quotations about the desert
The desert is like the sea, with the waves of wind over the hard sand, with the froth of rolling bramble bushes, with the flat stones, patches of lichen and plaques of salt, and the black shadows that dig out holes when the sun draws near to the earth.
J. M. G. LE CLÉZIO
Desert
The mad man's in the desert
Look out behind you
The mad man's in the desert
Looking to find you
THE CORAL
"Arabian Sand", The Invisible Invasion
The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
America
They make a desert and call it peace.
TACITUS
Agricola
Nobody ever takes from the desert anything but aridity and monsters.
JOHN GEDDES
A Familiar Rain
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
"Interior Monologue,", The Wheel of Love and Other Stories
To be sure, very few of the deserts of real life possess that absolute flatness, sandiness and sameness, which characterises the familiar desert of the poet and of the annual exhibitions--a desert all level yellow expanse, most bilious in its colouring, and relieved by but four allowable academy properties, a palm-tree, a camel, a sphinx, and a pyramid. For foreground, throw in a sheikh in appropriate drapery; for background, a sky-line and a bleaching skeleton; stir and mix, and your picture is finished. Most practical deserts one comes across in travelling, however, are a great deal less simple and theatrical than that; rock preponderates over sand in their composition, and inequalities of surface are often the rule rather than the exception. There is reason to believe, indeed, that the artistic conception of the common or Burlington House desert has been unduly influenced for evil by the accessibility and the poetic adjuncts of the Egyptian sand-waste, which, being situated in a great alluvial river valley is really flat, and, being the most familiar, has therefore distorted to its own shape the mental picture of all its kind elsewhere. But most deserts of actual nature are not all flat, nor all sandy; they present a considerable diversity and variety of surface, and their rocks are often unpleasantly obtrusive to the tender feet of the pedestrian traveler.
GRANT ALLEN
Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
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: A Season in the Wilderness
I'm moving, I'm changing
I might find myself
Out in the desert's land
Raise the moon
Call the dead
Touch the sky
Curse the sand
CORONER
"Serpent Moves", Grin
Once again there was the desert, and that only.
STEPHEN KING
The Gunslinger
The desert rat carries one distinction like a halo: he has learned to love the kind of country that most people find unlovable.
EDWARD ABBEY
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.
PAUL HOFFMAN
The Last Four Things
This was as the desert should be, this was the desert of the picture books, with the land unrolled to the farthest distant horizon hills, with saguaro standing sentinel in their strange chessboard pattern, towering supinely above the fans of ocotillo and brushy mesquite.
DOROTHY B. HUGHES
The Expendable Man
If deserts have a fault ... that fault may doubtless be found in the fact that their scenery as a rule tends to be just a trifle monotonous.
GRANT ALLEN
Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science