Tintern Abbey Quotes

When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty.

I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the ~ Katy Butler

Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist. ~ Edward Abbey

The Machine may seem omnipotent, but it is not. Human bodies and human wit, active here, there, everywhere, united in purpose, independent in action, can still face that machine and stop it and take it apart and reassemble it-if we wish-on lines entirely new. There is, after all, a better way to live. ~ Edward Abbey

I always have my Laura Mercier foundation and concealer with me, and I love the Rimmel Kate Moss lipsticks. My favourite is shade 08, because it's just such a lovely natural colour with just a bit of pink to it. ~ Abbey Clancy

All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob. ~ Edward Abbey

To undermine a person's self-respect is a sin. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery ~ Abbey Strauss

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique. ~ Edward Abbey

All forms of government are pernicious, including good government. ~ Edward Abbey

How to pry the tourists out of their automobiles, out of their back-breaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs and onto their feet, onto the strange warmth and solidity of Mother Earth again? This is the problem which the Park Service should confront directly, not evasively, and which it cannot resolve by simply submitting and conforming to the automobile habit. ~ Edward Abbey

In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood. ~ Edward Abbey

I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them. ~ Edward Abbey

I got a head start and ws already hanging upside down when he caught up. All the blood was rushing to my head, making me feel dizzy. "I can't stay like this much longer," I told him."Head rush."
He leaned down and stuck his face next to mine, gifting me with a beautiful smile."I know the feeling," he said. "You give me a head rush all the time. ~ Jessica Verday

In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal. ~ Edward Abbey

I guess my goal is to design my own walker. The walkers with the big tennis balls, no one wants to use those. I would rather crawl down the street in New York City than use those. ~ Abbey Curran

It's quite rare that you find models taken care of backstage. ~ Abbey Lee Kershaw

Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true. ~ Edward Abbey

When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh. ~ Edward Abbey

Let's just say, if I weren't a model, I'd be a walking collage. I see my body as a blank canvas that's aching to be decorated; I find it all very fascinating. ~ Abbey Lee Kershaw

Art, science, philosophy, religion
each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience. ~ Edward Abbey

How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah. ~ Edward Abbey

A man's duty? To be ready
with rifle or rood
to defend his home when the showdown comes. ~ Edward Abbey

Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again, embrace a pine tree, cut my initials in the bark of an aspen, get bit by a mosquito, see a mountain bluebird, find a big blue columbine, get lost in the firs, hike above timberline, sunbathe on snow and eat some ice, climb the rocks and stand in the wind at the top of the world on the peak of Tukuhnikivats. ~ Edward Abbey

I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published. ~ Lynn Abbey

One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city
as I once did for a couple of years. ~ Edward Abbey

I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be. ~ Edward Abbey

The dead man's nephew, excused from this duty, walks far ahead out of earshot. We are free as we go stumbling and sweating along to say exactly what we please, without fear of offending. "Heavy son of a bitch. ... " "All blown up like he is, you'd think he'd float like a balloon." "Let's just hope he don't explode." "He won't. We let the gas out." "What about lunch?" somebody asks; "I'm hungry." "Eat this." "Why'd the bastard have to go so far from the road?" "There's something leaking out that zipper." "Never mind, let's try to get in step here," the sheriff says. "Goddamnit, Floyd, you got big feet." "Are we going in the right direction?" "I wonder if the old fart would walk part way if we let him out of that bag?" "He won't even say thank you for the ride." "Well I hope this learned him a lesson, goddamn him. I guess he'll stay put after this. ... " Thus we meditate upon the stranger's death. ~ Edward Abbey

If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally. ~ Edward Abbey

Whatever the cost, however financed, the benefits for park visitors in health and happiness
virtues unknown to statisticians
would be immeasurable. ~ Edward Abbey

Why do we have to go to Summerwind Abbey tonight? Why couldn't we have waited until I at least combed the sand out of my hair? She heard the whine in her voice and realized she'd been reduced to petulance. With any luck at all, she'd become a nag and make Jermyn a dreadful wife. ~ Christina Dodd

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator. ~ Edward Abbey

Grown men do not need leaders. ~ Edward Abbey

I was in New York, miserable because I was working supper clubs but I wasn't expressing myself. I was really unhappy with my life. I saw Max Roach again and he told me I didn't have to do things like that. He made me an honest woman on the stage. I have been performing in that tradition since. I feel that I'm a serious performer now whereas then I wanted to be but I didn't know how. ~ Abbey Lincoln

At last, the details finally settled, Abbey found herself coming to terms with the inevitable: the whole lot of them would go to Cape Cod. It was a dizzying prospect. Thirteen years ago she had said goodbye once and for all to the only man she had ever loved. Now she was setting out with him on a vacation, accompanied by a young woman determined above all else to become his wife. ~ Emily Ann Benedict

every one of the novels. To some the delightful freshness and humour of Northanger Abbey, its completeness, finish, and entrain, obscure the undoubted critical facts that its scale is small, and its scheme, after all, that of burlesque or parody, a kind in which the ~ Jane Austen

Like fragile ice, anger passes away in time. Therefore, the greatest remedy for anger is delay. - Gideon Penman of Muirwood Abbey ~ Jeff Wheeler

We worked the medley on side two of "Abbey Road" out carefully in advance. All of those mini songs were partly completed tunes; some were written while we were in India a year before. So there was just a bit of chorus here and a verse there. We welded them all together into a routine. ~ George Harrison