Best 478 quotes in «desert quotes» category

But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountain than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to human kind. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes into the sand I made contact with that larger world - an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. Certainly I was still by myself, so to speak - there were no other people around and there still are none - but in the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque. All that is human melted with the sky and faded out beyond the mountains and I felt, as I feel - is it a paradox? - that a man can never find or need better companionship than that of himself.

...celebrating in a sea of little more than cacti and a billion stars.

Chelnov directed Rubin's attention to the geography of Moses' crossing. From the Nile to Jerusalem the Jews had at most 250 miles to go, and that meant that even if they rested on the Sabbath they could have easily covered the distance in three weeks. Wasn't it necessary therefore to assume that for the remaining forty years Moses did not simply lead them but misled them all over the Arabian desert?

Cress?" "It's beautiful out there." A hesitation, before, "Could you be more specific?" "The sky is gorgeous, intense blue color." She pressed her fingers to the glass and traced the wavy hills on the horizon. "Oh, good. You've really narrowed it down for me." "I'm sorry, it's just..." She tried to stamp down the rush of emotion. "I think we're in a desert." "Cactuses and tumbleweeds?" "No just a lot of sand. It's kind of orangish-gold, with hints of pink, and I can see tiny clouds of it floating above the ground, like...like smoke." "Piles up in lots of hills?" "Yes, exactly! And it's beautiful." Thorne snorted. "If this is how you feel about a desert, I can't wait until you see your first real tree. Your mind will explode.

Cutters read the land like a text. They search the manuscript of the ground for irregularities in its narration. They know the plots and the images by heart. They can see where the punctuation goes. They are landscape grammarians, got the Ph.D. in reading dirt.

Deserts never believe in cactus. seeds so.

Deserts are full of sand and winds are full of air, both are full of something but both look quite empty and when they get to pair it’s easy to see they are almighty.

[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.

Down here the layers of earth are comforting like blankets. The soil I think of as time. Below the caliche I sift through sediment from thousands of years. Though the sharp desert light above is another world, its pulse courses through me. When the mastodons and ground sloths roamed, its pulse coursed through me. When the Hohokam in the canyon ground my pods in the stone its pulse coursed through me. When the new gatherers of the desert learn again how to live here, its pulse will course through me. And I say, I will be ready if the drought comes. And I say, go deep into the Earth. And I say, go deep into yourself, go deep and be ready.

Dubai, with all of its glitz and glamour rose in the heart of the desert.

Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.

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.

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

Even in the most barren desert one would still one's heart beating.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Există diverse moduri de a trăi şi diferite feluri de a muri, dar nu asta contează, ci faptul că doar deşertul rămâne în urma noastră, doar el supravieţuieşte.

For, indeed, this is the great horror, solitude, when the soul can no longer bathe in the ever-changing mind, laugh as its sunlit ripples lap its skin, but, shut up in the castle of a few thoughts, paces its narrow prison, wearing down the stone of time, feeding on its own excrement. There is no star in the blackness of that night, no foam upon the stagnant and putrid sea. Even the glittering health that the desert brings to the body, is like a spear in the soul's throat. The passionate ache to act, to think: this eats into the soul like a cancer. It is the scorpion striking itself in its agony, save that no poison can add to the tortue of the circling fire; no superflux of anguish relieve it by annihilation. But against these paroxisms is an eightfold sedative. The ravings of madness are lost in soundless space; the struggles of the drowning man are not heeded by the sea.

From the beginning, the highway has always lacked grace-those who worship desert gods know them to favor retribution over the tender dove of forgiveness. In Desolation, doves are at the bottom of the food chain. Tohono O'Odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has pointed out that rosaries and Hail Marys don't work out here. "You need a new kind of prayers," she says "to negotiate with this land.

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

He came at length to realize that the desert was a teacher. He did not realize all that he had learned, but he was a different man. And when he decided upon that, he was not thinking of the slow, sure call to the primal instincts of man; he was thinking that the desert, as much as he had experienced and no more, would absolutely overturn the whole scale of a man’s values, break old habits, form new ones, remake him. More of desert experience, Gale believed, would be too much for intellect. The desert did not breed civilized man, and that made Gale ponder over a strange thought: after all, was the civilized man inferior to the savage?

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.

He looked at her like a thirsty man gazing on an oasis, trying to decide if it were an illusion brought on by the heat.

...He sat back on his heels and watched the stars one by one cut their way through onrushing darkness, till all was reversed, day was night, and the blackness glittered with all the desert's sands, each a tiny flame beyond the bounds of time.

He who puts his brother in the ground is everywhere. The word of the wise has fled without delay. Lo, the son of man is denied recognition, The child of his lady became the son of his maid. Lo, the desert claims the land, The nomes are destroyed.

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

I am convinced now that the desert has no heart, that it presents a riddle which has no answer, and that the riddle itself is an illusion created by some limitation or exaggeration of the displaced human consciousness.

I knew I was a grain of sand in the vast desert that never ended and he was a sparkling star in the sky. I was a fish who couldn’t breathe in air and had to stay in dark waters forever while he was a majestic bird who soared so high that he barely touched the ground. I did not deserve him. I could only watch him from down here and wish, wish that he could come here someday. That he could know that I existed. But for that, he had to fall. He had to drop to the ground but I could not let that happen. And then I thought, birds are meant to fly and stars are meant to shine and if someone takes it away from them, they can't be the same anymore. So, I just prayed that his wings never fail him, that the star never explodes. And I was at peace.

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.

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

If seeds waited for perfect conditions to grow, there would be no plants in the desert.

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.

I didn't know where I was going. My life was a hard and difficult desert. I was wandering aimlessly. I was drifting like a crazy man and wandering from place to place. I would wake up in the morning in one city and sleep in the night in another city. What was the meaning of my life? Nothing! What was the meaning of happiness? I did not know! I was a nomad. I was a wanderer. I was a drifter. Why was I drifting? Yes, I wish I knew why? I was not aware of the reason myself. Why was I drifting? And then one day I met you. You came to my life like the clouds to a parched desert! For a while, I discovered peace! I discovered that I too had a heart! I began to smile for the first time in life!

If a flower can flourish in the desert, you can flourish anywhere.

If you live in the desert, view the sun not as your enemy, but as your friend. If you live in the wilderness, view nature not as your adversary, but as your companion.

Il deserto batteva qualsiasi cosa avesse mai visto. Non era per un fatto estetico, perché non poteva certo dire che fosse stupendo o meraviglioso. Era una questione di stazza. il deserto era lì. Stava. Ovunque guardasse. Monotono, imponente, come il mare. Però il contatto era più stretto, sentiva il calore, sentiva la sabbia. Era strano, gli piaceva.

I left a piece of my soul that will always rightfully belong in the desert.

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.

I love like I’m thirsty. Can I offer you a tall glass of Sahara sand?

imagine the desert mothers, with hair tangled tighter than their theology and breasts that flowed milk and mystic wisdom. they knew how to draw the singing sigils in the sand, how to dig rough and bitten fingers into desiccated dirt for water to wet the lips of their young. women of hips and heft, who learned how to burn beneath the wild and searing sun, who made loud love against the star-flecked threat of night, who knew that strength is not always a matter of muscle. imagine your ancestresses, the prophetesses of the arid lands, before these starched traditions and pews too hard to pray from, who bled true ritual and birthed their own fierce souls at creation's crowning --

In a land that knew only dark beauty, she was something of a hybrid no one dared touch. But the tall Arab did not appear in the least daunted by her abnormality. No, she saw his eyes. He was not daunted in the least.

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.

In the desert of the heart, tears do not touch the ground. (Dans le désert du coeur, - Les larmes ne touchent la terre.)

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.

I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. the marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.

-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!

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

I shivered in those solitudes when I heard the voice of the salt in the desert.

It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...

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.

It is the desert that tests a seed's strength.