The Serpents of Paradise Quotes

“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

“The world is big but it is comprehensible," says R. Buckminster Fuller. But it seems to me that the world is not nearly big enough and that any portion of its surface, left unpaved and alive, is infinitely rich in details and relationships, in wonder, beauty, mystery comprehensible only in part. The very existence of existence is itself suggestive of the unknown - not a problem, but a mystery. We will never get to the bottom of it, never know the whole of even so small and trivial and useless and precious a place as Aravaipa. Therein lies our redemption.”
― Edward Abbey, The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader

“Man is a gregarious creature, we are told, a social being. Does that mean he is also a herd animal?...Are men no better than sheep or cattle, that they must live always in view of one another in order to feel a sense of safety? I can't believe it!”
― Edward Abbey, The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader

“Wordless, it rises and falls in hemidemisemitones of unearthly misery. The dirge of the damned”
― Edward Abbey, The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader