Desert Quotes

It was either the chaos of a crowd of thoughts or the silence of solitude... nothing in between..

~ Sanhita Baruah

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.

~ Michael Ondaatje

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 the heat like drapery folds.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

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...

~ Leonard Seet

The 'Wild West' is a good description of law enforcement in the desert southwest USA.

~ Steven Magee

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.

~ Stephen King

I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

He’d lived in the desert all his life, and he loved it. He was its child. It was his home.

~ Tony Taylor

-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!

~ Michael Ondaatje

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.

~ Terri Farley

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

You and I, your mother, Ahlam, we are from up there,' my father continued. 'We come from the stunning stars. We were just born in the wrong place. We were meant to live on another planet. The people who come to the desert are those who know this, deep inside of them, we are from up there. From far, far away.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

He watched the desert slip under the airship's nose, and the land roughened into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain - dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.

~ C.j. Cherryh

The Gobi wasn't completely devoid of life; its ecosystem was unexpectedly extensive and varied given the extremes to which it subjected its denizens, but some of those forms of life weren't the kind that Anna wanted to admire too closely.

~ A. Ashley Straker

As for those who disbelieve, their deeds are like a mirage in a desert. The thirsty one thinks it to be water, until he comes up to it, he finds it to be nothing, but he finds Allah with him, Who will pay him his due (Hell). And Allah is Swift in taking account.

~ Anonymous

Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.

~ Stephen King

[Deserters], they've given up everything. Oaths. Families. When you desert, it breaks you. It leaves you willing to do anything, because you've already given away everything you could have cared about losing.

~ Brandon Sanderson

Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.

~ Saul Bellow

The day here is a something without value, a mere torment suffered by living creatures as they await the night. Night is deliverance.

~ Tayeb Salih

If not prevented, desertification of the world can one day make the camels as the best and the sole cars of our civilisation!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It is better to make an irrational noise in a bush than in a desert.

~ Duop Chak Wuol

He would not now conduct little Nell to the coast; he would not convey her by a steamer to Port Said, would not surrender her to Mr. Rawlinson; he himself would not fall into his father's arms and would not hear from his lips that he had acted like a true Pole! The end, the end! In a few days the sun would shine only upon the lifeless bodies and afterwards would dry them up into a semblance of those mummies which slumber in an eternal sleep in the museums in Egypt

~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

Awakened by the oppressive midday heat, Zach opened his eyes to see a small blue and tan lizard doing what looked like push-ups about a foot away from his face.

~ Pamela Clare

Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find the means frightening.

~ Floriano Martins

The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across the desert sky.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

If you want water, do not go to desert...

~ Alen Sargsyan

The buckets emptied quickly, and men from different squads took turns bringing water from the gully that lay towards the city, where, in the feeble shade of emaciated mulberries, a muddy stream lived out its last days in the diabolical heat.

~ Mikhail Bulgakov

So they drove again, Vivien sitting up and looking now, but as navigator only, letting the desert scratch its own thorny poetry on the enormous moon.

~ Douglas Woolf

I will love you like the desert burns along the sun when they are together,and when you will be gone,just like every one else,I will cry for you like the snow that melts at the first hint of summer...and hoping that you'll be backI will miss you like the clouds lose themselves when it rains...

~ Sanhita Baruah

During the night a fine, delicate summer rain had washed the plains, leaving the morning sky crisp and clean. The sun shone warm—soon to bake the earth dry. It cast a purple haze across the plain—like a great, dark topaz. In the trees the birds sang, while the squirrels jumped from branch to branch in seeming good will, belying the expected tension of the coming days.

~ Cate Campbell Beatty

The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising from the winter cold. The rock walls that protect it meet in points around it, one giving way to another, for days on end. But the dungeons into which you'll fall as you work through the pathways to its gates number in the low hundreds, and if you actually get into the entry hall, there are a few hundred more sub-dungeons before you'll actually reach somewhere that's truly safe. Technically, it's possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long.

~ John Darnielle

Light and air — what means wherewith to conjure up illusions and deceive the senses!

~ John C. Van Dyke

The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the little backyard was filled with the little rainbows as the sun touched the dew.

~ Larry Mcmurtry

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.

~ Sophia Rose

Inside her head or out in the desert was the same, and the air inside her throat was very dry to keep from crying and her neck sore from forcing herself not to look down, not to look back.

~ Mike Bond

Love is wild; its whole beauty is in its wildness. It comes like a breeze with great fragrance, fills your heart, and suddenly where there was a desert there is a garden full of flowers.

~ Osho

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 of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.

~ Bruce Crown

I could just like down, right here, and let the sand cover me like a blanket. But my legs, clumsy as they've become, keep stumbling forward on their own. I'm not frightened and I'm not sorry. Not even a little bit. Nikko and I shared this fate, six years apart. We both walked into the desert, and we will both have died out here, under the wide open sky. At this moment, I feel closer to him than I have in years. Maybe that's what Endd meant when she said that none of us are ever truly alone.

~ Joaquin Lowe

In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquility was to be found there.

~ Wilfred Thesiger

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

~ Michael Ondaatje