Desert Quotes - Page 39

• The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Names, World, Maps

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Crossing: Book 2 of The Border Trilogy”, p.387, Vintage

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• The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Army, Sand, Passing

  Cormac McCarthy (2013). “The Border Trilogy”, p.424, Pan Macmillan

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• I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old man’s puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit until the two are one.

  Robertson Davies

  Wise, Men, Two

  Robertson Davies (1983). “The Deptford trilogy”, Penguin Mass Market

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• I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.

  William Saroyan

  Prayer, War, Home

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• At that moment, it seemed to him that time stood still, and the Soul of the World surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke — the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes met, as had theirs here at the well.

  Paulo Coelho

  Eye, Heart, Dark

  "The Alchemist". Book by Paulo Coelho, 1988.

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• 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, Children

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

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• In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Cat, Dark, Opposites

  Jerry Spinelli (2012). “The Stargirl Collection”, p.15, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• I salute to you Commander and I sneeze 'Cause I have Now an Allergy To your policies it seems Where have we gone wrong America? Mr. Lincoln we can't seem to find you anywhere out of the millions From the deserts To the mountains Over prairies To the shores Is this just the Madness of King George Yo George Is this just the Madness of King George Yo George Well you have the whole Nation on all fours.

  Tori Amos

  Kings, America, Mountain

  Song: Yo George, Album: American Doll Posse, 2007

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• Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

  W. H. Auden

  Healing, Heart, Night

  Another Time (1940) "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

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• Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

  Herman Melville

  Rain, Men, Rivers

  Herman Melville (2015). “Annotated Moby Dick or, the Whale with English Grammar Exercises: by Herman Melville (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, p.5, Powell Publications, LLC

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• For without you, I swear, the town Has become like a prison to me. Distraction and the mountain And the desert, all I desire.

  Rumi

  Spiritual, Desire, Mountain

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• Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

  Ted Dekker

  Reality, People, Drug

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• Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.

  Virginia Woolf

  Fall, Human Nature, Wilderness

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.190, Wordsworth Editions

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• Some mothers in today's world feel "cumbered" by home duties and are thus attracted by other more "romantic" challenges. Such women could make the same error of perspective that Martha made. The woman, for instance, who deserts the cradle in order to help defend civilization against the barbarians may well later meet, among the barbarians, her own neglected child.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Mother, Children, Home

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• When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.

  Blaise Pascal

  Atheist, Mean, Sleep

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• Use every man according to his desert and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity, the less they deserve ... the more merit in your bounty.

  William Shakespeare

  Men, Honor, Use

  William Shakespeare (2015). “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”, p.64, Hackett Publishing

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• The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

  W. H. Auden

  Land, Bed, Cracks

  Another Time (1940) "As I Walked Out One Evening"

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• A spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Spiritual, Despair, Emptiness

  "Papal Homily at Closing Mass in Sydney: 'May This 23rd World Youth Day Be Experienced as a New Upper Room'". Speech by Pope Benedict XVI given at the World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia, www.catholic-church.org. July 19, 2008.

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• The Bible is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live -- this lost world -- means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Mean, Here I Am, People

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• When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.

  Isaac Asimov

  Sea, Rivers, Advice

  Isaac Asimov (2009). “I, Asimov: A Memoir”, p.83, Bantam

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• Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand. Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation -- teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Art, Teaching, Land

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• I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.

  A. J. Jacobs

  Book, Utah, Should Have

  A. J. Jacobs (2004). “The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World”, p.56, Simon and Schuster

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• here in the summer desert, winter found my blood

  Dean Koontz

  Summer, Winter, Blood

  Dean Koontz (2016). “The Complete Odd Thomas 8-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Apocalypse, Odd Interlude, Deeply Odd, Saint Odd”, p.19, Bantam

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• They took it for granted that if they went he would go also, but really they scarcely cared. Thus children are ever so ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones.

  James M. Barrie

  Children, Novelty, Granted

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• After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. 'Fire up the kettle,' I told him. 'Ol'-fashioned skull boil at five p.m.

  David Sedaris

  Fire, Should Have, Skulls

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