Quotes about desert
Sophia Rose - Liquid Me: Poetry and Prose
It is poetic and lyrical words that spill forth like cool waters into the dusty dry rock bed of the Soul desiring love. It has been said that I’ve lived in the desert all my life and do not know what it means to be wet.
Sorin Cerin - Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
The field of the soul must be watered by the rain with tears of love otherwise it will become a desert.
Mickey Rivers -
I felt alone out there, like I was on a desert island. I felt like Gilligan.
James Lovelock -
Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.
Jiddu Krishnamurti -
No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us - many days, many nights of stars.
Bear Grylls -
The rules of survival never change, whether you're in a desert or in an arena.
Alaric Hutchinson - Living Peace
Why are the desert blooms that spring to life after a monsoon so magnificent? The answer is – their impermanence. The lush growth and blooming flowers do not last very long here in the desert, and this new growth only happens once a year. If this growth was never-ending, we would soon take it for granted. Likewise, our human lives. What makes them so special and unique? Our fleeting impermanence.
Julene Bair - The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning
I’d forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn’t cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was “sublime” in the way that the romantic poets had used the word- not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth’s skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight.
Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.
Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire
The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.
Rebecca Solnit - Wanderlust: A History of Walking
It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...
Edward Abbey - Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
The weather here is windy, balmy, sometimes wet. Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and at evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement - mating season. And lots of fresh rabbit meat hopping about to feed the young ones with.
Debora Greger - Uranium Daughters
The desert lay in wait, more infinite than God, no less remote.
Mike Bond - The Last Savanna
The breeze across the desert as the light died was so sweet she could almost drink it.
Mike Bond - The Last Savanna
One by one and then together the birds chanted, warbled, whistled, and cooed, like a rare desert plant bursting into life after the rain.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Sand and Stars
But silence continued in the layers of the earth, and this density that I could feel at my shoulders continued harmonious, sustained, unaltered through eternity. I lay there pondering my situation, lost in the desert, and in danger, naked between sky and sand and stars, withdrawn by too much silence from the poles of my life.
Tom Hanks -
The desert, when the sun comes up...I couldn't tell where heaven stopped and the Earth began.
Sharon E. Rainey - Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life
I had to clear up my messy life. By letting go of the debris and filth, I have come to a deeper, more soulful beauty and clarity like an oasis in the desert. From that place of clarity, a vision of what I could have, what I could do, who I could be has emerged if I allow my heart to become a place of compassion, acceptance and forgiveness.
Don DeLillo -
The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light—the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter’s hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn’t expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert.
V.S. Carnes -
In a land that knew only dark beauty, she was something of a hybrid no one dared touch. But the tall Arab did not appear in the least daunted by her abnormality. No, she saw his eyes. He was not daunted in the least.
Edmond Jabès -
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.There is my desert.
Terry Pratchett - Jingo
Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.
Edward Abbey - Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.
Neil Gaiman - Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.
Kiera Woodhull - Chaos of the Mind
Where is my oasis? Too far fromhere for me to crawl with thesedead legs, refusing to co-operateHands and fingers clawing uselesslythrough the grains of sand...
Pablo Neruda -
I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert.
Charlotte Eriksson - You're Doing Just Fine
You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you’re the house where people come and go as they please, because you’re simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn’t let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You’re still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn’t have been let in in the f
Marissa Meyer - Cress
My life is an adventure." she said, growing confident as she opened her eyes again. "I will not be shackled to this satellite anymore.
Alwyn Hamilton - Hero at the Fall
We were going to get Ahmed back. And Rahim back. And Shazad. And Delila. And all the others who had been captured. And we were going to end this.
M.B. Dallocchio - The Desert Warrior
There are people who come home from war and want to talk about the pain, but no one wants to listen; there are others who want to keep silent and repress the memories, and all their family and friends want is to talk about it. I call this the war veteran reintegration paradox.
M.B. Dallocchio - The Desert Warrior
I left a piece of my soul that will always rightfully belong in the desert.
Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
Edward Abbey - Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.
Jessica Khoury - The Forbidden Wish
Time has a different meaning for me, and these events that seem so monumental in the moment will one day be nothing more than a line in a scroll. These humans are but letters to be inked into history. A hundred years from now, I will be free. I will have forgotten their names and faces, and the struggles they have will not matter. Time has a way of burying things, shifting like the desert and swallowing entire civilizations, erasing them from map and memory. Always, in the end, everything return
Criss Jami - Killosophy
It often occurs that pride and selfishness are muddled with strength and independence. They are neither equal nor similar; in fact, they are polar opposites. A coward may be so cowardly that he masks his weakness with some false personification of power. He is afraid to love and to be loved because love tends to strip bare all emotional barricades. Without love, strength and independence are prone to losing every bit of their worth; they become nothing more than a fearful, intimidated, empty ten
Father Dioscuros -
But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. And unless you begin to know yourself, how can you even begin to search for God?
Paul E. Miller - A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World
God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden... The best gift of the desert is God's presence... The protective love of the Shepherd gives me courage to face the interior journey.
Christopher Isherwood - Exhumations
An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation and immense vistas. Not very far away are Death Valley, and Yosemite, and Sequoia Forest with its giant trees which were growing long before the Parthenon was built; they are the oldest living things in the world. One should visit such places often, and be conscious, in the midst of the city, of their
V.S. Carnes -
He watched her for her reaction, or possibly watched her just to watch, his eyes hooded by his lashes and his mouth impassive. A faceless man—such as the one she had dreamed of since she was a child—his identity not obscured by mist or flying sand or swirling dust, but by a mask he readily employed whenever he wished. As a shutter closed against a gale. Closed against her, no matter the impact of his words. He seemed to speak them against his will, just as he seemed to care for her against his w
Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire
This sweet virginal primitive land will metaphorically breathe a sigh of relief --like a whisper of wind--when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man.
Roman Payne -
Ô, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.
Vera Nazarian - Dreams of the Compass Rose
In the desert, the only god is a well.
Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives
At the bar on the Favoritenstrasse, Julius the policeman talked to us about dignity, evolution, the great Darwin and the great Nietzsche. I translated so that my good friend Ulises could understand what he was saying, although I didn’t understand any of it. The prayer of the bones, said Julius. The yearning for health. The virtue of danger. The tenacity of the forgotten. Bravo, said my good friend Ulises. Bravo, said everyone else. The limits of memory. The wisdom of plants. The eye of parasites
Ana Claudia Antunes - ONE HUNDRED ONE WORLD ACCOUNTS in ONE HUNDRED ONE WORD COUNT
A dessert to a deserter in the desert burst, "You trust your thirst. And you are too hot! You scream for ice cream. And believe it or not, I may not be your first. But I might be your lust! Give it a shot...
Dejan Stojanovic - The Sun Watches the Sun
Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?
Aleister Crowley - The Soul of the Desert
For, indeed, this is the great horror, solitude, when the soul can no longer bathe in the ever-changing mind, laugh as its sunlit ripples lap its skin, but, shut up in the castle of a few thoughts, paces its narrow prison, wearing down the stone of time, feeding on its own excrement. There is no star in the blackness of that night, no foam upon the stagnant and putrid sea. Even the glittering health that the desert brings to the body, is like a spear in the soul's throat. The passionate ache to
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long life seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. ..
Paul Hoffman - The Last Four Things
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Vera Nazarian - The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland.The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox.The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides.The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun.The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus.The moral of the story?Kids are smart.
Bangambiki Habyarimana - The Great Pearl of Wisdom
True understanding lies beyond the desert
Michael Bassey Johnson -
Pretend to be poor in reality and you'll notice a decrease in your friends list and request.
Mehmet Murat ildan -
Are you in a desert? Then be a camel! Be compatible with the reality!
Mehmet Murat ildan -
The journey of every ignorant and obedient society always ends up in the same place: In the desert!
Albert Camus -
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
Rebecca McNutt - Shadowed Skies: The Third Smog City Novel
7 Up soda pop mixed with bright pink grenadine with a chemical-tasting maraschino cherry stuck to the plastic straw. It was one of those drinks marketed for children, but Mandy could see that she wasn’t the only adult ordering one. For some reason or other these old-fashioned restaurants always seemed to attract old ladies ordering strawberry Jell-O with whipped cream, truck drivers ordering “worms and dirt” (chocolate pudding with Oreo cookies squished over the top in a glass bowl, fruit-flavou
Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son
She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
James Anderson - The Never-Open Desert Diner
Rich people always had someone to call who could arrange something that the average guy couldn't get done, no matter how right or wrong. The only call the poor man could make was to Jesus. If Jesus didn't answer, Smith and Wesson always did.
John Mark Green -
She thirsted for love, but found only a mirage. Some hearts are a desert you can die wandering in.
Lori R. Lopez - Dance Of The Chupacabras
One’s options in this world are as vast as the horizon, which is technically a circle and thus infinitely broad. Yet we must choose each step we take with utmost caution, for the footprints we leave behind are as important as the path we will follow. They’re part of the same journey — our story.
Vera Nazarian - The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface.The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust.The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being.Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water.Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden li
Rinsai Rossetti -
Pale sky, white land; like somewhere past the end of the world
Frank Herbert - Dune
On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power," the Duke said. "Here, we must scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul.
Moonshine Noire -
Maybe I should stop while I'm aheadNay, I swim with sea-demons no sweet summer tuned radioover my sunless desertscapehow does it burn without the sun?
Sara Sheridan -
In a heartbeat, he understands why religions are born on the sands – there is nothing here for a man but his own mind.
Aleena Yasin -
I knew I was a grain of sand in the vast desert that never ended and he was a sparkling star in the sky. I was a fish who couldn’t breathe in air and had to stay in dark waters forever while he was a majestic bird who soared so high that he barely touched the ground. I did not deserve him. I could only watch him from down here and wish, wish that he could come here someday. That he could know that I existed. But for that, he had to fall. He had to drop to the ground but I could not let that happ
Martin Stepek -
Vast skies in the Australian desertwaves that don't movewe slide surf glide like condors
Avijeet Das -
You came into my life like the rain to the parched desert!
Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient
-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?I said nothing.-Deny it,damn you!
Hannah Lillith Assadi - Sonora
I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.
Tony Taylor - Counters
He’d lived in the desert all his life, and he loved it. He was its child. It was his home.
Stephen King -
I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.
Leonard Seet - Meditation on Space-Time
I would enter the desert alone, to leave in the sand endless footprints only to be obliterated by the wind, to walk the same path each day expecting the same path tomorrow, and perhaps to cease wondering at the bloom and wither of lilies only to linger for death. But no, even in the desert, I would seek a new sanctuary, to contemplate a grain of sand in a sea of dryness...
Terri Farley - Blue Wings
What did you say, Gram? About there being no church out here?" "I said that the sky was the roof of my cathedral and the desert was its floor and any time I paid attention, I could feel a higher power all around me.
James Anderson - The Never-Open Desert Diner
This was the desert, everything all at once, whether it was needed or not. What survived had learned to save, live carefully, and keep a low profile, even appear to be dead for long periods. Perseverance and patience.
Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient
The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.
John Hopkins - Lost Cactus: The First Treasury
On a far-flung parcel of government land situated somewhere in the vast reaches of parched American western desert sits an abandoned and long forgotten government facility known as Lost Cactus. That is what the shadowy agency ~ that operates there to this day ~ wants everyone from presidents on down to John Q. Public to believe.
Cormac McCarthy - or the Evening Redness in the West
They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following the war trail and they were very small and they moved very slowly in the immensity of that landscape.Come evening they hove toward the rimrock again and Sproule pointed out a dark stain on the face of the barren cliff. It looked like the black from old fires. The kid shielded his eyes. The scalloped canyon walls rippled in
Steven Magee -
The 'Wild West' is a good description of law enforcement in the desert southwest USA.
Beth Morey - Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul
imagine the desertmothers, with hair tangledtighter than their theologyand breasts that flowed milkand mystic wisdom. theyknew how to draw the singingsigils in the sand, how to digrough and bitten fingersinto desiccated dirt for waterto wet the lips of their young.women of hips and heft, wholearned how to burnbeneath the wild and searingsun, who made loud loveagainst the star-flecked threatof night, who knew that strengthis not always a matter of muscle.imagine your ancestresses,the prophetesses
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - The Little Prince
I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...
Alan Kinross - Longinus The Vampire: Babylon
The desert became grim, dark and foreboding. A silence of death lay over the land, and it seemed as though the very stars held their breath and twinkled no more.
Sanhita Baruah -
It was either the chaos of a crowd of thoughts or the silence of solitude... nothing in between..
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Juice is a poor man’s dessert.
Edward Abbey -
Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then —May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattles
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio -
They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They appeared as in a dream, at the crest of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky.
Stephen King - The Gunslinger
Once again there was the desert, and that only.
Mike Bond - The Last Savanna
...He sat back on his heels and watched the stars one by one cut their way through onrushing darkness, till all was reversed, day was night, and the blackness glittered with all the desert's sands, each a tiny flame beyond the bounds of time.
Dan B. Allender - The Healing Path
The desert shatters the soul's arrogance and leaves body and soul crying out in thirst and hunger. In the desert we trust God or die.
John Geddes - A Familiar Rain
...nobody ever takes from the desert anything but aridity and monsters...
Bruce Crown - How Dim the Promised Land
I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues
Omar Khayyam -
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes - or it prospers; and anon, Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face, Lighting a little hour or two - is gone.
Hod Lipson -
We've seen computers play chess and beat grand masters. We've seen computers drive a car across a desert. But interestingly, playing chess is easy, but having a conversation about nothing is really difficult for a computer.
Robyn Davidson -
I love the desert and its incomparable sense of space.
Ella Maillart -
I had to live in the desert before I could understand the full value of grass in a green ditch.
Sydney Smith -
Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.
Joyce Carol Oates -
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.
George Saunders -
The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years.