I'd had no particular interest in the Southwest at all as a young girl, and I was completely surprised that the desert stole my heart to the extent it did.
The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.
The sin of the desert is knowing where the water is and not sharing it.
The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one.
The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Spirit vibrated into matter; hence, both Spirit and matter exist. Matter, however, does not exist in the way that it appears to us. It exists as we see it owing to the delusive force of maya, which makes the indivisible Spirit seem finite and divisible to all appearances. Matter has existence in the same delusive way as does a mirage in the desert.
God never deserts a man, unless He is deserted by that man first. For even if a man shall have committed grievous sins once, twice, and a third time, God still looks for him, "so that he may be converted and live. "
Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, hungry nomads turn their herds out into fragile African rangeland, reducing it to desert, and small farmers in India and the Philippines cultivate steep slopes, exposing them to the erosive powers of rain. Perhaps half the world's billion-plus absolute poor are caught in a downward spiral of ecological and economic impoverishment. In desperation, they knowingly abuse the land, salvaging the present by savaging the future.
It is like being in the desert. At first you listen to the absence of sounds and call it silence. Then suddenly you may be taken by the presence of stillness where you are one with listening itself.
The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.
Although people rarely died playing Quidditch, referees had been known to vanish and turn up months later in the Sahara Desert.
But mayn't desertion be a brave thing? A fine thing? To desert a thing we've gone beyond - to have the courage to desert it and walk right off from the dead thing to the live thing - ?
You jackass. We're all going to die here. You know that, right?' Harrier said. Yeah," Eugens said shakily. '. . . Guess I might as well die here with you as out on the desert with a bunch of other jackasses.
Grace Kelly was a glacially cool, like a wonderful sherbet in the middle of the desert. Cooling, icy, clean. She was a genetic miracle, a superior woman.
Look at you, you madman! Screaming you are thirsty and dying in a desert, when all around you there is nothing but water!
Always expect trouble in the desert. Then you usually won't meet it.
I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.