Desert Quotes - Page 13

• I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

  Brad Leithauser

  Air, Average, Long Ago

  "Reading Your Friends’ Novels" by Brad Leithauser, www.newyorker.com. January 07, 2013.

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• Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert? I think that in such a cse to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional but withal a great mercy.

  Abraham Lincoln

  War, Boys, Simple

  Abraham Lincoln, Don Edward Fehrenbacher (1977). “Abraham Lincoln, a Documentary Portrait Through His Speeches and Writings”, p.227, Stanford University Press

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• When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Philosophy, Angel

  Aldous Huxley (1956). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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• Science may have come a long way, but as far as religion is concerned, we are first cousins to the !Kung tribesmen of the Kalahari Desert. Except for the garments, their deep religious trances might just as well be happening at a revival meeting or in the congregation of a fundamentalist TV preacher.... As we move further from the life of ignorance and superstition in which religion has its roots, we seem to need it more and more.... Why has religion become a force just when we'd have thought it would be losing ground to secularism?

  Phil Donahue

  Religious, Cousin, Moving

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• In the high mountains and desert beings can affect you. Most aren't malicious, but some will lure you to your death.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Mountain, Malicious

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• If I wasn't in broadcasting I would like to grow a gigantic beard; and I would like to open a motorcycle garage somewhere in the desert in Nevada and I would disappear and work on bikes, make them really fast. I would love to just race motorcycles for a living if I could do it, but I'm just not that good at it so this is what I'm doing.

  George Stroumboulopoulos

  Race, Motorcycle, Beard

  "George Stroumboulopoulos: 'I like having good conversations with people'". CNN Interview, www.cnn.com. June 7, 2013.

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• The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches.

  Thomas Merton

  Today, Problem

  Thomas Merton (1966). “Raids on the Unspeakable”, p.19, New Directions Publishing

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• The desert is cold early in the morning. Laying down on that sand is like laying on a block of ice.

  Steven Michael Quezada

  Morning, Block, Ice

  "'Breaking Bad's' Gomez on 'Ozymandias': At Least 'I Didn't Get Melted in Acid' (Q&A)". Interview with Aaron Couch, www.hollywoodreporter.com. September 16, 2013.

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• Expediency is a law of nature. The camel is a wonderful animal, but the desert made the camel.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Animal, Law, Camels

  Benjamin Disraeli (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Benjamin Disraeli (Illustrated)”, p.3319, Delphi Classics

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• There are so many intellectual and moral angels battling for rationalism, good citizenship, and pure spirituality; so many and such eminent ones, so very vocal and authoritative! The poor devil in man needs all the support and advocacy he can get. The artist is his natural champion. When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.

  Aldous Huxley

  Angel, Artist, Men

  Aldous Huxley (1970). “Collected Works: Do what you will”

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• There can be no barrenness in full summer. The very sand will yield something. Rocks will have mosses, and every rift will have its wind-flower, and every crevice a leaf; while from the fertile soil will be reared a gorgeous troop of growths, that will carry their life in ten thousand forms, but all with praise to God. And so it is when the soul knows its summer. Love redeems its weakness, clothes its barrenness, enriches its poverty, and makes its very desert to bud and blossom as the rose.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Love, Summer, Flower

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• Happiness is much more equally divided than some of us imagine. One man shall possess most of the materials, but little of the thing; another may possess much of the thing, but very few of the material. In this particular view of it, happiness had been beautifully compared to the man in the desert--he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Happiness, Men, Views

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• Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness ... Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation.

  Ouida

  Angel, Passion, Rose

  Ouida (1896). “Views and Opinions”

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• Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.

  Honore de Balzac

  Voice, Soul, Certain

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• Dare we let children grow up with no vital contact with the Saviour, never intentionally and consciously put into His arms? Not to bring them to Him, not to teach them to walk toward Him, as soon as they can walk toward anyone, is wronging a child beyond words. The terrible indictment uttered by the Lord, "Them that were entering in ye hindered," and the millstone warning for offending little ones, are close akin to the deserts of those who ruin a man's whole day of life by wronging his morning hours. Not to help a child to know the saving power of Christ is to hold back a man from salvation.

  Maltbie Davenport Babcock

  Morning, Growing Up, Children

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• Observation made in the cloister or in the desert will generally be as obscure as the one and as barren as the other; but he that would paint with his pencil must study originals, and not be over-fearful of a little dust.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Dust, Littles, Study

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.6

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• The emigrant's way o'er the western desert is mark'd by
  Camp-fires long consum'd and bones that bleach in the sunshine.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Sunshine, Fire, Long

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• Vain-glorious man, when fluttering wind does blow
  In his light wing's, is lifted up to sky;
  The scorn of-knighthood and true chivalry.
  To think, without desert of gentle deed
  And noble worth, to be advanced high,
  Such praise is shame, but honour, virtue's meed,
  Doth bear the fairest flower in honourable seed.

  Edmund Spenser

  Flower, Blow, Men

  Edmund Spenser (1965). “Books I and II of the Faerie queene: the mutability cantos, and selections from the minor poetry”

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• A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.

  Washington Irving

  Mother, Brother, Children

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• The truly great rest in the knowledge of their own deserts, nor seek the conformation of the world.

  Alexander Smith

  Greatness, World

  Alexander Smith (1854). “Poems”, p.120

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• A great silence has descended on me for the last six months. I am as silent as an Arab in the desert, as dry, thirsty, and full of wonder and rumours which do not materialize into camels or travellers at all, but just vanish into the silent spaces from where they came. I expect this is a good thing though it is extremely irritating - the brink of a voice and never a voice.

  May Sarton

  Voice, Space, Silence

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• We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Survival, Suffering

  Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

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• The water-lily, in the midst of waters, opens its leaves and expands its petals, at the first pattering of the shower, and rejoices in the rain-drops with a quicker sympathy than the packed shrubs in the sandy desert.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Freedom, Rain, Water Lily

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• The deserts of the Middle East are in need of water, not bombers.

  Golda Meir

  Water, Middle East, Needs

  Golda Meir, Marie Syrkin (1973). “A land of our own: an oral autobiography”, Putnam Publishing Group

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• Texas liberals are the camels of good news. We can cross entire deserts between oases.

  Molly Ivins

  Oasis, Texas, Camels

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