quotations about the desert
The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it.
ROBERT EDISON FULTON JR.
One Man Caravan
Cry for the desert
I will tremble and receive His pain
Die for the desert
I will pour my life on this terrain
TWILA PARIS
"Cry for the Desert"
The desert is a place of passage, of wandering, or even of exile where love is accompanied by the anguish rooted in our ultimate incompleteness, which, however, reveals our true nature. The difference of the other shows us the gap in our vision of ourselves, the world, and God. This kind of self-knowledge is never easy to accept, but it leads us from slavery to freedom.
FABRICE BLÉE
The Third Desert
Going into the desert is like throwing bone after bone to a dog, some he will catch and some of them he will drop. He may catch our bones, or we may go by and come to gleaming Mecca.
LORD DUNSANY
The Tents of the Arabs
I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.
NEIL GAIMAN
Smoke and Mirrors
Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.
STEPHEN KING
The Gunslinger
I had to live in the desert before I could understand the full value of grass in a green ditch.
ELLA MAILLART
Forbidden Journey
The desert is so huge, and the horizon so distant, that they make a person feel small, and as if he should remain silent.
PAULO COELHO
The Alchemists
Like water in the desert is wisdom to the soul.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence--lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage.
THOMAS MERTON
Thoughts in Solitude
The desert is, like transgression in Bataille, a relation to an instance whose only being is its approach--an instance that one only seizes where one goes beyond it.
JOSEPH LIBERTSON
Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication
The desert is our troubled state. It is the dwelling place of our demons.
SEAN CAULFIELD
The God of Ordinary People
Anything built here, an unrelenting desert, was an act of sheer will imposed on territory unsuited for habitation.
DAVE EGGERS
A Hologram for the King
Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find the means frightening. Our strategy of permanence in the uterus of chaos.
FLORIANO MARTINS
Cenizas del sol
The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.
BIBLE
Isaiah 35:1
The desert is like that; it's filled with the unforeseen.... Whatever does exist in that parched land is viciously competitive for the very resources upon which you also rely.
AMITY PIERCE BUXTON
Unseen-Unheard
The desert is not remote in southern tropics
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
They make a desert and call it peace.
TACITUS
Agricola
Come here my serenade, my desert serenade
A lover's melody, to bring you close to me
It's a tender lullaby, born of golden sand and sky
The song is new, and it's calling you
Tonight beside the desert palms
ELVIS PRESLEY
"My Desert Serenade", Harum Scarum
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