Desert That Quotes

#1. Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own? ... You carry your fortune in your own hand.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#2. Night. Heavenly delicious sweet night of the desert that calls all of us to love her. The night is our comfort with her coolness and darkness. On wings, on feet, on our bellies, out we all come to glory in the night.

Leslie Marmon Silko

#3. I could fall in love with a cruel desert that kills without passion, a canyon full of scorpions, one thousand blinding arctic storms, a century sealed in a cave, a river of molten salt flowing down my throat. But never with you.

Henry Rollins

#4. There is a native baseness in the ambition which seeks beyond its desert, that never shows more conspicuously than when, no matter how, it temporarily gains its object.

William Gilmore Simms

#5. I would drive through the desert, and there's this one spot in the desert that, every time I drove through it, I would get crazy ideas. I would either sing into the cell phone recorder or I would sing into a DAT machine.

Tim Rutili

#6. It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness.

Frank Herbert

#7. Worlds which had trembled for a moment in their orbits now steadied, and in one of those worlds, in a desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts, a man named Roland turned over in his bedroll and slept easily once again beneath the alien constellations.

Stephen King

#8. As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.

Jack Kerouac

#9. Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God's glory or just to keep the sand out of the house?

Barbara Kingsolver

#10. In order to grow in grace, we must be much alone. It is not in society that the soul grows most vigorously. In one single quiet hour of prayer it will often make more progress than in days of company with others. It is in the desert that the dew falls freshest and the air its purest.

Horatius Bonar

#11. It is, but we can only help people by giving less than we take away from them. We enlarge the oasis by increasing the desert. That is the science of time and housekeeping. Some call it economics.

Alasdair Gray

#12. If you concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. You'll see that there is life in the desert, that there are stars in the heavens ... Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living right now.

Paulo Coelho

#13. Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, 'No thank you' to desert that night. And for what?!

Erma Bombeck

#14. I plan on going so deep into the desert, that any failure of my equipment could cost me my life.

Evan Tanner

#15. This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see the thin thread of necessities on which our human existence is suspended ...

Freya Stark

#16. The world makes things for each place. Fish for the sea, Rocs for the mountain skies, and girls with sun in their skin and perfect aim for a desert that doesn't let weakness live.

Alwyn Hamilton

#17. Too much good fortune can make you smug and unaware. Happiness should be like an oasis, the greener for the desert that surrounds it.

Rachel Field

#18. Hulkamania is like a single grain of sand in the Sahara desert that is Macho Madness.

Randy Savage

#19. The palpable sense of mystery in the desert air breeds fables, chiefly of lost treasure ... It is a question whether it is not better to be bitten by the little horned snake of the desert that goes sidewise and strikes without coiling, than by the tradition of a lost mine.

Mary Hunter Austin

#20. I took a Ferrari under the 405 freeway. We took rent-a-cars through the desert. That was fun.

Adam Ferrara

#21. Christian literature makes reference to many episodes that parallel the experiences of those going a yogic way. Saint Anthony, one of the first desert mystics, frequently encountered strange and sometimes terrifying psychophysical forces while at prayer.

Willigis Jager

#22. In that little party there was not one who would desert another; yet we were of different countries, different colours, different races, different religions
and one of us was of a different world.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#23. The idea that Area 51 was this test facility working to move science and technology faster and further than any other nation is true and is one of the great hallmarks of Area 51. There are other areas of the base that are controversial - but they both exist simultaneously - out there in the desert.

Annie Jacobsen

#24. I walked, a desert creature, in that fertile land. I felt harsh and dusty.

Anonymous

#25. What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jete is a frantic variation on our one free fall.

Annie Dillard

#26. 'Walking the Bible' describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

Bruce Feiler

#27. She was beautiful in the way people call the desert beautiful, which is to say that although some people actually believed it, most of the time it was said in response to someone else's denigration of it.

Chris McCormick

#28. The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame

Terry Pratchett

#29. 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.
..

Virginia Woolf

#30. Maybe God created the desert so that man could appreciate the date trees

Paulo Coelho

#31. He said he didn't think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.
"Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that," he said, "People don't go to a place like that to look for other people. That's the opposite of the whole concept that's behind the thing.

David Foster Wallace

#32. They have a book of locations, and we would do a story about the Sahara Desert for instance, and in the California book you would find a comparable location, to match that location in California.

Robert Stack

#33. This tottered ensign of my ancestors
Which swept the desert shore of that dead sea
Whereof we got the name of Mortimer,
Will I advance upon these castle-walls.
Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport,
And sing aloud the knell of Gaveston!

Christopher Marlowe

#34. If some temptation arises in the place where you dwell in the desert, do not leave that place in time of temptation. For if you leave it then, no matter where you go, you will find the same temptation waiting for you.

John Moses

#35. Going across the Tannai Desert was one of the spookiest experiences I've ever had. Not driving during the day; that was fine. And so we camped in an old sort of truck siding, I think. And the silence. The eerie silence and then a dingo howling, and it was just so spooky. I didn't sleep all night.

Joan Kirner

#36. Some say that true love is a mirage; seek it anyway, for all else is surely desert.

Robert Breault

#37. Under Arab rule, Palestine had always been a somnolent desert land that could have sustained no authentic twentieth-century Arab awakening. Palestine without Jews is a not a nation but a naqba.

George Gilder

#38. I don't look like a desert person because I stay indoors most of the day and fool around at night. That's what the desert animals do - they don't have a tan either.

Captain Beefheart

#39. The desert ... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes ... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself.

Richard Misrach

#40. I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert
a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

Mark Twain

#41. 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.

James Anderson

#42. As I've gotten older, I've wanted to represent Las Vegas more. Represent the Southwest. It's a magical place. The desert. I do understand people's criticisms, but it's a magical place and a beautiful city, even though there are a lot of things that are wrong with it.

Brandon Flowers

#43. When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square ... the critics ... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert" ... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling ...

Kazimir Malevich

#44. This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.

Mary Hunter Austin

#45. Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.

Palmer Luckey

#46. I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.

Stephen King

#47. A woman of the desert knows that she must await her man.

Paulo Coelho

#48. Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It's no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time.

Bill Viola

#49. You could drop Tony Stark naked in the middle of the desert and he'd fly out in a jet made of sand and cactus needles. It's not his *stuff* that gives him power. It's his *brain*. Try using yours. You'll be amazed the difference it makes.

Charles Soule

#50. It is unacceptable that immigrants, including children, are shackled and detained in deplorable conditions. And it is unacceptable that already this year immigrants have died by the dozens in the California desert or in other parts of the Southwest.

Roger Mahony

#51. The desert is hot and boring, I'm sorry but that's pretty much all there is to it. It's also sandy, but rocks are essentially dull things and breaking them up into really small pieces doesn't improve matters.

Mark Lawrence

#52. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.

Barbara Kingsolver

#53. And who knew?
That an unlettered man from the middle of the desert,
Would change the whole world from darkness into heaven
You may have every title, every big shot degree,
But you still can't explain: Alif-Laam-Meem

Boonaa Mohammed

#54. Resources on the planet are limited, and limited resources can come to an end. But there are also a lot of resources that are renewable. A lot of land, for example, can be reclaimed from the encroaching deserts.

Wangari Maathai

#55. THE BOY RODE ALONG THROUGH THE DESERT FOR SEVERAL hours, listening avidly to what his heart had to say. It was his heart that would tell him where his treasure was hidden. "Where your treasure is, there also will be your heart," the alchemist had told him. But his heart was speaking of other things.

Paulo Coelho

#56. How do I know that there is a God? In the same way that I know, on looking at the sand, when a man or beast has crossed the desert - by His footprints in the world around me.

Henry Parry Liddon

#57. Saddam had buried a bunch of his fighters in the desert. He had them covered with plastic and then tried to hide them. Probably he figured we'd come through like we did in Desert Storm, hit quick and then leave. He was wrong about that.

Chris Kyle

#58. Be mine that silent calm repast,
A conscience cheerful to the last:
That tree which bears immortal fruit,
Without a canker at the root;
That friend which never fails the just,
When other friends desert their trust.

Nathaniel Cotton

#59. Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah were stung by the irony that on the wild desert, where people had virtually nothing, they shared freely, but here, where resources were comparatively abundant, no one would offer them so much as a drink.

Dean King

#60. My soul longs to feel itself more of a pilgrim and stranger here below; that nothing may divert me from pressing through the lonely desert, till I arrive at my Father's house.

Jonathan Edwards

#61. There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it's really true: I should have stayed home.

David Rakoff

#62. Immigration is a kind of pilgrimage. That's the way I see it. Just to go back to the desert, biblical metaphors, that's the story of great migration right there, the Old Testament.

Ruben Martinez

#63. Life is a warfare; and he who easily desponds deserts a double duty
he betrays the noblest property of man, which is dauntless resolution; and he rejects the providence of that All-Gracious Being who guides and rules the universe.

Jane Porter

#64. I'm so happy to have been a part of that process and I would go straight back into the desert in a ton of chain mail for Ridley any day of the week. He's an amazing director and I can't wait to see the long version.

Orlando Bloom

#65. Don't get the expression of a vicious cur that appears to know the kicks it gets are its desert, and yet hates all the world, as well as the kicker, for what it suffers.

Emily Bronte

#66. The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents.

Joseph Wood Krutch

#67. On a globe it looks like a swollen California. Within that space, though, are twenty-thousand-foot peaks, the world's deepest canyon (twice as deep as the Grand Canyon), unmapped Amazon jungle and the driest desert on earth.

Mark Adams

#68. Everyone just keeps on disappearing. Some things vanish, like they were cut away. Others fade slowly into the mist. And all that remains is a desert.

Haruki Murakami

#69. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable ... and knows no kindness with all its beauty.

Georgia O'Keeffe

#70. These are the lords
That have bought titles: men may merchandise
Wares, ay and traffic in all commodities
From sea to sea, and from shore to shore:
But in my thought, of all things that are sold,
'Tis pity honor should be bought for gold:
It cuts off all desert.

Eliza Haywood

#71. A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses

John Milton

#72. When you're on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it's very much like my paintings.

Edward Ruscha

#73. You know that Moses was spinning like crazy in Exodus XIV through XVII when the Jewish people wanted to go back and become a place again because tramping through the desert was a bit too hard.

Joe Klein

#74. Did you hear that crazy man? we said.
Education is your mother? we said.
We laughed and did imitations. We thought Mr. Kondit, like more than a few of the men and boys who had crossed the desert to get to Ethiopia, had lost his mind along the way.

Dave Eggers

#75. Right now, you understand that you are going to have to leave your Egypt of financial debt. I pray that you enjoy your ride through the desert to the Promised Land of prosperity.

Celso Cukierkorn

#76. That undefined and mingled hum, Voice of the desert never dumb!

James Hogg

#77. What makes a desert so beautiful is that it hides a well somewhere ...

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#78. That theatrical kind of virtue, which requires publicity for its stage, and an applauding world for its audience, could not be depended on, in the secrecy of solitude, or the retirement of a desert.

Charles Caleb Colton

#79. Any action, like any act of magic, is in some sense an act of faith ... I've seen the desert bloom, the flower that emerges from the barest hint of water, and I know the power of life will rise, stubborn and persistent to be renewed. May our actions be the wind that brings the rain.

Starhawk

#80. But when society is the name for such hollow gentlemen and ladies ... and when its breeding is professed indifference to everything that can advance or can retard mankind, I think we must have lost ourselves in that same Desert of Sahara, and had better find the way out.

Charles Dickens

#81. I'm most passionate about anything to do with nature and the simple things. I love taking walks with my family or my friends and seeing nature. And that's why I love living where I live because I live up in the desert area in the mountains.

Atticus Shaffer

#82. Absolute peace in our world is an unattainable goal. But it is one towards which we must continue to journey, our eyes fixed on it as a traveller in a desert fixes his eyes on the one guiding star that will lead him to salvation.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#83. I can't believe this," I muttered, cradling the skein of water up close to my chest. "Two weeks in the desert all on account of some assassin who doesn't know how to look out for snakes."
"If you hadn't killed that snake," Naji said calmly, "I would have killed you."
" Oh, shut up.

Cassandra Rose Clarke

#84. There are not many places in the world where you can get to the beach in an hour, the desert in two hours and snowboarding or skiing in three hours. You can do all that in California.

Alex Pettyfer

#85. Just like that - in one apocalyptic moment - simple and beautiful. A birth. But also a kind of death. Like lightning in a storm. In one flash of light, the whole desert was lit, and you could see the universe. That's what she had seen - the universe in the hands of a child feeling the face of a man.

Benjamin Alire Saenz

#86. It is such an innocent, intuitively discerning mind that helps make the Eastern guru and the Desert Abba "master". Where intimate Source radiates among non-Christians then surely we must be dealing with the "other sheep" manifesting the cosmic Christ.

Tilden Edwards

#87. For the 'Rai-kirah' books, I began with the image of Aleksander riding the great wastelands, and that quickly morphed into the desert. Because I wanted my slave market cold and miserable, I chose to set the opening scene in the empire's summer capital in the mountains.

Carol Berg

#88. Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others.

Kathleen Norris

#89. 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

#90. And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can't see the desert because it is not a thing.

Mark Haddon

#91. I pray that we would let God take us through the desert - not just so that we can arrive in the Promised Land, but so that we can talk, or simply listen, to Him along the way.

Katie Kiesler

#92. Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water. I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. I so resent this.

Anne Lamott

#93. The desert preserves. What other lands destroy, the desert keeps. It accepts dead things, holds them close, and draws away the rot that would destroy; given time, it mummifies or crystalizes.

Louis L'Amour

#94. Many free countries have lost their liberty, and ours may lose hers; but, if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her.

Abraham Lincoln

#95. The back-seat driving of the less charitable emotions often makes me wonder that the brain does not desert the wheel entirely, in righteous exasperation. Not

Rex Stout

#96. Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.

Lawrence Block

#97. Reading from St. John Chrysostom that the life of a bishop should be more perfect than the life of a hermit. The reason he gave was that the holiness which the monk preserves in the desert must be preserved by the bishop into the midst of the evil of the world.

Fulton J. Sheen

#98. If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.

Ralph Ellison

#99. Rattlesnakes are only too plentiful everywhere; along the river bottoms, in the broken, hilly ground, and on the prairies and the great desert wastes alike ... If it can it will get out of the way, and only coils up in its attitude of defence when it believes that it is actually menaced.

Theodore Roosevelt

#100. I think its really matured a lot. I like the fact that there is now more to do there than gamble, since I don't do a lot of that. The people are great. I seldom have time for vacations and when I do I prefer the beach instead of the desert.

Doug Davidson