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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.

-Edward Abbey

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How To Avoid Pleurisy:

Edward Abbey

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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.

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Growth For The Sake Of Growth Is The Ideology Of The Cancer Cell.

I Was Once Invited To Take Part In A Heroic, Possibly Fatal Enterprise, But I Declined, Mainly On Account Of Sloth.

The Canyon Country Does Not Always Inspire Love. To Many It Appears Barren, Hostile, Repellent - A Fearsome Mostly Waterless Land Of Rock And Heat, Sand Dunes And Quicksand, Cactus, Thornbrush, Scorpion, Rattlesnake, And Agaraphobic Distances. To Those Who See Our Land In That Manner, The Best Reply Is, Yes, You Are Right, It Is A Dangerous And Terrible Place. Enter At Your Own Risk. Carry Water. Avoid The Noonday Sun. Try To Ignore The Vultures. Pray Frequently.

No Tyranny Is So Irksome As Petty Tyranny: The Officious Demands Of Policemen, Government Clerks, And Electromechanical Gadgets.

What Our Economists Call A Depressed Area Almost Always Turns Out To Be A Cleaner, Freer, More Livable Place Than Most.

Despair Leads To Boredom, Electronic Games, Computer Hacking, Poetry And Other Bad Habits.

I'm In Favor Of Animal Liberation. Why? Because I'm An Animal.

There Are No Vacant Lots In Nature.

How To Overthrow The System: Brew Your Own Beer; Kick In Your Tee Vee; Kill Your Own Beef; Build Your Own Cabin And Piss Off The Front Porch Whenever You Bloody Well Feel Like It.

Saving The World Was Merely A Hobby. My *vocation* Has Been That Of Inspector Of Desert Water Holes.

A Drink A Day Keeps The Shrink Away.

I Always Wanted To Be A Cowboy. But Alas! I Was Burdened Early With Certain Inescapable Obligations To World Literature.

World Literature

Anarchism Is Not A Romantic Fable But The Hardheaded Realization, Based On Five Thousand Years Of Experience, That We Cannot Entrust The Management Of Our Lives To Kings, Priests, Politicians, Generals, And County Commissioners.

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.

In All Of Nature, There Is No Sound More Pleasing Than That Of A Hungry Animal At Its Feed. Unless You Are The Food.

The Distrust Of Wit Is The Beginning Of Tyranny.

There Never Was A Good War Or A Bad Revolution.

Why Can't We Simply Borrow What Is Useful To Us From Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Especially Zen, As We Borrow From Christianity, Science, American Indian Traditions And World Literature In General, Including Philosophy, And Let The Rest Go Hang? Borrow What We Need But Rely Principally Upon Our Own Senses, Common Sense And Daily Living Experience.

The Ready Availability Of Suicide, Like Sex And Alcohol, Is One Of Life's Basic Consolations.

The Night I Filled An Inside Straight: Even A Blind Hog's Gonna Root Up An Acorn Once In A While.

Come With Me, The River Said, Close Your Eyes And Quiet Your Limbs And Float With Me Into The Wonder And Mystery Of The Canyons, See The Unknown And The Little Known, Look Upon The Stone Gods Face To Face, See Medusa, Drink My Waters, Hear My Song, Feel My Power, Come Along And Drift With Me Toward The Distant, Ultimate And Legendary Sea.

How Did Haydn And Mozart Produce Such Vast Quantities Of Formally Perfect Art? They Worked From A Perfect Formula. In Music, Beethoven Was The Great Emancipator.

Nearly All Of Latin America, From Chile To Mexico, Is One Long Rack Of Torture. Financed, Equipped, And Refined By The U.s. Government.

There Comes A Time In The Life Of Us All When We Must Lay Aside Our Books Or Put Down Our Tools And Leave Our Place Of Work And Walk Forth On The Road To Meet The Enemy Face-to-face. Once And For All And At Last

Our Contemporary Tories Prefer The Term 'ordered Liberty' To 'freedom'. The Word 'freedom' Scares Them; It Has Too Much Of A Paleolithic Ring To It.

Everyone Should Learn A Manual Trade: It's Never Too Late To Become An Honest Person.

We Are Kindred All Of Us, Killer And Victim, Predator And Prey, Me And The Sly Coyote, The Soaring Buzzard, The Elegant Gopher Snake, And Trembling Cottontail, The Foul Worms That Feed On Our Entrails; All Of Them, All Of Us. Long Live Diversity, Long Live The Earth!

I Wouldn't Trade A Good Horse For The Best Rolls-royce Ever Made -- Unless I Could Trade The Rolls For Two Good Horses.

Charity Should Be Spontaneous. Calculated Altruism Is An Affront.

Each Thing In Its Way, When True To Its Own Character, Is Equally Beautiful. (p 41)

Edmund Wilson Was Our Greatest American Literary Critic Because He Was More Than A Literary Critic: He Was A Fearless, Even Radical Judge Of The Society He Lived In. (see, For Example, _a Piece Of My Mind_; _the Cold War And The Income Tax_; The Introduction To _patriotic Gore_.) Our Conventional Critics Cannot Forgive Him For Those Scandalous Lapses In Good Taste.

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.

Mental Degeneracy May Be Caused By Lead Poisoning. Or By A Poor Dip In The Gene Pool.

My Notion Of A Great Novel Is Something Like A Five-hundred-page Shaggy-dog Story, With Only The Punch Line Omitted.

Those Who Fear Death Most Are Those Who Enjoy Life Least.

I Hold No Preference Among Flowers, So Long As They Are Wild, Free, Spontaneous.

There Is No Trajectory So Pathetic As That Of An Artist In Decline.

There Are Two Kinds Of People I Cannot Abide: Bigots And Any Well-organized Ethnic Group.

The Longest Journey Begins With A Single Step, Not With The Turn Of An Ignition Key. That’s The Best Thing About Walking, The Journey Itself. It Doesn’t Much Matter Whether You Get Where You’re Going Or Not. You’ll Get There Anyway. Every Good Hike Brings You Eventually Back Home. Right Where You Started.

To Meet God Or Medusa Face To Face, Even If It Means Risking Everything Human In Myself. I Dream Of A Hard And Brutal Mysticism In Which The Naked Self Merges With The Nonhuman World And Yet Somehow Survives Still Intact Individual, Separate. Paradox And Bedrock.

When The Writer Has Done His Best, He Then Should Proceed To Do His Second Best.

I Don't See How Poetry Can Ever Be Easy... Real Poetry, The Thick, Dense, Intense, Complicated Stuff That Lives And Endures, Requires Blood Sweat; Blood And Sweat Are Essential Elements In Poetry As Well As Behind It.

Reincarnation? There Is Such A Thing. What Could Be More Mozartian Than The Nutcracker Suite?

To The Intelligent Man Or Woman, Life Appears Infinitely Mysterious. But The Stupid Have An Answer For Every Question.

I Come More And More To The Conclusion That Wilderness, In America Or Anywhere Else, Is The Only Thing Left That Is Worth Saving.

There Is A Wine Called Easy Days And Mellow Nights, Well-known On The Outskirts Of The Navajo Reservation. It Is An Economical Wine, Fortified With The Best Of Intentions, And I Recommend It To Every Serious Wino.

Freedom Begins Between The Ears.

Grown Men Do Not Need Leaders.

For Myself I Hold No Preferences Among Flowers, So Long As They Are Wild, Free, Spontaneous. Bricks To All Greenhouses! Black Thumb And Cutworm To The Potted Plant!

All Men Are Brothers, We Like To Say, Half-wishing Sometimes In Secret It Were Not True. But Perhaps It Is True. And Is The Evolutionary Line From Protozoan To Spinoza Any Less Certain? That Also May Be True. We Are Obliged, Therefore, To Spread The News, Painful And Bitter Though It May Be For Some To Hear, That All Living Things On Earth Are Kindred.

Do I Believe In Ghosts? I Believe In The Ghosts That Haunt The Human Mind.

May Your Trails Be Crooked, Winding, Lonesome, Dangerous, Leading To The Most Amazing View. May Your Mountains Rise Into And Above The Clouds.

A Pretty Girl Can Do No Wrong.

If A Man’s Imagination Were Not So Weak, So Easily Tired, If His Capacity For Wonder Not So Limited, He Would Abandon Forever Such Fantasies Of The Supernal. He Would Learn To Perceive In Water, Leaves And Silence More Than Sufficient Of The Absolute And Marvelous, More Than Enough To Console Him For The Loss Of The Ancient Dream.

Only The Half-mad Are Wholly Alive.

Why Administrators Are Respected And Schoolteachers Are Not: An Administrator Is Paid A Lot For Doing Very Little, While A Teacher Is Paid Very Little For Doing A Lot.

I Am Not An Atheist But An Earthiest. Be True To The Earth.

The Earth, Like The Sun, Like The Air, Belongs To Everyone - And To No One.

Anton Bruckner Wrote The Same Symphony Nine Times, Trying To Get It Just Right. He Failed.

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

Who Needs Astrology? The Wise Man Gets By On Fortune Cookies.

We Live In A Society In Which It Is Normal To Be Sick; And Sick To Be Abnormal.

I’m Tired Of Doing What I Don’t Want To Do To Live The Way I Don’t Want To Live.

The Duty Of A Patriot Is To Protect His Country From Its Government.

We Can Have Wilderness Without Freedom; We Can Have Wilderness Without Human Life At All, But We Cannot Have Freedom Without Wilderness, We Cannot Have Freedom Without Leagues Of Open Space Beyond The Cities, Where Boys And Girls, Men And Women, Can Live At Least Part Of Their Lives Under No Control But Their Own Desires And Abilities, Free From Any And All Direct Administration By Their Fellow Men.

Not All Questions Can Be Answered.

It Is Always Dishonest For A Reviewer To Review The Author Instead Of The Author's Book.

Men Have Never Loved One Another Much, For Reasons We Can Readily Understand: Man Is Not A Lovable Animal.

It's True: Every Time You Kill An Elk, You're Saving Some Cow's Life.

Late In August The Lure Of The Mountains Becomes Irresistible. Seared By The Everlasting Sunfire, I Want To See Running Water Again, Embrace A Pine Tree, Cut My Initials In The Bark Of An Aspen, Get Bit By A Mosquito, See A Mountain Bluebird, Find A Big Blue Columbine, Get Lost In The Firs, Hike Above Timberline, Sunbathe On Snow And Eat Some Ice, Climb The Rocks And Stand In The Wind At The Top Of The World On The Peak Of Tukuhnikivats.

To Die Alone, On Rock Under Sun At The Brink Of The Unknown, Like A Wolf, Like A Great Bird, Seems To Me Very Good Fortune Indeed.

Among Politicians And Businessmen, *pragmatism* Is The Current Term For 'to Hell With Our Children.'

Cold Morning On Aztec Peak Fire Lookout. First, Build Fire In Old Stove. Second, Start Coffee. Then, Heat Up Last Night's Pork Chops And Spinach For Breakfast. Why Not? And Why The Hell Not?

Appearance Versus Reality? Appearance Is Reality, God Damn It!

The Greater Your Dreams, The More Terrible Your Nightmares.

The Author: An Imaginary Person Who Writes Real Books.

A True Conservative Must Necessarily Be A Conservationist.

Reply To Plato: I Seen Horses I Seen Cows I Haint Never Yet Seen Horsiness Nor That There Bovinity Neither.

In The Dog-eat-dog Economy, The Doberman Is Boss.

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.

My Aunt Ida At Age Eighty-three: 'yeah,' She Said, 'i'll Be Dead Pretty Soon. And Frankly, I Don't Give A Damn.'

Rocks, Like Louseworts And Snail Darters And Pupfish And 3rdworld Black, Lesbian, Feminist, Militant Poets, Have Rights, Too. Especially The Right To Exist.

When Guns Are Outlawed, Only The Government Will Have Guns. The Government - And A Few Outlaws. If That Happens, You Can Count Me Among The Outlaws.

We Need Wilderness Whether Or Not We Ever Set Foot In It. We Need A Refuge Even Though We May Never Need To Go There. We Need The Possibility Of Escape As Surely As We Need Hope.

The Absurd Vanity Of Metaphysicians Who Like To Imagine That They Create The World By Thinking About It.

How Could Anything Non-controversial Be Of Intellectual Interest To Grown-ups?

There Is Science, Logic, Reason; There Is Thought Verified By Experience. And Then There Is California.

I Despise My Own Nation Most. Because I Know It Best. Because I Still Love It, Suffering From Hope. For Me, That's Patrotism.

There Is A Deep, Abiding, Unshakable Satisfaction In A Life Of Complete Failure.

Critics Are Like Ticks On A Dog Or Tits On A Motor: Ornamental But Dysfunctional.

Reason Has Seldom Failed Us Because It Has Seldom Been Tried.

In The American Southwest, I Began A Lifelong Love Affair With A Pile Of Rock.

All Power Rests On Hierarchy: An Army Is Nothing But A Well-organized Lynch Mob.

Industrialism, Whether Of The Capitalist Or Socialist Coloration, Is The Basic Tyrant Of The Modern Age.

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.

Anarchism Is Democracy Taken Seriously.

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.

Heaven Is Home. Utopia Is Here. Nirvana Is Now.

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.

Passion, Sexual Passion, May Lead To Marriage, But Cannot Sustain Marriage. The Purpose Of Marriage Is The Raising Of Children, For Which Patience, Not Passion, Is The Necessary Foundation.

In This Glare Of Brilliant Emptiness, In This Arid Intensity Of Pure Heat, In The Heart Of A Weird Solitude, Great Silence And Grand Desolution, All Things Recede To Distrances Out Of Reach, Relecting Light But Impossible To Touch, Annihilating All Thought And All That Men Have Made To A Spasm Of Whirling Dust Far Out On The Golden Desert.

But It Is A Writer's Duty To Write And Speak And Record The Truth, Always The Truth, No Matter Whom May Be Offended.

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.

Balance, That's The Secret. Moderate Extremism. The Best Of Both Worlds.

A House Built On Greed Cannot Long Endure.

I Have Written Much About Many Good Places. But The Best Places Of All, I Have Never Mentioned.

Cowboys Make Better Lovers: Ask Any Cow.

All Governments Require Enemy Governments.

Scientific Method: There's A Madness In The Method.

Scientific Method

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.

There Are Only Two Kinds Of Books -- Good Books And The Others. The Good Are Winnowed From The Bad Through The Democracy Of Time.

Girls, Like Flowers, Bloom But Once. But Once Is Enough.

Nobody Has So Many Friends That He Can Afford To Lose One.

Our Culture Runs On Coffee And Gasoline, The First Often Tasting Like The Second.

Where All Think Alike There Is Little Danger Of Innovation.

Thought Provoking

This World May Be Only Illusion -- But It's The Only Illusion We've Got.

It Is True That Some Of My Fiction Was Based On Actual Events. But The Events Took Place After The Fiction Was Written.

There Is A Fine Art To Making Enemies And It Requires Diligent Cultivation. It's Not As Easy As It Looks.

America My Country: Last Nation On Earth To Abolish Human Slavery; First Of All Nations To Drop The Nuclear Bomb On Our Fellow Human Beings.

A World Without Open Country Would Be Universal Jail.

The World Is What It Is, No Less And No More, And Therein Lies Its Entire And Sufficient Meaning.

All We Have, It Seems To Me, Is The Beauty Of Art And Nature And Life, And The Love Which That Beauty Inspires.

Nature And Life

The Artist's Job? To Be A Miracle Worker: Make The Blind See, The Dull Feel, The Dead To Live.

No Man-made Structure In All Of American History Has Been Hated So Much, By So Many, For So Long, With Such Good Reason, As That Glen Canyon Dam At Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital Of Coconino County.

Nature Is Indifferent To Our Love, But Never Unfaithful.

Jesus Don't Walk On Water No More; His Feet Leak.

Every Writer Has His Favorite Coterie Of Enemies: Mine Is The East Coast Literati -- Those Prep School Playmates And Their Ivy League Colleagues.

Every Important Change In Our Society, For The Good, At Least, Has Taken Place Because Of Popular Pressure-pressure From Below, From The Great Mass Of People.

The Earth Is Real. Only A Fool, Milking His Cow, Denies The Cow's Reality.

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.

Once Upon A Time

The Rich Are Not Very Nice. That's Why They're Rich.

Anyone Not Paranoid In This World Must Be Crazy. . . . Speaking Of Paranoia, It's True That I Do Not Know Exactly Who My Enemies Are. But That Of Course Is Exactly Why I'm Paranoid.

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.

Of All Bores, The Worst Is The Sparkling Bore.

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.

Generally Speaking, It's A Matter Of Only Mild Intellectual Interest To Me Whether The Earth Goes Around The Sun Or The Sun Goes Around The Earth. In Fact, I Don't Care A Rat's Ass Either Way.

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.

Why The Critics, Like A Flock Of Ducks, Always Move In Perfect Unison: Their Authority With The Public Depends Upon An Appearance Of Unanimous Agreement. One Dissenting Voice Would Shatter The Whole Fragile Structure.

A Good Philosopher Is One Who Does Not Take Ideas Seriously.

To Be Everywhere At Once Is To Be Nowhere Forever, If You Ask Me.

When The Situation Is Hopeless, There's Nothing To Worry About.

Roosters: The Cry Of The Male Chicken Is The Most Barbaric Yawp In All Of Nature.

Readers, Not Critics, Are The People Who Determine A Book's Eventual Fate.

You Can't Study The Darkness By Flooding It With Light.

Vladimir Nabokov Was A Writer Who Cared Nothing For Music And Whose Favorite Sport Was The Pursuit, Capture, And Murder Of Butterflies. This Explains Many Things; For Example, The Fact That Nabokov's Novels, For All Their Elegance And Wit, Resemble Nothing So Much As Butterflies Pinned To A Board: Pretty But Dead; Symmetrical But Stiff.

Vaughan Telecom Installers And Contractors Ensure The Highest Quality Service For Data And Network Cabling In Toronto And Gta Area.

Some People Write To Please, To Soothe, To Console. Others To Provoke, To Challenge, To Exasperate And Infuriate. I've Always Found The Second Approach The More Pleasing.

Humility Is A Virtue When You Have No Other.

Love Flowers Best In Openness And Freedom.

Flora And Fauna

Counterpart To The Knee-jerk Liberal Is The New Knee-pad Conservative, Always Groveling Before The Rich And The Powerful.

A Man's Duty? To Be Ready -- With Rifle Or Rood -- To Defend His Home When The Showdown Comes.

Trout Fishing. One Must Be A Stickler For Proper Form. Use Nothing But #4 Blasting Caps, Or A Hand Grenade, If Handy, Or At A Pool Well-lined With Stone, One Blast From A .44 Magnum Will Bring A Few Stunned Brookies Quietly To The Surface.

The Ever-rising Cost Of Living: Someday Soon, The Corporate Technicians Will Be Locking Meters On Our Noses And Charging Us A Royalty On The Air We Breathe.

The Tank, The B-52, The Fighter-bomber, The State-controlled Police And Military Are The Weapons Of Dictatorship. The Rifle Is The Weapon Of Democracy. Not For Nothing Was The Revolver Called An "equalizer."

There Has Never Been An 'original' Sin: Each Is Quite Banal.

May Your Rivers Flow Without End... Down Into A Desert Of Red Rock, Blue Mesas, Domes And Pinnacles And Grottos Of Endless Stone, And Down Again Into A Deep Vast Ancient Unknown Chasm Where Bars Of Sunlight Blaze On Profiled Cliffs... Where Something Strange And More Beautiful And More Full Of Wonder Than Your Deepest Dreams Waits For You-beyond That Next Turning Of The Canyon Walls.

The Idea Of Wilderness Needs No Defense. It Only Needs More Defenders. Remaining Silent About The Destruction Of Nature Is An Endorsement Of That Destruction.

A Giant Thirst Is A Great Joy When Quenched In Time.

Those Art Lovers Who Pride Themselves Mostly On *taste* Usually Possess No Other Talent.

We Are Befouling And Destroying Our Own Home, We Are Committing A Slow But Accelerating Race Suicide And Life Murder - Planetary Biocide. Now There Is A Mighty Theme For A Mighty Book But A Challenge To Which No Modern Novelist Or Poet Has Yet Responded. Where Is Our Melville, Our Milton, Our Thomas Mann When We Need Him Most?

In History-as-politics, The 'future' Is That Vacuum In Time Waiting To Be Filled With The Antics Of Statesmen.

Simplicity Is Always A Virtue.

Alaska Is Our Biggest, Buggiest, Boggiest State. Texas Remains Our Largest Unfrozen State. But Mountainous Utah, If Ironed Out Flat, Would Take Up More Space On A Map Than Either.

The Function Of Football, Soccer, Basketball And Other Passion-sports In Modern Industrial Society Is The Transference Of Boredom, Frustration, Anger And Rage Into Socially Acceptable Forms Of Combat. A Temporary Substitute For War; For Nationalism; Identification With Something Bigger Than The Self.

Mayonnaise, Like Hollandaise, Was Invented By The French To Cover Up The Flavor Of Spoiled Flesh, Stale Vegetables, Rotten Fish. Beware The Sauce! Where Food Comes Beslobbered With An Elegant Slime You May Well Suspect The Integrity Of The Basic Ingredients.

The Proustian Aquarium: Grotesque And Gorgeous Fish Drifting With Languid Fins Through A Subaqueous Medium Of Pale Violet Polluted Ink.

Longevity, Like Intelligence And Good Looks And Health And Strength Of Character, Is Largely A Matter Of Genetic Heritage. Choose Your Parents With Care.

Government: If You Refuse To Pay Unjust Taxes, Your Property Will Be Confiscated. If You Attempt To Defend Your Property, You Will Be Arrested. If You Resist Arrest, You Will Be Clubbed. If You Defend Yourself Against Clubbing, You Will Be Shot Dead. These Procedures Are Known As The Rule Of Law.

Music Begins Where Words Leave Off. Music Expresses The Inexpressible. If There Is A Kingdom Of Heaven, It Lies In Music.

As War And Government Prove, Insanity Is The Most Contagious Of Diseases.

The Function Of An Ideal Is Not To Be Realized But, Like That Of The North Star, To Serve As A Guiding Point.

Home Is Where, When You Have To Go There, You Probably Shouldn't.

There's Nothing So Obscene And Depressing As An American Christmas.

One Word Is Worth A Thousand Pictures. If It's The Right Word.

Every Moment Is Precious. And Precarious.

A Crowded Society Is A Restrictive Society; An Overcrowded Society Becomes An Authoritarian, Repressive And Murderous Society.

Man Was Created To Complete The Horse.

What's The Difference Between The Lone Ranger And God? There Really Is A Lone Ranger.

King Arthur And His Armored Goons Of The Round Table Functioned As The Politburo Of A Slave State: Camelot. Of All Who Have Written On The Matter Of Arthur, From Malory To White, Only Mark Twain Understood This. But Mark Twain Was A Great Writer.

In Writing, Fidelity To Fact Leads Eventually To The Poetry Of Truth.

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?

In Marriage, The Occasional Catastrophic Crisis Is Easier To Manage Than The Daily Routine.

The Feminists Have A Legitimate Grievance. But So Does Everyone Else.

Proverbs Save Us The Trouble Of Thinking. What We Call Folk Wisdom Is Often No More Than A Kind Of Expedient Stupidity.

All Serious Writers Want The Obvious Rewards: Fame, Money, Women, Love -- And Most Of All, An Audience!

I Once Sat On The Rim Of A Mesa Above The Rio Grande For Three Days And Nights, Trying To Have A Vision. I Got Hungry And Saw God In The Form Of A Beef Pie.

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.

Are People More Important Than The Grizzly Bear? Only From The Point Of View Of Some People.

Somewhere In The Depths Of Solitude, Beyond Wilderness And Freedom, Lay The Trap Of Madness.

One Can Imagine A Sane, Healthy, Cheerful Human Society Based On No More Than The Principles Of Common Sense, As Validated Each Day By Work, Play, And Living Experience. But This Remains The Most Utopian And Fantastic Of Ideals.

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?

In Art As In Life, Form And Subject, Body And Soul, Are One.

We Know So Very Little About This Strange Planet We Live On, This Haunted World Where All Answers Lead Only To More Mystery.

There Are Some Good Things To Be Said About Walking. Not Many, But Some. Walking Takes Longer, For Example, Than Any Other Known Form Of Locomotion Except Crawling. Thus It Stretches Time And Prolongs Life. Life Is Already Too Short To Waste On Speed. I Have A Friend Who's Always In A Hurry; He Never Gets Anywhere. Walking Makes The World Much Bigger And Thus More Interesting. You Have Time To Observe The Details. The Utopian Technologists Foresee A Future For Us In Which Distance Is Annihilated... To Be Everywhere At Once Is To Be Nowhere Forever, If You Ask Me.

If The End Does Not Justify The Means - What Can?

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.

I Would Like To Evoke The Sense Of Wonder And Magic In The Reader But Without Invoking The Mystical, The Supernatural Or The Transcendent.

The Rich Can Buy Everything But Health, Virtue, Friendship, Wit, Good Looks, Love, Pride, Intelligence, Grace, And, If You Need It, Happiness.

When A Man's Best Friend Is His Dog, That Dog Has A Problem.

In The End, For All Our Differences And Conflicts, Most Women And Men Share The Same Food, Work, Shelter, Bed, Life, Joy, Anguish, And Fate. We Need Each Other.

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