Patty > Patty's Quotes

“No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs--anything--but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave accordingly.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

“Whatever we cannot understand easily we call God; this saves wear and tear on the brain tissues.”
― Edward Abbey

“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

“If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.”
― Edward Abbey

“If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world is contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature. Anything becomes permissible. We return once more to the nightmare cultures of Hitler, Stalin, King Philip II, Montezuma, Caligula, Heliogabalus, Herod, the Pharaohs; Christ sacrificed himself in vain.”
― Edward Abbey, Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside

“Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze into thee.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“When you're born into this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America you get a front row seat.”
― George Carlin

“The enemy is not the person standing before you, sword in hand. It is the person standing next to you with a dagger concealed behind his back.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“At the end of the day this has nothing to do with him. This is all about you—how you attracted him into your life and how you kept him engaged in a cycle of dysfunction. If you focus on him, you will lose. You need to focus on your inner void, since this is what keeps this dynamic alive.”
― Shefali Tsabary, A Radical Awakening: Turn Pain into Power, Embrace Your Truth, Live Free – A Clinical Psychologist's Guide to Authenticity and Conscious Fulfillment for Women