Preface (dated June 1987) for 1988 reprint of Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”
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Edward Abbey 146
American author and essayist 1927–1989Related quotes
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
“The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.”
"The Long and Winding Road" from Let It Be (1970)
Lyrics, The Beatles
“Since there is no telling in advance where it may lead, reflection can be seen as dangerous.”
Introduction, p. 11
Think (1999)
Tim Curry Plunges Ahead Into the Past, Part IV http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/24/theater/tim-curry-plunges-ahead-into-the-past-part-iv.html (January 24, 1990)
Edward Everett, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 352.
