Quotes from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“What's more American than violence?" Hayduke wanted to know. "Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“What do we know? What do we really know? He licks his dried cracked lips. We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom—goddammit!—herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon!—by God, yes! Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“I am against all forms of government, including good government.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“And the wind blows, the dust clouds darken the desert blue, pale sand and red dust drift across the asphalt trails and tumbleweeds fill the arroyos. Good-bye, come again. (p. 34)”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“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, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“I do love you. I’d be one miserable and lonesome man without you around.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“No one know precisely how sentient is a pinyon pine, for example, or to what degree such woody organisms can feel pain or fear, and in any case the road builders had more important things to worry about, but this much is clearly established as scientific face: a living tree, once uprooted, takes many days to wholly die.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Hayduke thought. Finally the idea arrived. He said, 'My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving. That's simple, right?”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Dr. Sarvis with his bald mottled dome and savage visage, grim and noble as Sibelius, was out night-riding on a routine neighborhood beautification project, burning billboards along the highway—U.S. 66,”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“We are caught,” continued the good doctor, “in the iron treads of a technological juggernaut. A mindless machine. With a breeder reactor for a heart.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“She fasted on the mesa rim, waiting for a vision, and fasted some more, and after a time God appeared incarnate on a platter as a roasted squab with white paper booties on His little drumsticks.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Lake Powell: storage pond, silt trap, evaporation tank and garbage dispose-all, a 180-mile-long incipient sewage lagoon.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Hayduke smelled something foul in all this. A smoldering bitterness warmed his heart and nerves; the slow fires of anger kept his cockles warm, his hackles rising. Hayduke burned. And he was not a patient man.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don’t know anything else worth saving.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“The night. The stars. The river.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Meanwhile the doctor was saying, “The reason there are so many people on the river these days is because there are too many people everywhere else.” Bonnie shivered, slipping into the crook of his left arm. “Why don’t we build a fire?” she said. “The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life,” the doctor said. “Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness.” He sipped at his bourbon and ice. “Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal.” Another thought. “And the universe goes mad.” “We”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“There was this tendency to drift. And yet  when she thought about it, what did she really want to do? Or be? She had given up dancing-the dance-because it was too demanding, because it required an almost total devotion which she was unwilling to give. The cruelest art. ”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Lifting her lovely and longing face towards the inaudible chant of the sun, she drifted through her time, through space, through the concatenate cells of her unfolding self. Where to now, Abbzug? You're twenty-eight and a half years old, Abbzug. ”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“The entertainment palled. Fatigue like gravitation pulled at limbs and eyelids. As they had come so they departed, first Abbzug, then the two women from San Diego. The ladies first. Not because they were the weaker sex—they were not—but simply because they had more sense. Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand, befouling God’s sweet earth. The manly tradition. The”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Eyes blurred, she drove away. Alone, buzzing down the asphalt trail to Kayenta, heart beating, her pistons leaping madly up and down, Bonnie Abbzug relapsed into the sweet luxury of tears. Hard to see the road. She turned on the windshield wipers but that didn't help much.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

“The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness." He sipped at his bourbon and ice. "Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal." Another thought. "And the universe goes mad.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang

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