Top 100 Abbey's Quotes
#1. The GDP rises whenever money changes hands ... The whole thing is reminiscent of Edward Abbey's reflection that growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.
John Robbins
#2. I was already in a band, and the teachers called my mum in and said: 'Abbey's so clever, it's a total waste if she follows her dream'. But I never wanted to do a job I didn't love, and I'd always wanted to be a model or an actress or a singer.
Abbey Clancy
#3. [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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live ...
Edward Abbey
#7. 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
#8. As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.
Edward Abbey
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. '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
#16. 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
#17. War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.
Edward Abbey
#18. 'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner.
Steve Erickson
#19. Though Duty's face is stern, her path is best: They sweetly sleep who die upon her breast.
Henry Abbey
#20. When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
Edward Abbey
#21. Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.
Edward Abbey
#22. 'Downton Abbey' is one of my favourite shows ever - it's just beautifully filmed, and the stories and characters are so wonderful.
Amanda Donohoe
#23. Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.
Edward Abbey
#24. I actually don't watch much TV, but my goal is to watch 'Downton Abbey.' I want to catch up on the series ... that's like my style.
Kelly Rutherford
#25. The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
Edward Abbey
#26. If there's anyone still present whom I've failed to insult ... I apologize.
Edward Abbey
#27. God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.
Edward Abbey
#28. Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.
Edward Abbey
#29. Sunday night is curry night. I always order a spinach paneer and a chicken tikka. There's usually something good on TV like 'Mr Selfridge' or 'Downton Abbey,' so I'll watch them before I have to think about blowdrying my hair and all the other boring stuff us girls have to do!
Donna Air
#30. Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
Edward Abbey
#31. But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.
Edward Abbey
#32. Sometimes a hard sacrifice must be made for a future that's worth having
Tom Branson
#33. I mean, you can't walk down the aisle in Westminster Abbey in a strapless dress, it just won't happen - it has to suit the grandeur of that aisle, it's enormous.
Bruce Oldfield
#34. Out there in the middle of the maelstrom the Eater awaits, heaving and gulping, its mouth like a giant clam's . . . its mind a frenzy of beige-colored rapid foam. A horrifying uproar, all things considered. Imagine floating through that nonsense in a life jacket. - EDWARD ABBEY
Kevin Fedarko
#35. I see potential in everything. It's about opening your mind to what you can do to the garment: because they're cheap, you can cut them or stitch them, and if you stuff it up, it's fine - it's only two dollars.
Abbey Lee Kershaw
#36. It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.
Lynn Abbey
#37. Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation's prayer ever in dumb music ascending.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#38. You can never go wrong cuttin' fence,' repeated Smith, warming to his task. (Pling!) "Always cut fence. That's the law west of the 100th meridian. East of that don't matter none. Back there it's all lost anyhow. But west, we cut fence,' (Plang!)
Edward Abbey
#39. What's your life philosophy, Leo?" "I haven't figured it out yet." Abbey considers this. "'I haven't figured it out yet' is not a bad life philosophy
Paul Acampora
#40. Life is the wave's deep whisper on the shore Of a great sea beyond.
Henry Abbey
#41. I don't like feeling vulnerable. I think my mum and dad's divorce affected me more than I let on.
Abbey Clancy
#42. When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.
Edward Abbey
#43. Preacher to me: 'A dollar for the Lord, brother?' Me to preacher: 'That's all right, I'm headed his way. I'll give it to him when I see him.'
Edward Abbey
#44. I will be up at 8 A.M. making spaghetti bolognese for Peter and Sophia's evening meal if I'm working that day. I may not get back for the evening, and I worry if I don't do that, then they won't eat anything.
Abbey Clancy
#45. What do we plant when we plant a tree?
A thousand things that we daily see,
We plant the spire that out-towers the crag,
We plant the staff for our country's flag;
We plant the shade from the hot sun free,
We plant all these when we plant the tree.
Henry Abbey
#46. It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?
Edward Abbey
#47. It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow.
Lynn Abbey
#48. It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.
Edward Abbey
#49. Scholl Velvet Smooth Express Pedi is just great. You get yourself in a hot bath to soften up your skin and then use this, and it really works. Plus, it's so easy to do, and you don't have to leave the house, so whenever you want to put sandals on, you don't have to worry about going to the salon.
Abbey Clancy
#50. I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.
Edward Abbey
#51. Do you know what the name Astrid means?" He switched gears again and I was helpless to follow.
"No."
It means 'star'. That's what I think of you as, Abbey. One day I looked up, and there you were. A fiery spot of light surrounded by darkness. You make me feel like anything is possible.
Jessica Verday
#52. I've got no interest in football. My brother's a footballer, too, and I was dragged to the freezing pitch every week as a child. I don't see much glamour in it.
Abbey Clancy
#53. I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not
realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.
Edward Abbey
#54. Honestly, I don't buy papers or the weeklies. I think when something messy does happen, you just need your closest friends and family all around you, and it's nothing to do with anyone else.
Abbey Clancy
#55. But I've been there and done that. I'm not trying to prove anything to anybody, and if somebody wants me to come, if they can afford what I ask, it's not as much as Madonna makes; not that I want what Madonna makes, but I was saying.
Abbey Lincoln
#56. There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas.
Edward Abbey
#57. [R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.
Edward Abbey
#58. Before 'Austenland,' I got do a lead role in 'Northanger Abbey', which is Jane Austen. Growing up in England, you can't really ignore Jane Austen. It's always been there.
JJ Feild
#59. I think that's what really a substantial work is, it's forever. It's the truth now and it was the truth then, and it will be the truth tomorrow.
Abbey Lincoln
#60. I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.
Lynn Abbey
#61. 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
#62. The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.
Edward Abbey
#63. Vonnegut is one of America's basic artists, a true and worthy heir to the grand tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Traven, Tom Wolfe (the real Tom Wolfe, I mean) and Steinbeck. In other words, he writes out of a concern for justice, love, honesty, and hope.
Edward Abbey
#64. I think it's important to keep your own identity when you've got a baby.
Abbey Clancy
#65. When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.
Edward Abbey
#66. And everyone knows I'm a mad scientist. It's amazing what everyone knows, isn't it? Usually what everyone knows is insulting and sort of ableist, because the people who know everything always seem to think of themselves as being perfectly normal. But that's neither here nor there.
Mira Grant
#67. I tried to get people at 'South Park' into 'Downton Abbey,' and it didn't work. I think they were like, 'Downton Abbey?' What?' And I kinda made a big plea in the writer's room, like, 'Guys, you should really watch it. It's good. It's addicting. My wife and I are obsessed with it.'
Bill Hader
#68. You can't belay a man who's falling in love.
Edward Abbey
#69. It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.
Edward Abbey
#70. If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.
Edward Abbey
#71. There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.
Edward Abbey
#72. Surely it is no accident that the most thorough of tyrannies appeared in Europe's most thoroughly scientific and industrialized nation. If we allow our own country to become as densely populated, overdeveloped and technically unified as modern Germany we may face a similar fate.
Edward Abbey
#73. A lizard is a perfect pet for a model. They only need feeding once a fortnight. And I'm always travelling, so it's perfect. If I had a dog, it would drop dead of starvation.
Abbey Lee Kershaw
#74. The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.
Edward Abbey
#75. People who think that love, sex, marriage, work, play, life and death are serious matters are urged NOT to read this book. Buy it, yes, but don't read it. [Regarding "The Fool's Progress"]
Edward Abbey
#76. No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next
if not a damn sight better.
Edward Abbey
#77. The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirit's weak.
Edward Abbey
#78. Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.
Edward Abbey
#79. It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true
nobody will ever take you seriously.
Edward Abbey
#80. To undermine a person's self-respect is a sin. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Abbey Strauss
#81. From the point of view of political geography we are standing on one of the frontiers of human culture; for the man inside the rubber sack it was land's end, the shore of the world.
Edward Abbey
#82. Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.
Edward Abbey
#83. Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.
Edward Abbey
#84. Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat
planet Earth
could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama
soap opera with literary trimmings.
Edward Abbey
#85. I love doing girly stuff with my mum or with Sophia. I took Sophia and a couple of her friends to the Hello Kitty spa. They had chocolate facials and Hello Kitty mani-pedis. I put it on my Twitter and got lots of abuse for it, but I think it's just a nice girly thing.
Abbey Clancy
#86. If you're an English actor, and you're asked to do an episode - especially the Christmas episode - of 'Downton Abbey,' you can't turn it down. It's like, 'Of course!'
Janet Montgomery
#88. I always have my Laura Mercier foundation and concealer with me, and I love the Rimmel Kate Moss lipsticks. My favourite is shade 08, because it's just such a lovely natural colour with just a bit of pink to it.
Abbey Clancy
#89. When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.
Edward Abbey
#90. By the time we made "Abbey Road", John and I were openly critical of each other's music, and I felt John wasn't much interested in performing anything he hadn't written himself.
Paul McCartney
#91. It's hopeless," he went on. "We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!"
"We are dwarfs," William admitted, "but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they.
Umberto Eco
#92. The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.
William Wordsworth
#93. Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.
Edward Abbey
#94. Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.
Edward Abbey
#95. Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.
Edward Abbey
#96. I've built an 8-track studio in my house that's virtually identical to what they used at Abbey Road, and I also own the 16-track set-up that Led Zeppelin used to record 'Houses of the Holy.' I'm interested in producing, but I'm mostly recording my own stuff.
Lukas Haas
#97. Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.
Edward Abbey
#98. Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey - it's unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species.
Steve Erickson
#99. 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
#100. It's a spirit that was given me and the relationships and meeting all these great people, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong; through Max I met a lot of people too. My first album was with Benny Carter.
Abbey Lincoln
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