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Desert Solitaire

Book by Edward Abbey · 8 quotes · Wilderness, Nature, Ifs

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Desert Solitaire Quotes

“Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness.”

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“But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountain than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to human kind. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes into the sand I made contact with that larger world - an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. Certainly I was still by myself, so to speak - there were no other people around and there still are none - but in the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque. All that is human melted with the sky and faded out beyond the mountains and I felt, as I feel - is it a paradox? - that a man can never find or need better companionship than that of himself.”

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“In the mixture of starlight and cloud-reflected sunlight in which the desert world is now illuminated, each single object stands forth in preternatural though transient brilliance, a final assertion of existence before the coming of night: each rock and shrub and tree, each flower, each stem of grass, diverse and separate, vividly isolate, yet joined each to every other in a unity which generously includes me and my solitude as well.”

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“How to pry the tourists out of their automobiles, out of their back-breaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs and onto their feet, onto the strange warmth and solidity of Mother Earth again? This is the problem which the Park Service should confront directly, not evasively, and which it cannot resolve by simply submitting and conforming to the automobile habit.”

National ParksEnvironmental ConservationAnti Car
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