey

......just couldn't resist a couple more

"Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube. There are some things one would rather have done than do."

Edward Abbey

DD, thanks for this thread. I had never heard of Edward Abbey before.

"Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland."

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit."

"How to avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah."

"It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave."
.

“When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem”

“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”

Edward Abbey quote

I did not know who he was this is a great thread.

"Freedom begins between the ears."
– Edward Abbey

"Time and the winds will sooner or later bury the Seven Cities of Cibola - Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, all of them - under dunes of glowing sand, over which blue-eyed Navajo bedouin will herd their sheep and horses, following the river in winter, the mountains in summer, and sometimes striking off across the desert toward the red canyons of Utah where great waterfalls plunge over silt-filled, ancient, mysterious dams."

- Edward Abbey

Even if our best efforts to protect the land from too many people fail, Mother Earth will have the final word.

Damn, I can't lay my hands on anyof my Ed Abbey. I condensed my library recently to clear a bedroom and now I can't findanything.

Thank goodness for google, here goes:

"So I lived alone.
The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally. Next I unloaded the horse, smacked her on the rump and sent her back to the village."

-Edward Abbey,
Desert Solitaire, a season in the wilderness, 1968

Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be – a man.
– Edward Abbey

This is killer stuff:

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

From a speech to environmentalists in Missoula, Montana, and in Colorado, which was published in High Country News, (24 September 1976), under the title "Joy, Shipmates, Joy!", as quoted in Saving Nature's Legacy : Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (1994) by Reed F. Noss, Allen Y. Cooperrider, and Rodger Schlickeisen

Courtesy wikiquote.org

I wonder how Candy felt about that quote? Good one!

"How to avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah."