The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyong reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.
If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture – that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.
The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief – but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.
What’s more American than violence?” Hayduke wanted to know. “Violence, it’s as American as pizza pie.
I’ve got a crooked elbow and I generally say my prayers with one leg on a brass rail.
But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.
They listened for a while to the perfect music of the wind and rain and night. To the fire and the simmering kettle.
How become a writer? Naturally.
Walking is the only form of transportation in which a man proceeds erect – like a man – on his own legs, under his own power. There is immense satisfaction in that.
Those who have no sense of posterity or any concern for future generations are the ones who are really dead. I mean, they are dead right now. Walking zombies.
It’s a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true – nobody will ever take you seriously.
The more we learn of outer space and inner space, of quasars and quarks, of Big Bangs and Little Blips, the more remote, abstract and intellectually inconsequential it all becomes.
The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an “equalizer.
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.
The shock of the real.
It would be like murder; and where would I set my coffee?
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.