In love with the written word of a cranky man

Tonight I plagarize, too full of the day and ready for sleep to think coherently for myself. I thought about love tonight and today, thought about what I could say. I was ready to start off with "Love is really just about convenience" which is a more sentimental comment than appears off the bat, and I hope to come back to it another day. But love for me tonight is really about Edward Abbey to whom I have finally crept back, begging for forgiveness that I abandoned him for so long. Maybe I really just miss the west - it's one and the same.

But how can I pick a paragraph? An emblematic moment? How can I convince you all to read something by this man, preferably non-fiction, although the fictional stories have real enough description. I suppose in the interest of not over-thinking things, I should just write out what caught my attention two nights ago, and gave me the idea. From The Brave Cowboy which I have not read and believe is fictional:

The great cliffs leaned up against the flowing sky, falling through space as the earth revolved, turning amber as whisky in the long-reaching lakes of light from the evening sun. But the light had no power to soften the jagged edges and rough-spalled planes of the granite; in that clear air each angle and crack cast a shadow as harsh, clean, sharp, real, as the rock itself - so that though they had endured as they were for ten million years, the cliffs held the illusion of a terrible violence suddenly arrested, paralyzed in time, latent with power.

If you've been to Utah, Nevada, Arizona, you'll understand.