-DESERT SOLITAIRE-

Pg. 31 "Love flowers best in openness and freedom."

Pg. 67 “What about children? What about the aged and the infirm? Frankly, we need waste little sympathy on these two pressure groups. Children too small to ride bicycles and too heavy to be borne on their parents’ backs need only wait a few years-if they are not run over by automobiles they will grow into a lifetime of joyous adventure, if we save the parks and leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” –Industrial Tourism and the National Parks

Pg.72 “We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men.”

Pg. 207 “Wilderness. The word itself is music. Wilderness, wilderness… We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination.”

Pg. 198 "The best of all sauces is hunger."

-THE MONKEYWRENCH GANG-

“Drop your cocks and grab your socks, off your ass and on your feet.” –Hayduke

“The river, the canyon, the desert world was always changing, from moment to moment, from miracle to miracle, within the firm reality of mother earth. River, rock, sun, blood, hunger, wings, joy—this is the real……” -Edward Abbey

-HAYDUKE LIVES-

The Kowboy and His Kow
Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a bawling beef herd
And the flies are not swarming all day.
Yes, give me a home where the grizzly bears roam
Where the bighorn and wapiti play,
Where "never" is seen a hamburger machine
And the cowshit's not stinking all day.
(I should recite this at the annual Cowboy Poet's Roundup.)

Ambition: I wish to be
an inspector of volcanoes.
I want to study cloud formations
and memorize the wind
and learn by heart the habits of
the ponderosa pine.
While we sit here
in our air-conditioned offices
rattling fresh documents
and arranging new wars
wasting time and squandering eternity
some really great things
are happening OUT THERE.

-ONE LIFE AT A TIME, PLEASE-

pg. 64
Avoid the polluted herd,
Shun the reeking flock;
Live like that stoic bird
The eagle on the rock.
-Elinor Wylie

pg. 120 “We agree that getting up early, before anyone else, gives one a feeling of moral superiority that may last, on a good day, all day long. Furthermore, early morning is the sweetest time of day, any day. That’s when your senses are keenest, your mind liveliest, your heart most alive and hopeful.”

Pg. 166 “ it appears to me, for example, that torture is wrong, a hideous wrong, and always wrong; that the death penalty—the cold-blooded infliction of death by instruments of the state—is an evil greater than murder; it seems to me, judging by appearances only, that it’s wrong to allow children to die of malnutrition and equally wrong—worse than wrong, criminally stupid—to bring children into the world when you are not prepared to feed and care for them; it appears to me that the domination of many by a few, whatever the creed behind it, whatever the means, leads always to injustice and is therefore wrong, always wrong, leading to greater wrongs. I cite these banal, crude, and simple examples only to demonstrate that there is a moral area in which the true can easily be distinguished from the false. I cheerfully agree that there are other areas where the distinction is more difficult to ascertain.”

pg. 175 “This is what you shall do. Love the earth and the sun and the animals. Despise riches. Give alms to everyone that asks. Stand up for the stupid and crazy. Devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or any number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and the young and with the mothers of families…. Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book and dismiss whatever insults your own soul….

-Walt Whitman

Emerson Quotes:
-A man is a god in ruins
-It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
-Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.
-All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.
-Nature is the symbol of spirit.

-THE JOURNEY HOME-

Pg. 98 “…The quiet tragedy of human relationships.”

Pg.205 “Walking makes the world much bigger and therefore more interesting. You have time to observe the details.” “Walking stretches life and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed.”

Pg.220 “in the basin above the cirque I passed shallow lakes, emerald green when viewed from the trail, turquoise blue when seen from above. Cascades tumbled through gorges in the rock, disappearing beneath the casual wreckage of the mountains to emerge as flashing brooks at the head of the lakes. Almost everything in sight was stone or water or vapor, as in the beginning, except for the miniature pastures of grass and turf—like putting greens—where the pikas make their living. The mountain glittered under the sun with that harsh perfection characteristic of God’s later work. Almost too perfect; I should have brought a few beer cans to throw around, give the place a natural look.”

-DOWN THE RIVER-

Pg. 23 Thoreau quotes:

“Tell those who worry bout their health that they may be already dead.”

“If I repent anything, it is likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behave so well?”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

Pg. 31 “All babies look identical; boys and adolescents resemble one another, in their bewildered hopefulness, more than they differ. But eventually the inner nature of the man appears on his outer surface. Character begins to shine through. Year by year a man reveals himself, while those with nothing to show, show it. Differentiation becomes individuation. By the age of forty, if not before, a man is responsible for his face. The same is true of women too, certainly, although women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder than men to preserve an appearance of youthfulness—the reproductive look—and lose It sooner. Appearance is reality.”

Pg. 33 “Mark Twain was right. Better the savage wasteland with Eve than Paradise without her. Where she is, there is Paradise. Poor Henry. And then I hear that voice again, far off but clear. “All Nature is my bride.”

Pg. 38 Thoreau: “I have traveled a good deal in Concord, and everywhere, in shops and offices and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways… By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and dust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before… I sometimes wonder than we can be so frivolous… As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

Pg. 44 “Looking at the rich brown river, jungle on both banks, I think how splendid it would be, an apposite to see the rugose snout of an alligator come sliding through the water towards us. We need alligators here. Crocodiles, also. A few brontosauri, pteranodons, and rocs with twenty-five-foot wingspan would not be amiss. How tragic that we humans arrived too late, to the best of our conscious recollection, to have witnessed the fun and frolic of the giant thunder lizards in their time of glory. Why was that great chapter ripped too soon from the Book of Life. I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough nature.”

Pg. 45 “We camp today at Spanish Bottom, near the first rapids of Cataract Canyon. Sitting around our fire till sundown, four of us gnawing on our spareribs, the other two picking at their pussy food—tofu and spinach leaves and stewed kelp (it looks like the testicles of a sick octopus)

Pg. 91 “I drive on, indulging the reveries of a solitary wanderer, keeping an eye peeled for topaz, amethyst, opal, beryl, tourmaline, obsidian, agate, crystal-loaded geodes. This is rock-hound country—a place for hounding rocks. But I am satisfied to look and touch, and leave each stone where it belongs, in situ. Every rock should be regarded as what some call “leavitrite”: leave it right where it is. The same holds for what’s left of original America: love it or leave it alone.

Pg. 121 “It is my fear that if we allow the freedom of the hills and the last of the wilderness to be taken from us, then the very idea o freedom may die with it.”

Pg. 223 Jerky recipe: “Take five pounds frozen round steak or brisket, slice into thin (1/8 inch) strips. Marinate for 12 hours in a mixture of wine vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, olive oil, red chilli powder, salt, garlic salt, (mais oui!), and beer. (Heineken’s will do.) (Or black Swan.) Pin to a line in the hot sun, If in an arid climate, for about twenty-four hours or until done, or dry in an over for eight to twelve hours 200 degrees F.;leave the oven door open about one inch to allow circulation of air. Remove. Cool. Place in Pack. Place pack on back. March twenty miles into wilderness. Open Pack. Mangez!”

Pg. 233 “Our world is so full of beautiful things: fruit and ideas and women and good men and banjo music and onions with purple skins. A virtual Paradise. But even Paradise can be damned, flooded, overrun, generally mucked up by fools in pursuit of paper profits and plastic happiness.”

Pg. 237 “But where is home? Surely not the walled-in prison of the cities, under that low ceiling of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides and acid rain—the leaky malaise of an overdeveloped, overcrowded, self-destroying civilization—where most people are compelled to serve their time and please the wardens if they can.”

-BEYOND THE WALL-

Pg. xvi. So much for all that. Now I can do no more than offer one final prayer to the young, to the bold, to the angry, to the questioning, to the lost. Beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security fences topped with barbed wire and razor wire, beyond the asphalt belting of the superhighways, beyond the cemented banksides of our temporarily stopped and mutilated rivers, beyond the rage of lies that poisons the air, there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then— May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God’s dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.

Pg. 135 Standing here amid this dereliction, one contemplates (maybe recalls) that former style of life. Many miles by dirt road to the nearest town. Saturday afternoon at the moving picture show. Return by starlight to the homestead. Unharnessing the team, forking hay into the manger, milking the cow. Inside the shack, Maw trims the wick of the kerosene lamp. Survival chores. A hard life? No Doubt. But, speaking as one whose boyhood was spent in a similar kind of life, I can think of worse things. Spending your days monitoring a computer, for example, inside the air-conditioned fluorescent-lighted womb of some glass-walled data center over in Houston, Tucson or Moscow. With windows that don’t open and ranks of fellow robots all wearing dark neckties and white shirts. That would be intolerably worse.

-ABBEY WEB-

(Quotes taken from various Edward Abbey websites)

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages--as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

There is this to be said for walking: It's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.

The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.

Machines[off-road vehicles] are domineering, exclusive, destructive and costly; it is they and their operators who would deny the enjoyment of the back country to the rest of us. About 98% of the land surface of the contiguous USA already belongs to heavy metal and heavy equipment. Let us save the 2% - that saving remnant.

Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noonday sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently.

The essence of true wilderness is big mammals that can eat you.

As if we could waste time without injuring eternity…..

-CONFESSIONS OF A BARBARIAN-

Pg.22 “Oh Lord, preserve me from the fate of these poor hacks who waste their lives within library stacks.”

Pg.12 HOW TO DIE – but first, how not to:

Not in a smelly old bloody-gutted bed in a rest-home room drowning in the damp wash from related souls groping around you in an ocean heavy with morbid fascination with agony, sin and guilt expiated, with clinical faces and automatic tear glands functioning perfunctorily and a fat priest kneeling on the naked heart.
-Not in snowy whiteness under arc lights and klieg lights and direct television hookup. No never under clinical smells and sterilized medical eyes cool with detail calculated needle-pronged agonizing, stiff and starchy in the white monastic cell, no.
-Not in the muddymire of battleblood commingled with charflesh and others’ blood, guts, bones, mud and excrement in the damp smell of blasted and wrung-out air; nor in the masspacked weight of the cities atomized while masonary topples and chandeliers crash clashing buried with a million others, no.
-Not the legal murdur either – too grim and ugly such a martyrdom – down long aisles with chattering Christers chins on shoulders under bright lights again a spectacle an entertainment grim stickyquiet officialdom and heavy-booted policeman guiding the turning of a public hair gently grinding in a knucklebone and arm hard and obscene fatassed policeman everywhere under the judicial – not to be murdered so, no never.

But how to:
Alone, elegantly, a wolf on a rock,
old pale and dry,
dry bones rattling in the leather bag,
eyes alight, high, dry, cool, far off,
dim distance alone,
free as a dying wolf on a pale dry rock gurgling quietly alone between the agony-spasms of beauty and delight; when the first flash of hatred comes to crawl, ease off casually forward into space the old useless body, falling, turning, glimpsing for one more time the blue evening sky and the far distant lonesome rocks below – before the crash, before….
With none to say no, none.
Way off yonder in the evening blue, in the gloaming.

Pg.31
O, there are no words for what I mean.
I am lonely.
I am unhappy.
I cannot say what it is that I am feeling.
There is no music for it, there is no art…I cannot tell you what I mean.
I know that I am alone, that I am lonely, that I am haunted by a vague cloud of sorrow and by a fading floating image of a breathless loveliness which sings not hope to me, not warmth or happiness, nor meaning or end, but only is, only is, and never will be more.
I am heavy-tongued, slow-worded, thick and halting and nearly dumb.
I cannot say it.
I am unhappy.
I am lonely.
Give me your hand, whoever you are.

Pg.58 “Mildly talented in a variety of ways but with no genuine ability in any one field, she was, like me, the perennial hapless self-amused dilettante, half-worried by the slippage of time but determined to enjoy failure anyway.”

Pg.85 “Do I occasionally long for death?
Not very deeply –
I’m much too interested in the investigation of the human situation, in trying to discover the root-cause of my own and others’ misery.
After all, I’ll die anyway, probably – no need for impatience.
The final gift of life, at least, never fails us.
Again I am grateful that I have abandoned – no, it would be more accurate to say “never acquired”
– Christianity, with is appalling and horrible promise of immortality which makes Heaven and Hell indistinguishable, and life a vale of dread. It’s not immortality I crave, no, never – what I want is understanding. Gladly, joyfully would I sacrifice all eternity for one bright flash of terrible and godly omniscience. This traditional Western bawling after immortality – what is the meaning of it? Why the insane desire to perpetuate through and beyond all time the identity of the person and the personal consciousness? The Orientals know better – they have the spirit merge with the world, not buzz over it forever like a bored and boring fly.”

Pg. 97 “After all, I remind myself, the life of adventure is the only life that makes sense. Adventure interpreted broadly, of course – to include not only physical action, exploration, but also human love, ideas and ideals, the arts, and the common and daily motion and conflict and trouble of everyday people doing the world’s hard work, making everything else possible.”

Pg. 106 “What loyalty I still have for “America” takes this form: I love the land – its great rivers, plains, mountains and the ineffable desert; I love my friends, my kin, my unknown allies – I will stand by them to the end. But for the cities, for our schools and churches and industries, for the government, for the meaningless documents embalmed of the past, for the mass of hucksters and enterprisers – no love. Fuck them. No loyalty. I will not defend them.”

Pg. 124 “Gawd but I hate school. Most of the time. Occasionally it’s entertaining, even exciting. But mostly tedious and painful and full of gray smog and hateful to life. Surely life – a more abundant life – is possible! Must be. A life of violence and action and passion, sensation probed to its heights and depths, the soul stretched like violin strings over the arch of mountains and women and conflict! Of that, now, of that I dream. That is how genuine life appears, looking out wistfully through the bars of my cubicle window.

Pg. 125 “I still insist on plain living and high thinking. I enjoy chopping wood; I love wood fires; I don’t mind carrying water; I find ecstasy in building a fire. Like Lawrence, I am taken by the primeval charm and fascination of the simple mysteries: fire, fucking, building in mud, rain, sunlight, the smell of greasewood and live oak after a cloudburst, the luxury of a sleeping hound. I require openness, space, economy, natural resistance, red meat, women, fire, water – the essentials of liberty.

A day like spring today. Nostalgia. Sun and violet sky, and a southern wind that whispers –
mountain, desert, yucca and lava rock, space, wildness, and the Gila monster, the vinegaroon, Big Bend and Mexico and freedom. O! brother, that southern wind!

The more I dim my eyes over print and frazzle my brain over abstract ideas, the more I want and appreciate the delight of being basically and animal wrapped in a sensitive skin: sex, the resistance of rock, the taste and touch of snow, the feel of the sun, good wine and rare beefsteak and the company of friends around a fire with guitar and lousy old cowboy songs.

Despair: I’ll never become a scholar, never be a decent good Christian. Just a hedonist, a pagan, a primitive romantic. But what’s an honest soul to do? I don’t know. I can say this:
Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight you enemies with passion and laughter.”

Pg. 140 “Sweet sweet wilderness! Soon ah too soon to vanish under noise dirt and confusion – one incredible crime after another: attack murder dishonor and befoulment follow greed, overwhelm this wild innocent and defenseless beauty…

Pg. 148 “If the world is truly as ugly, cruel, trivial, unjust and stinking with fraud as it usually appears, and if it is really impossible to make it pleasant and decent, then there remains only one alternative for the honest man: stay home, cultivate your own garden, look to the mountains. (Withdraw! Withdraw! Withdraw!)

Pg. 150 “A lovely quiet evening with nothing human in sight, the great river murmuring a few feet away, frogs and cicadas chirping, a few nighthawks zooming thru the twilight gulping bugs.”

Pg. 247
VALUES:
-- Courage (“without courage, all other virtues are useless”)
-- generosity: Kindness, gentleness, sharing
-- wisdom: knowledge and understanding; search for truth
-- health
-- good useful work to do
-- love and friendship
-- sanctity of all life, of all forms of being (including rocks, hills etc.)
-- intelligence and humor
--music, poetry, drama, fiction, ideas
--Nature
--fruit, nuts and beautiful women
--easy money and fat girls.

Pg. 261 “I have enough money in the bank now to buy enough beans and rice for twenty-five years. To the end (sometimes longed for). Why not kidnap Suzy and sneak off to the like of a semi-hermit? A tempting, constantly tempting idea. Hide out up in Red Canyon, or Dirty Devil, or Trachyte Canyon under the Little Rockies? Peace. Simplicity. Order, ceremony and ritual. Voluntary poverty. An end to clutter and this vulgar, stifling, crushing burden of things – junk – trash – things! – that weigh so upon our lives. I need some love in my daily life. Some loyalty. Some beauty. ‘Tis a gift to be simple. ‘Tis a gift to be free….

Pg. 286 My self-graded report card, a la Vonnegut:
Jonathan Troy: D-
Brave Cowboy: B
Fire on the Mountain: C
Black Sun: A
Monkey Wrench Gang: B
Good News: B
Desert Solitaire: B
Abbey’s Road: A
Journey Home: C
Down the Rover: A
-Just read William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, a damn good book

Pg. 317 “One punk slob on a dirt bike makes more noise takes up more space inflicts more damage than a hundred horsemen or a thousand walkers.”

Pg. 326 “We don’t go into the wilderness to exhibit our skills at gourmet cooking. We go into the wilderness to get away from the kind of people who think gourmet cooking is important.”

Pg. 330
WEALTH AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT:
Let us define the wealthy man as he who has everything he desires. How to reach that happy condition? Two ways…
(1) Through money: Work, sweat, scheme, grovel, cheat, lie, betray to acquire it. But there’s no guarantee you’ll succeed. Ninety-nine chances out of a hundred, you’ll fail. Or….
(2) Do without: Reduce your needs to the minimum required for a healthy life. Get by on part-time work. Enjoy the leisure of the leisure class. That’s the easy way to become rich, and anyone can do it; the success rate is one-hundred percent.”

-ABBEY’S ROAD-

Pg. 100 "I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth."
--Steve McQueen

Pg. 91 “The map is a Xerox copy of a copy, printed in Mexico on recycled tortilla paper with iguana piss for ink. Hard to read.”

Pg. 134 “Conflict within and between species is inevitable, necessary, and to an optimum point, desirable. When the lion lies down with the lamb, it must be for the purpose of sharing a dinner, a dinner in which one eats and the other is eaten. Otherwise the lion would starve to death. The lamb itself eats grass, those green, tender, delicate beings with who knows what fine emotions and refined aspirations of their own. The moralistic vegetarian is a hypocrite; no self-respecting herbivore would share such a doctrine for a moment.”

Pg. 137 “Why settle for anything less? And why give up our wilderness? What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?”

Pg. 197 “Government does not exist to ease, facilitate, moderate, and preside over necessary social change. On the contrary, the purpose of government is to prevent change. At all costs. By any means. That is why government reserves to itself the monopoly of coercion, or organized, large-scale violence.”

Pg. 198 “When the dawn comes I’ll crawl from my sack, naked as the snake in my hand, face the east, kneel on the bare rock, and make an offering for Mother.”

Black sun Heart’s sun
Black sun of my heart
Burn me pure as the flame
Burn me and take me
And let me sleep
Down by a river I know
In the land of stone and sky
Until we wake again
In a new and bolder dawn.

-A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS-

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

What’s the difference between a whore and a congressmen? A congressmen makes more money.

The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.

The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.

I wouldn’t trade a good horse for the best Rolls-Royce ever made—unless I could trade the Rolls for two good horses.

If you’ve never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You’ve only missed out on one half of life.

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.

"Never fear that your life may come to a
sudden end, rather fear that it may end
before it has begun."
- Anonymous