Desert Quotes - Page 18

• Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you?

  John Ashbery

  Night, Giving, Heat

  John Ashbery (1985). “A Wave: Poems”, p.1, Ardent Media

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• Adulthood feels like walking around in the desert with a bag over your head, being bumped into by people who rob you as they bore you.

  Dylan Moran

  Funny, Humor, Bores You

  "What It Is". Stand-up by Dylan Moran, www.youtube.com. May 15, 2009.

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• But nowadays everybody's a comedian, even the weather girls and continuity announcers. We laugh at everything. Not intelligently anymore, not with sudden shock, astonishment, or revelation, just relentlessly and meaninglessly. No more rain showers in the desert, just mud and drizzle everywhere, occasionally illuminated by the flash of paparazzi.

  Douglas Adams

  Girl, Rain, Weather

  Douglas Adams (2009). “Mostly Harmless”, p.175, Pan Macmillan

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• That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the world better than it does the white waves that whip it , caress it , collapse on to it . The white foam knows nothing better than those sands which wait for it , rise to it and suck it in .but what do the waves know of the massed, hot, still sands of the desert just twenty , no , ten feet beyond the scalloped edge ? And what does the beach knows of depths, the cold, the currents just there, where-do you see it? - Where the water turns a deeper blue.

  Ahdaf Soueif

  Beach, Blue, White

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• That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

  Virginia Woolf

  Glorious Life, Curves, Perfection

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.63, Virginia Woolf

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• You've got to spread out as far as you can, cut down a whole forest, irrigate a whole desert, just to make sure that you won't accidentally stumble upon a place that's still in its natural state.

  Charles de Lint

  Cutting, Forests, Natural

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• She is immensely interested in him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Islands, Wish, Moments

  "The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw".

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• 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

  Falling In Love, Passion, Rivers

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• The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.

  Daniel Quinn

  Ocean, Men, Space

  Daniel Quinn (2009). “Ishmael: A Novel”, p.74, Bantam

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• And something chocolate, of course. A meal was not a meal without some sort of chocolate for desert.

  Janet Evanovich

  Chocolate, Meals, Courses

  Janet Evanovich (2002). “Full House”, p.57, St. Martin's Paperbacks

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• It is this nothingness (in solitude) that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something. The task is to persevere in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone. The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ.

  Henri Nouwen

  Running, Jesus, Believe

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• When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

  Denis Johnson

  Mother, Hurt, Jesus

  Denis Johnson (2009). “Jesus' Son: Stories”, p.84, Macmillan

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• ...to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself...the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.

  Joanne Greenberg

  Rain, Reality, Oasis

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• Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.

  Wallace Stegner

  Moving, Mountain, Wells

  Wallace Stegner (1971). “Angle of Repose”, Penguin Group USA

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• In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.

  Edith Wharton

  Grief, Heart, Should

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• The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

  Roberto Bolano

  Men, Air, People

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• You can't change the desert. You can only take the fastest course through it. Wishing it's an oasis won't make it so.

  Michelle Moran

  Oasis, Wish, Can't Change

  Michelle Moran (2011). “The Egyptian Royals Collection: Three Historical Novels by Michelle Moran: Nefertiti, The Heretic Queen, and Cleopatra's Daughter”, p.151, Broadway Books

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• Life, deal gently with her ... Love, never desert her

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Deals

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2013). “Jane Of Lantern Hill (Annotated Edition)”, p.218, Jazzybee Verlag

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• I will You, in all, Myself, with promise to never desert you, To which I sign my name.

  Walt Whitman

  Names, Promise

  Walt Whitman, Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, William White (2008). “Leaves of Grass: Vol. I-III: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 1855-1856”, p.634, NYU Press

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• A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Morning, Heart, Cutting

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• Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.

  Stendhal

  Selfishness, Fool

  Stendhal (2016). “The Red and the Black”, p.331, Tyché

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• Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving, seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly, that, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me.

  Dante Alighieri

  Men, Beloved, Pleasure

  Dante Alighieri (2016). “The Divine Comedy. Longfellow's Translation.”, p.60, Dante Alighieri

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• Time has no meaning. I feel as if I have been left in the desert to die and am eagerly awaiting the vultures to begin their work and end my misery.

  Libba Bray

  Misery, Ends, Feels

  Libba Bray (2010). “A Great and Terrible Beauty”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

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• God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love.

  Graham Greene

  Running, Hate, Heart

  "The Collected Edition: The power and the glory".

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• An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Oasis, Boredom, Horror

  Charles Baudelaire (2012). “The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen: Selected Poems”, p.63, Courier Corporation

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