Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.”

— Edward Abbey

402. “I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.”

— Edward Abbey

403. “She fasted on the mesa rim, waiting for a vision, and fasted some more, and after a time God appeared incarnate on a platter as a roasted squab with white paper booties on His little drumsticks.”

— Edward Abbey

404. “I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.”

— Edward Abbey

405. “Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.”

— Edward Abbey

406. “Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.”

— Edward Abbey

407. “Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people.”

— Edward Abbey

408. “Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.”

— Edward Abbey

409. “Life is hard? True – but let’s love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.”

— Edward Abbey

410. “The result of this bestial lust is an indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of all of my energies- wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing.”

— Edward Abbey

411. “Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.”

— Edward Abbey

412. “Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.”

— Edward Abbey

413. “Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.”

— Edward Abbey

414. “Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.”

— Edward Abbey

415. “My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.”

— Edward Abbey

416. “Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.”

— Edward Abbey

417. “Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?”

— Edward Abbey

418. “And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.”

— Edward Abbey

419. “Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.”

— Edward Abbey

420. “How can I be so evil? It ain’t easy.”

— Edward Abbey

421. “For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.”

— Edward Abbey

422. “The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.”

— Edward Abbey

423. “I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life – if I live that long.”

— Edward Abbey

424. “It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.”

— Edward Abbey

425. “Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.”

— Edward Abbey

426. “Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it’s likely that no one is thinking at all.”

— Edward Abbey

427. “Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.”

— Edward Abbey

428. “Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn’t.”

— Edward Abbey

429. “My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit.”

— Edward Abbey

430. “There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.”

— Edward Abbey

431. “Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.”

— Edward Abbey

432. “The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners – and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.”

— Edward Abbey

433. “All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.”

— Edward Abbey

434. “Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.”

— Edward Abbey

435. “My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING – and find it enough.”

— Edward Abbey

436. “A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.”

— Edward Abbey

437. “A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.”

— Edward Abbey

438. “All governments require enemy governments.”

— Edward Abbey

439. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.”

— Edward Abbey

440. “I’m a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.”

— Edward Abbey

441. “My own best books have not been published. In fact, they’ve not even been written yet.”

— Edward Abbey

442. “The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.”

— Edward Abbey

443. “Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.”

— Edward Abbey

444. “One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante’s plastic Paradiso, or Yeats’s gold-plated Byzantium.”

— Edward Abbey

445. “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 mother love or cherry pie.”

— Edward Abbey

446. “Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.”

— Edward Abbey

447. “Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.”

— Edward Abbey

448. “It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God’s obvious love for it.”

— Edward Abbey

449. “Man was created to complete the horse.”

— Edward Abbey

450. “A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.”

— Edward Abbey