DESERT QUOTES
quotations about the desert
For waters will burst forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert plain. The heat-parched ground will become a reedy pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water. In the lairs where jackals rested, there will be green grass and reeds and papyrus.
BIBLE
Isaiah 35:6-7
What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPéRY
The Little Prince
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.
TERRY PRATCHETT
Jingo
Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune
"Once you get into the desert, there's no going back," said the camel driver. "and, when you can't go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward. The rest is up to Allah."
PAULO COELHO
The Alchemist
Inhuman solitude made of sand and God. Surely only two kinds of people can bear to live in such desert: lunatics and prophets. The mind topples here not from fright but from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses downward, losing human stability, sometimes it springs upward, enters heaven, sees God face to face, touches the hem of His blazing garment without being burned, hears what He says, and taking this, slings it into men's consciousness. Only in the desert do we see the birth of these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up in rebellion even against God himself and stand before Him fearlessly, their minds in resplendent consubstantiality with the skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is proud, because in them his breath has not vented its force; in them, God has not stooped to becoming a man.
NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS
Report to Greco
In the desert, the line between life and death is sharp and quick.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
The desert does not mean the absence of men, it means the presence of God.
CARLO CARRETTO
The Desert in the City
I do not think it was ever intended that people should live here. This is a land made for insects who eat sand and lay eggs in each other's corpses and have no voices with which to scream when they die.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing.
ROBERT BOLT & MICHAEL WILSON
Lawrence of Arabia
Those who went into the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being.
T. E. LAWRENCE
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
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.
JULENE BAIR
The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning
Night time on the desert
A blanket of blue above
Night time on the desert
Time to dream of love
MARTY ROBBINS
"Night Time on the Desert", Long Long Ago
A desert is a place without expectation.
NADINE GORDIMER
Telling Times
The desert is so vast that no one can know it all. Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return.
JEAN-MARIE GUSTAVE LE CLÉZIO
Desert
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.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPéRY
The Little Prince
The desert takes our dreams away from us, and they don't always return.... Those who don't return become a part of the clouds, a part of the animals that hide in the ravines and of the water that comes from the earth. They become part of everything … They become the Soul of the World.
PAULO COELHO
The Alchemist
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.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
The English Patient
To see the desert is like peeling the skin off a landscape.
FRED WILLIAMS
attributed, Landscapes of Western Australia
No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where, like all desert dwellers, they dream their buildings, rather than design them.
ARTHUR ERICKSON
attributed, 1001 Greatest Things Ever Said About California