Desert Quotes - Page 23

• A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses

  John Milton

  Memories, Men, Names

  1634 Comus, A Mask, l.204-8.

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• The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer; he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. When all other friends desert, he remains.

  George Graham Vest

  Dog, Selfish, Kissing

  "Best Speech; Faithful, Even in Death" by William Safire, www.nytimes.com. April 18, 1999.

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• That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.

  Samuel Beckett

  Love, Loneliness, Men

  Samuel Beckett, Björnstjerne Björnson, Pearl Stydenstricker Buck, Ivan Alekseevič Bunin (1971). “Samuel Beckett, Björnstjerne Björnson, Pearl Buck [and] Ivan Bunin”

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• In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Darkness, Add, Horizon

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1808). “Select Essays and Poems”, p.23

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• The eating of meat was unknown up to the big flood, but since the flood they have put the strings and stinking juices of animal meat into our mouths, just as they threw in front of the grumbling sensual people in the desert. Jesus Christ, who appeared when the time had been fulfilled, has again joined the end with the beginning, so that it is no longer allowed for us to eat animal meat.

  St. Jerome

  Jesus, Animal, People

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• At first, I thought 'this series is going to be all about death and desecration,' but instead became a more complex landscape of human relationships. I hope I put something of these feelings into the portraits that I made of the characters, which were landscapes in themselves. An irony in the subject of crystal meth is how beautifully it resembles the desert sky.

  Ralph Steadman

  Character, Sky, Feelings

  "The day when Bill Murray got festive and Belle & Sebastian went techno" by Sam Richards, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2014.

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• I can't use logic concerning my feelings, my feelings demand musical notes, violins, guitar solos, the stomping of feet, poetic language, metaphors, poetic lines about birds or deserts or tree-crowded forests.

  Noah Cicero

  Feet, Guitar, Bird

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• I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries. I have discovered, too, that there are fewer idiots at 3000 meters above sea level than down below.

  Jean Giono

  Sea, Levels, Crowds

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• The silken rush of woodland waters and the scoured shapes of the desert - these and countless other treasures we owe to those farsighted enough to have preserved the public lands that make up our inheritance.

  T. H. Watkins

  Nature, Land, Water

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• Sometimes it can be really hard in our fast paced society to slow ourselves down enough to begin to listen to God's voice. The dilemma exists in my position as well. To be a follower of Christ is to emulate Him. When He went off alone into the desert to pray, He was teaching a valuable lesson.

  Jon Foreman

  Teaching, Voice, Followers

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• We must find our way back to true nature. We must set ourselves to the task of revitalizing the earth. Regreening the earth, sowing seeds in the desert--that is the path society must follow.

  Masanobu Fukuoka

  Sowing, Tasks, Earth

  Masanobu Fukuoka (2013). “Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security”, p.16, Chelsea Green Publishing

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• The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in northeast Asia, the only airspace spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent.

  Barbara Demick

  Night, Dust, Korea

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• Always I shall be one who loves the wilderness:
  Swaggers and softly creeps between the mountain peaks; I shall listen long to the sea's brave music; I shall sing my song above the shriek of desert winds.

  Everett Ruess

  Song, Mountain Peaks, Wind

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• Just as water is the only thing that can relieve thirst in the desert, the provision of God's Word is the only thing that can satisfy our spiritual thirst.

  Jim George

  Spiritual, Water, Provision

  Jim George (2015). “A Man After God's Own Heart”, p.20, Harvest House Publishers

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• My dad, who was creative director in the '60s, always wore black jeans with black desert boots; he thought he was cool. He told me to buy a pair as well. I didn't like black, so I got the sand color, and I've been wearing them since college.

  Andy Spade

  Dad, College, Color

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• I've had the hat for four years and it keeps getting better with age. It's been in the ocean and the pool several times, yet refuses to be destroyed. The shape only improved with weathering. I bought several for my storefront in NYC, but it felt like a fish out of water in the city. It cries out for the California coastline and the arid deserts of Africa.

  Andy Spade

  Ocean, Years, Cities

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• Put any two people together and each will seek ways of feeling superior to the other. If a ship went down in the Pacific and a single sailor managed to swim to a desert island, would he be pleased to see, ten minutes later, another sailor emerging from the surf? Quite possibly - but only if the new arrival accepted that the first man was now a landed aristocrat while he himself was an illegal immigrant.

  Michael Foley

  Men, Islands, Two

  Michael Foley (2012). “Embracing the Ordinary: Lessons From the Champions of Everyday Life”, p.254, Simon and Schuster

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• Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.

  Roger Scruton

  Spiritual, Needs, Matter

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• When a building is about to fall down, all the mice desert it.

  Pliny the Elder

  Fall, Building, Mice

  'Historia Naturalis' bk. 8, ch. 103

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• New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.

  Harry Hershfield

  New York, Mutiny

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• You see layers as you look down. you see clouds towering up. You see their shadows on the sunlit plains, and you see a ship's wake in the Indian Ocean and brush fires in Africa and a lightning storm walking its way across Australia. You see the reds and the pinks of the Australian desert, and it's just like a stereoscopic view of all nature, except you're a hundred ninety miles up.

  Joseph P. Allen

  Ocean, Fire, Clouds

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• The earth itself assures us it is a living entity. Deep below surface one can hear its slow pulse, feel its vibrant rhythm. The great breathing mountains expand and contract. The vast sage desert undulates with almost imperceptible tides like the oceans. From the very beginning, throughout all its cataclysmic upthrusts and deep sea submergences, the planet Earth seems to have maintained an ordered rhythm.

  Frank Waters

  Nature, Travel, Ocean

  Frank Waters (1999). “Mountain Dialogues”, Swallow Press

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• All that the historians give us are little oases in the desert of time, and we linger fondly in these, forgetting the vast tracks between one and another that were trodden by the weary generations of men.

  J. A. Spender

  Men, Oasis, Track

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• Home. One place is just like another, really. Maybe not. But truth is it's all just rock and dirt and people are roughly the same. I was born up there but I'm no stranger here. Have always felt at home everywhere, even in Virginia, where they hate me. Everywhere you go there's nothing but the same rock and dirt and houses and people and deer and birds. They give it all names, but I'm at home everywhere. Odd thing: unpatriotic. I was at home in England. I would be at home in the desert. In Afghanistan or far Typee. All mine, it all belongs to me. My world.

  Michael Shaara

  Hate, Home, Rocks

  Jeff Shaara, Michael Shaara (2012). “The Civil War Trilogy 3-Book Boxset (Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels, and The Last Full Measure)”, p.501, Ballantine Books

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• She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome-the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Animal, Years, Numbers

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid”, p.35, Vintage

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