Caroline > Caroline's Quotes

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.”
― Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey

“I don't kill flies but I like to mess with their minds. I hold them above globes. They freak out and yell, 'Whoa, I'm way too high!”
― Bruce Baum

“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”
― Anne Frank

“There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn't stop you from having your own opinion.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Oh, Eeyore, you are wet!” said Piglet, feeling him.
Eeyore shook himself, and asked somebody to explain to Piglet what happened when you had been inside a river for quite a long time.”
― A. A. Milne

“I like geography best, he said, because your mountains & rivers know the secret. Pay no attention to boundaries.”
― Brian Andreas, Story People

“I hate when people say primitive people didn’t even have running water. What do they call rivers?”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.”
― Edward Abbey

“Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.”
― Edward Abbey

“There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.”
― Edward Abbey, The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader

“Why this cult of wilderness?... because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.”
― Edward Abbey, The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader

“A house built on greed cannot long endure.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“Wilderness. The word itself is music.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.”
― Edward Abbey

“Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.”
― Edward Abbey

“I stand for what I stand on.”
― Edward Abbey

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“When you give yourself permission to communicate what matters to you in every situation you will have peace despite rejection or disapproval. Putting a voice to your soul helps you to let go of the negative energy of fear and regret.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays