Top 100 Abbey Quotes
#1. I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.
Edward Abbey
#2. Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.
Lynn Abbey
#3. Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.
Edward Abbey
#4. Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.
Edward Abbey
#5. An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.
Edward Abbey
#6. In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)
Edward Abbey
#7. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.
Edward Abbey
#9. You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.
Edward Abbey
#10. 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.
Edward Abbey
#11. I get invited to a lot more glamorous parties since I've been in 'Downton Abbey,' which has made me much more fashion conscious.
Lesley Nicol
#12. Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.
Edward Abbey
#13. The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.
Edward Abbey
#14. There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief - but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.
Edward Abbey
#15. I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.
Lynn Abbey
#16. If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.
Edward Abbey
#17. Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.
Edward Abbey
#18. Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'
Edward Abbey
#19. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.
Edward Abbey
#20. The desert wears ... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting
but waiting for what?
Edward Abbey
#21. There is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.
Edward Abbey
#22. A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Lynn Abbey
#23. Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.
Edward Abbey
#24. I always have to get my U.K. fix, and 'Downton Abbey' is definitely that. I absolutely love period dramas, but this one is particularly appealing - following the ins and outs of aristocracy as well as the interaction between the rich and the poor.
Estelle
#25. There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.
Edward Abbey
#26. The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.
Edward Abbey
#27. Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.
Edward Abbey
#28. The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!
Edward Abbey
#29. The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live ...
Edward Abbey
#30. The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone and to no one.
Edward Abbey
#31. I was always in hospital as a kid: I had a tumour on my knee, lots of broken bones. I loved climbing trees.
Abbey Lee Kershaw
#32. We have inherited a great music. This music is a holdover. It comes with us like the skin, the texture of our hair. It's our memory banks.
Abbey Lincoln
#33. As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.
Edward Abbey
#34. I've bought some Lanvin snake-print wedges, so maybe you'll see me pushing the pram in those and my hotpants!
Abbey Clancy
#35. Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.
Edward Abbey
#36. 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.
Edward Abbey
#37. Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.
Edward Abbey
#38. Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.
Edward Abbey
#39. I wondered if there were any rooms in all of Thorne Abbey that wouldn't leave me gawking in wonder at the doorway.
Rachel Hawkins
#41. Brits are cool at the moment. We've taken over the world, what with 'Game of Thrones', 'Downton Abbey', One Direction ... to be British is to be fashionable.
Russell Tovey
#42. The one product I can't live without is my mascara. I'm addicted to long eyelashes and think girls just look so pretty with long lashes!
Abbey Clancy
#43. You're a mad scientist,' said Maggie, in what may well have been intended as a reassuring tone. 'We don't expect you to be nice. We just go to bed every night hoping you won't mutate us before we wake up.'
Dr. Abbey blinked at her. 'That's ... almost sweet. In a disturbing sort of a way.
Mira Grant
#45. Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are
retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.
Edward Abbey
#46. Anarchism? You bet your sweet betsy. The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Much more.
Edward Abbey
#47. I'm sure as hell not going to fight over her. I got more interesting things to do than that.
There's nothing more interesting than a woman, George. Not in this world.
Edward Abbey
#48. Whenever I read _Time_ or _Newsweek_ or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind?
Edward Abbey
#50. Abbey was born to sophistication, whereas I was more Barbara than Buckingham Palace Windsor.
Samantha Tonge
#51. A city man is a 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
#53. Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers
obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.
Edward Abbey
#54. Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'
Edward Abbey
#55. Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
Edward Abbey
#56. To Stanley Ager, the gift of human "service" was no one-way loyalty. He clearly gave his all to the families he served but, though he was almost too polite to state this, his expectation of loyalty in return was implicit.
Stanley Ager
#57. To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.
Edward Abbey
#58. When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
Edward Abbey
#59. What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
Edward Abbey
#60. A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.
Edward Abbey
#61. In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
Edward Abbey
#62. Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.
Edward Abbey
#63. The first time I went to Abbey Road and put those headphones on, I discovered I had two voices. I no longer had to shout in the studio, but I can't knock the Cavern or the other clubs because they gave me my strong voice.
Cilla Black
#64. There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.
Lynn Abbey
#65. In that moment of truce, of utter surrender, when the rabbit still alive offers no resistance but only waits, is it possible that the rabbit also loves the owl?
Edward Abbey
#66. Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.
Edward Abbey
#67. Poetry
even bad poetry
may be our final hope.
Edward Abbey
#68. Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
Edward Abbey
#69. I will not. I will never surrender. I will fight through to the finsh, whatever the outcome. I will not quit. I will not betray and desert the best thing in my life. No, no, I will not surrender...Earth is the place for love.
Edward Abbey
#70. There were signs everywhere but none that I could read or even hope to decipher. These multi-lined symbols unhinged my familiar world.
Gerry Abbey
#71. Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses
they tie
who cares? And why?
Edward Abbey
#72. The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space. South
Edward Abbey
#73. The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.
Edward Abbey
#74. Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.
Edward Abbey
#75. After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.'
Anthony Marra
#76. To be alive is to take risks; to be always safe and secure is death.
Edward Abbey
#77. A life without tragedy would not be worth living. We
Edward Abbey
#78. My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
Edward Abbey
#79. No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.
Jane Austen
#80. Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.
Edward Abbey
#81. In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.
Edward Abbey
#82. The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.
Edward Abbey
#83. Wherever two human beings are alive, together, and happy, there is the center of the world.
Edward Abbey
#84. Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.
Edward Abbey
#85. I've never seen an episode of 'Downton Abbey.'
Keeley Hawes
#86. If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.
Edward Abbey
#87. Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.
Lynn Abbey
#88. Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.
Edward Abbey
#89. Obviously this was one of those stupid guy moments and he didn't understand what I wanted. I was going to explain it to him very, very soon.
-Abbey
Jessica Verday
#90. Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.
Edward Abbey
#91. It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.
Edward Abbey
#92. 'Downton Abbey' is just one cliche after another, and it is a really, really poor piece of drama. But that's only me talking. That's just my take on it.
Michael Hirst
#93. I remember wearing overcoats, hiding in the bushes outside of Abbey Road Studios, waiting for the traffic to clear. As it did, we would drop our overcoats and run out on to the cross walk and strike our poses.
Jack Irons
#94. I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?
Edward Abbey
#96. The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.
Edward Abbey
#97. War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.
Edward Abbey
#98. I think people used to read 'War and Peace,' and now they don't; now they sit around with their tablets and watch 'Downton Abbey' and 'Breaking Bad' or whatever, and they want the things that they watch to be better so that they can feel better about themselves for watching it.
Noah Hawley
#99. I'm tired of doing what I don't want to do to live the way I don't want to live.
Edward Abbey
#100. As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn't even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.
Gerry Abbey
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