Desert Quotes

“They hike almost three miles without incident, and it's amazing to watch the colors leach back into the desert after the day's blanching. There's a moment, Lydia realizes, or no, more than a moment - a span of perhaps fifteen minutes just at twilight - when the desert is the most perfect place that exists. The temperature, the light, the colors, all hang and linger at some unflawed precipice, like the cars of a roller coaster ticking ever so slowly over their apex before the crash. The light droops ever farther from the sky, and Lydia can smell the heat of the day wicking away from her skin.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“Deserts are full of sand and winds are full of air,
both are full of something but both look quite empty
and when they get to pair
it’s easy to see they are almighty.”
― Alain Bremond-Torrent, running is flying intermittently

“The desert sings of loss, always loss, and if you stand quiet with your eyes closed, it will grieve you too.”
― Nafiza Azad, The Candle and the Flame

“There is a certain fine simplicity in a landscape from which the element of water, with all the varied life it brings in it murmuring train, is entirely absent.”
― Gertrude Bell, Persian Pictures: From the Mountains to the Sea

“But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountain than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to human kind. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes into the sand I made contact with that larger world - an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. Certainly I was still by myself, so to speak - there were no other people around and there still are none - but in the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque. All that is human melted with the sky and faded out beyond the mountains and I felt, as I feel - is it a paradox? - that a man can never find or need better companionship than that of himself.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“This is, however, one of the greatest delights of a garden; the nearly hypnotic ability it has to make you slow down, consider things about life more carefully, wrangle over difficulties with care and imagination rather than anger and ferocity.”
― Mary F. Irish, A Place All Our Own: Lives Entwined in a Desert Garden

“At times, we need to be like the weed, which bends in the wind,' the old shaman eventually says.”
― Arianna Dagnino, The Afrikaner (161)

“Oh, wind and rain may haunt me,
Look to the north and pray.
Send me, please, his kisses;
Send them home today.

I'm begging Jesus, 'Please,
Send his love to me!'

Left alone in desert,
This house becomes a hell,
This love becomes a tether,
This room becomes a cell.

Mummy, Daddy, please,
Send him back to me!

How long must I suffer?
Dear God, I've served my time.
This love becomes my torture;
This love, my only crime.

Oh, lover, please release me.
My arms too weak to grip,
My eyes too dry for weeping,
My lips too dry to kiss.

Calling Jesus, 'Please,
Send his love to me!”
― P.J. Harvey

“Sunshine - sunshine! tedious, changeless, monotonous. Not that discreet English Sunshine which varies its charm with clouds, with rainbows, with golden mist... here the sun has ceased trying to please so venerable a world.”
― Gertrude Bell, Persian Pictures: From the Mountains to the Sea

“High above our heads the owl hoots under the lost moon. A pre-dawn wind comes sifting and sighing through the cottonwood trees; the sound of their dry, papery leaves is like the murmur of distant water, or like the whispering of ghosts in an ancient, empty, condemned cathedral.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Almost Myself
On a twilight road, I met a young man with my face.
A denizen of some distant dust devil in drifter denim.
We stood and eyed each other, then, with a look of mutual disdain, we parted.
Our backward glances were not narcissistic flirtation, but self-conscious reflection and surrender to the formality of the familiar.
Against a backdrop of veined lightning and coyote song, I was alone again.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Hell must look very beautiful to find customers for itself, and deserts do precisely this!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The desert mocked the map-makers.”
― Dean F. Wilson, Hopebreaker

“We must walk without rhythm," Paul said and he called up memory of men
walking the sand . . . both prescient memory and real memory.
"Watch how I do it," he said. "This is how Fremen walk the sand."
He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of
it, moved with a dragging pace.
Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw
the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand . . . like
the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step . . . drag
. . . drag . . . step . . . step . . . wait . . . drag . . . step . . .”
― Frank Herbert, Dune I

“He came at length to realize that the desert was a teacher. He did not realize all that he had learned, but he was a different man. And when he decided upon that, he was not thinking of the slow, sure call to the primal instincts of man; he was thinking that the desert, as much as he had experienced and no more, would absolutely overturn the whole scale of a man’s values, break old habits, form new ones, remake him. More of desert experience, Gale believed, would be too much for intellect. The desert did not breed civilized man, and that made Gale ponder over a strange thought: after all, was the civilized man inferior to the savage?”
― Zane Grey, Desert Gold

“Alone in the silence, I understand for a moment the dread which many feel in the presence of primeval desert, the unconscious fear which compels them to tame, alter or destroy what they cannot understand, to reduce the wild and prehuman to human dimensions. Anything rather than confront directly the antehuman, that other world which frightens not through danger or hostility but in something far worse - its implacable indifference.”
― Edward Abbey

“And even though it was just one hug, it was enough to lift more dark.”
― J.F. Sarrop, An Inventory of Batons

“The desert still has a memory of water. And that memory is a living thing. It is infused into the sand. It is part of its essence.”
― Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Painted Oxen

“No law. No order. No time or space. Danger was the desert’s breath, and the landscape changed with every wind.”
― Zita Steele, The Hidden Sphinx: A Tale of World War II Egypt

“Deserts never believe in cactus. seeds so.”
― Deepak Gupta, 10 Principles To Love Yourself

“And the desert shall reclaim, it’s wealth!”
― Danikelii

“He who puts his brother in the ground is everywhere.
The word of the wise has fled without delay.
Lo, the son of man is denied recognition,
The child of his lady became the son of his maid.
Lo, the desert claims the land,
The nomes are destroyed.”
― Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms

“And so on this rainbow day, with storms all around them, and blue sky above, they rode only as far as the valley. But from there, before they turned to go back, the monuments appeared close, and they loomed grandly with the background of purple bank and creamy cloud and shafts of golden lightning. They seemed like sentinels — guardians of a great and beautiful love born under their lofty heights, in the lonely silence of day, in the star-thrown shadow of night. They were like that love. And they held Lucy and Slone, calling every day, giving a nameless and tranquil content, binding them true to love, true to the sage and the open, true to that wild upland home.”
― Zane Grey, Wildfire

“Though one praises all the gods,
Birds will not come down to deserts.”
― Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms

“The socially validated natural beauty, deriving charisma from moisture, is the forest, the waterfall, the alpine meadow, the mountaintop crisp with snow. But the grace of the arid steppe, the subtlety of the life there, the muted shades of color, the delicate perfumes, these are unsung, unloved. The sage steppe is the orphan child of the environmental movement. There is almost no literature celebrating it.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“She might've had the skill to get them out of the Hold, but God knew how she'd fare across the desert of Altadas. And God wasn't telling.”
― Dean F. Wilson, Hopebreaker

“But then the war didn't always harden you on the outside. The desert did that. The war crisped you up within.”
― Dean F. Wilson, Hopebreaker

“For now, the world of Altadas was mostly an empty desert, but in the future it might be a world of iron.”
― Dean F. Wilson, Hopebreaker

“Commando Group Sphinx refused to provide information about their dead soldier. They were a secretive group. Also, they did not keep in regular contact with their roving desert warriors.”
― Zita Steele, The Hidden Sphinx: A Tale of World War II Egypt

“Egypt was no longer the garden of desert gods—it was an empire of warring foreigners.”
― Zita Steele, The Hidden Sphinx: A Tale of World War II Egypt