Beautiful Desert Quotes & Sayings

The future is always fairyland to the young. Life is like a beautiful and winding lane, on either side bright flowers, and beautiful butterflies and tempting fruits, which we scarcely pause to admire and to taste, so eager are we to hasten to an opening which we imagine will be more beautiful still. But by degrees, as we advance, the trees grow bleak; the flowers and butterflies fail, the fruits disappear, and we find we have arrived
to reach a desert waste. — George Augustus Henry Sala

Rita Vargas caught her breath - the dark was spilling out of the mountains as the sun vanished in the west. The deep purple/blue shadows spread out on the water of the Caribe. The ocean was shadowy, yet at the same time, glowing. The massif green on one side, and velvety black on the other. And below, the lights of the cities scattered and burned, white, yellow, white, looking like gems. Stars.
She still recalls it as one of the most beautiful sights she'd ever witnessed, as if the coast of Veracruz were somehow welcoming its sons home. It would have astounded the dead if the could have looked out the windows. Why would they ever have left such a beautiful home for the dry bones and spikes of the desert? If they could have seen what she saw, they might have stayed home. — Luis Alberto Urrea

Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mother's breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars. — Hermann Hesse

Spring advanced rapidly; the weather became fine, and the skies cloudless. It surprised me that what before was desert and gloomy should now bloom with the most beautiful flowers and verdure. My senses were gratified and refreshed by a thousand scents of delight, and a thousand sights of beauty. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

We are the desert winter's breath, cold and hopeless — Paul Pedroza

How do you view God in a desert? There's two types of birds. There's vultures, and there's hummingbirds. One lives off dead carcasses, rotting meat. The other lives off the beautiful, sweet, nectar in a particular flower, on a particular desert plant, in the same desert. They both find what they're looking for. Do you know - take it all the way back into the Old Testament - and the Muslim and you, we actually serve the same God. Allah, to a Muslim; to us, Abba Father, God. — Brian Houston

Cress?"
"It's beautiful out there."
A hesitation, before, "Could you be more specific?"
"The sky is gorgeous, intense blue color." She pressed her fingers to the glass and traced the wavy hills on the horizon.
"Oh, good. You've really narrowed it down for me."
"I'm sorry, it's just ... " She tried to stamp down the rush of emotion. "I think we're in a desert."
"Cactuses and tumbleweeds?"
"No just a lot of sand. It's kind of orangish-gold, with hints of pink, and I can see tiny clouds of it floating above the ground, like ... like smoke."
"Piles up in lots of hills?"
"Yes, exactly! And it's beautiful."
Thorne snorted. "If this is how you feel about a desert, I can't wait until you see your first real tree. Your mind will explode. — Marissa Meyer

I was fortunate enough, after many visits to many wonderful, weird people to come across Burt Rutan, who is a genius in the Mojave Desert. And SpaceShipOne was born and had three flights into space that won something called the X Prize. And from there, we're building SpaceShipTwo, which is ... a beautiful spaceship that is very, very, very nearly completed and will be ready from about next Christmas onwards to start taking people into space. — Richard Branson

A beautiful morning is not a guarantee for a beautiful afternoon! Just like a man of desert appreciates water, value well whatever beauty you have now! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

God, she was beautiful - my first image of the Orient - a woman such as only the desert poet knew how to praise: her face was the sun, her hair the protecting shadow, her eyes fountains of cool water, her body the most slender of palm-trees and her smile a mirage. — Amin Maalouf

What makes the desert beautiful,' said the little prince, 'is that somewhere it hides a well ... — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Whether it's a house or the stars or the desert, what makes them beautiful is invisible. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

She was beautiful in the way people call the desert beautiful, which is to say that although some people actually believed it, most of the time it was said in response to someone else's denigration of it. — Chris McCormick

When we are sad - at least I am like this - it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change. Your descriptions of the desert - that oceanic, endless glare - are terrible but also very beautiful. Maybe there's something to be said for the rawness and emptiness of it all. The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn. But when I think of you, it's as if you've gone away to sea on a ship - out in a foreign brightness where there are no paths, only stars and sky. — Donna Tartt

I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while. — Naguib Mahfouz

It is so beautiful to be loved as Laurie loves me; he isn't sentimental, doesn't say much about it, but I see and feel it in all he says and does, and it makes me so happy and so humble that I don't seem to be the same girl I was. I never knew how good and generous and tender he was till now, for he lets me read his heart, and I find it full of noble hopes and impulses and purposes, and am so proud to know it's mine. He says he feels as if he 'could make a prosperous voyage now with me aboard as mate, and lots of love for ballast.' I pray he may, and try to be all he believes me, for I love my gallant captain with all my heart and soul and might, and never will desert him while God lets us be together. Oh, Mother, I never knew how much like heaven this world could be when two people love and live for one another! — Louisa May Alcott

The day after we met," Fatima said, "you told me that you loved me. Then, you taught me something of the universal language and the Soul of the World. Because of that, I have become a part of you." The boy listened to the sound of her voice, and thought it to be more beautiful than the sound of the wind in the date palms. "I have been waiting for you here at this oasis for a long time. I have forgotten about my past, about my traditions, and the way in which men of the desert expect women to behave. Ever since I was a child, I have dreamed that the desert would bring me a wonderful present. Now, my present has arrived, and it's you." The — Paulo Coelho

-"This is incredible Ryn. It is. But-"
-"No." He turns around. "No buts. You think I'm going to hurt you? You think I'm going to get bored and run off with some Undergrounder the first chance I get? You obviously have no idea how amazing you are. You, Violet Fairdale, are incredible, and I want you. Every part of you. I want your stubbornness and your sarcasm and your competitive spirit. I want you challenging me and fighting beside me. I want to hold you and kiss you and so much more because there's no one else in the world who knows me like you do. You have always been the one for me, even when we couldn't stand each other. You're beautiful and hot and sexy all at once, and you're more intelligent than any girl I've met. I love the fact that I've known you all my life. It just feels right when you're beside me. It feel like I've been lost in the desert for years, and ... I've finally come home. — Rachel Morgan

Martin is always telling me to put all of this behind me, to get on with my life. But the thing is, before Jesse, I never really had a life. I had a routine. I did things. But aside from the accident" - he gestured with his prosthetic arm - "nothing ever happened to me. But she happened. And it was like a train wreck. It was big and painful and beautiful and every second mattered. You know what Beaudelaire said about love? It's 'an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.' But it's still an oasis. Our time together - that's the story of my life. Everything before her was just the boring setup. Like the first hour of a miniseries, the part that's just padding to stretch it out for three nights. And the time since she's gone - that's just been some sort of weird, dragged-out anticlimax. I can feel myself sitting in the audience watching my life and wondering, 'Why isn't this movie over? — Phoef Sutton

The angel tumbles down to Earth into my own personal realm of lust, hedonism and shame. With eyes the color of the ocean and her halo of fire burning as bright as the desert sun, she speaks to me. And while she is raw and sullied, tainted by this beautiful hell, her words breathe life into the darkest, loneliest parts of me. — S.L. Jennings

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

A movie I must have seen 10 times is 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.' It's an old movie, but still such a beautiful message. If I had only one film I could take on my computer on a desert island, I would take 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.' — Bertrand Piccard

That's what Alice liked about the desert, its constant relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once. — Joy Williams

Respect the man of noble races other than your own, who carries out, in a different place, a combat parallel to yours
to ours. He is your ally. He is our ally, be he at the other end of the world.
Love all living things whose humble task is not opposed in any way to yours, to ours: men with simple hearts, honest, without vanity and malice, and all the animals, because they are beautiful, without exception and without exception indifferent to whatever "idea" there may be. Love them, and you will see the eternal in the glance of their eyes of jet, amber, or emerald. Love also the trees, the plants, the water that runs though the meadow and on to the sea without knowing where it goes; love the mountain, the desert, the forest, the immense sky, full of light or full of clouds; because all these exceed man and reveal the eternal to you. — Savitri Devi

Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41) — Edward Abbey

It is terrifyingly beautiful," Julia said softly.
"Terrifying?"
"Nature at its most beautiful and most lethal. It is like standing on the edge of one of those lakes in Switzerland, so blue and so calm and so deep and so dangerous. You have the overwhelming urge to plunge in, even though you know the cold will kill you. This desert - your desert - it makes me want to walk into it and keep walking. You probably think I'm being ridiculously fanciful."
"I would not have put it in those words, but they are exactly how I feel about Qaryma. Terrifyingly beautiful. — Marguerite Kaye

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert. — Willa Cather

When I was little, I went to the Sahara desert and met an older woman with beautiful earrings that came all the way down to her stomach. She told me, 'For us Tuareg, jewelry is not meant for decoration. It absorbs negative energy that comes your way.' So think twice when you buy a vintage ring! — Sofia Boutella

She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever known. It was the beauty of a desert at dawn: a loveliness that filled my eyes, and crushed me into silent, unbreathing awe. — Gregory David Roberts

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls. — Edward Abbey

What makes a desert so beautiful is that it hides a well somewhere ... — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Any idiot can build bombs. Our Trinity sits not on some desert sand seared into glass at an abandoned, sad pillar of stones. It's in our heads and our hearts, it's in our genes, this beautiful, gorgeous marriage of money, freedom and ingenuity. — Bill Whittle

Broken aqueducts, left in the most picturesque and beautiful clusters of arches; broken temples; broken tombs. A desert of decay, sombre and desolate beyond all expression; and with a history in every stone that strews the ground. — Charles Dickens

And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release - out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know? — Carl Sandburg

She didn't know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn't know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful. — Michelle Tea

She was riding a camel, in the most beautiful desert, in the kingdom belonging to this most beautiful man. A man who thought she had the most delightful rear. A man who wanted to kiss her every bit as much as she wanted to kiss him. "I know that I will regret saying this, but at this moment in time, I think I could manage anything. — Marguerite Kaye

I have drawn people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance. — Marcel Duchamp

A tailwind, on the other hand, is one of the most beautiful experiences you can have on a bike. There's no wind in my ears, so I hear everything around me. The chain purrs sweetly as it pulls the gears under the coaxing of my legs. The soft hiss of my tires on the smooth hard pavement, the sound of little critters scurrying in the desert around me as I pass. Smells aren't as big a deal out here in the dry desert, but even the smells are more accessible in a tailwind, since I'm moving through air at a slower relative speed, and the smells linger around my face long enough to register and enjoy them.
Relative progress, speed, sights, smells, sounds. It all goes together to create a gestalt for the ride that's pure sweetness, and I never want it to end.
Hozho. — Neil M. Hanson

It is beautiful in a picture to wash the disciples' feet; but the sands of the real desert have no lustre in them to compensate for the servile nature of the occupation. — John Henry Newman

Rivulet, seek a better place for your limpid waters to reflect the brightness of the sun, for the desert will one day dry you up," the god of waters would have said, if perchance one existed. "Crows, there is more food in the forests than among rocks and sand," the god of the birds would have said. "Plants, spread your seeds far from here, because the world is full of humid, fertile ground, and you will grow more beautiful," the god of flowers would have said. — Anonymous

She was tired in her bones, but she rallied her energy one last time and told him of they years in Rifthold, of stealing Asterion horses and racing across the desert, of dancing until dawn with the courtesans and thieves and all the beautiful, wicked creatures in the world. And then she told him about losing Sam, and of that first whipping in Endovier, when she'd spat blood in the Chief Overseer's face, and what she had seen and endured in the following year. She spoke of the day she had snapped and sprinted for her own death. Her heart grew heavy when at last she got to the evening when the Captain of the Royal Guard prowled into her life, and a tyrant's son had offered her a shot at freedom. She told him what she could about the competition and how she'd won it, until her words slurred and her eyelids drooped. — Sarah J. Maas

When I'm standing in the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy place to me. — Terry Tempest Williams

If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona. When this giant new tap turned on, developers drew up plans to roll pink stucco subdivisions across the desert in all directions. The rest of us were supposed to rejoice as the new flow rushed into our pipes, even as the city warned us this water was kind of special. They said it was okay to drink but don't put it in an aquarium because it would kill the fish.
Drink it we did, then, filled our coffee makers too, and mixed our children's juice concentrate with fluid that would gag a guppy. Oh, America the Beautiful, where are our standards? — Barbara Kingsolver

And what is simplicity? It is the coming together of the true values of life. Snow is pretty because it has only one color. The sea is pretty because it appears to be a flat plane. The desert is beautiful because it seems to consist only of sand and rocks. However, when we look more closely at each of these things, we discover how profound and complete they are, and recognize their qualities. The simplest things in life are the most extraordinary. Let them reveal themselves. Consider — Paulo Coelho

We are an oasis in the desert, beautiful but doomed! — Clifford Lafrenier

The impression made upon them by the first view of a camel equipped and loaded for the desert. Custom, so fatal to other novelties, affects this feeling but little. At the end of long journeys with caravans, after years of residence with the Bedawin, the Western-born, wherever they may be, will stop and wait the passing of the stately brute. The charm is not in the figure, which not even love can make beautiful; nor in the movement, the noiseless stepping, or the broad careen. As is the kindness of the sea to a ship, so that of the desert to its creature. It clothes him with all its mysteries; — Lew Wallace

Through the window, I saw the beautiful world outside: the sky, the sun, the cacti, the rocks, and the dirt.
How I longed to return to it! I licked at the air, trying to smell the desert's delicious dusty scent, but could not. How was I able to see it without smelling it? Did humans control scents as well as the temperature and the waters?
Is that what windows were for, to keep out scents? Why did they wish to put invisible barriers between themselves and the world? — Patrick Jennings

Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window
or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one passion and four walls. — Willa Cather

Just like that - in one apocalyptic moment - simple and beautiful. A birth. But also a kind of death. Like lightning in a storm. In one flash of light, the whole desert was lit, and you could see the universe. That's what she had seen - the universe in the hands of a child feeling the face of a man. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

I used to sleep in the desert once every week, now it is every two weeks, most of the time alone. It's beautiful. What I enjoy is taking my food and cooking for myself. — Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

there is a type of flower that can bloom only in the desert of doubt. Faith that we elect to profess in the absence of certainty is an offering that is entirely free, unconditioned, and utterly authentic. Such a gesture represents our considered and chosen response to the universe, our assent to what we find beautiful and worthy and deserving of our risk. We — Terryl L. Givens

The desert at night was black and a strange madder-tinted silver; the sky was black, and the great contorted cliffs, and the vast expanses of sand that stretched out in all directions. But the red moon cast a pale crimson-tinged luminescence over everything, and far above the stars were glittering points of silver. — Rachel Neumeier

I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis, which is far more lush and beautiful after the desert crossing than it could possibly have been without it. — Madeleine L'Engle

The Moon was the most spectacularly beautiful desert you could ever imagine. Unspoilt. Untouched. It had a vibrancy about it and the contrast between it and the black sky was so vivid, it just made this impression of excitement and wonder. — Charles Duke

On a Bare Hill's Top...

On a bare hill's top, in the North, wild and cold,
A lone pine-tree somewhere stands;
She dozes, swaying, all covered by snow
With a mantel from feet to a head.

She sees in her dreams: in a faraway desert,
In lands where the sun enters skies,
Alone and sad, on a rock's sunburnt lather,
A beautiful palm-tree abides. — Mikhail Lermontov

I'm from Victorville - it's about an hour-and-a-half away from Los Angeles, up in the desert. They call it Victimville because it's kind of violent. It's a beautiful place, though. It's quiet. — Keith Stanfield

I sleep. In this room. In the dark. I have a place I can sleep. I have a chair. That's just beautiful. Oh, yeah. I like the desert. It's hot there in the desert, but it's clean. It's clean. — Howard Hughes

Don't be like the crowd that exists on Earth. They all have beautiful theories, beautiful dogmas, great philosophies, magnificent theologies, but all in their heads. They have not tasted anything, and they will die without actually knowing anything. Their whole lives will be simply a long desert where nothing grows, where nothing happens, where nothing is realized. — Osho

The grass and the vines and the willow tree were all so lush and vividly green that he was slightly awed by them. Their location within an alcove of a cliff made all of it more remarkable. It was such an unexpected place for something so beautiful, like an oasis in the middle of a barren desert. — Katie Lynn Johnson

The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen ... The desert is beautiful," the little prince added. And that was true. I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams ... "What makes the desert beautiful," said the little prince, "is that somewhere it hides a well ... " I was astonished by a sudden understanding of that mysterious radiation of the sands. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home too ... I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it. — Georgia O'Keeffe

As I've gotten older, I've wanted to represent Las Vegas more. Represent the Southwest. It's a magical place. The desert. I do understand people's criticisms, but it's a magical place and a beautiful city, even though there are a lot of things that are wrong with it. — Brandon Flowers

Going up north with the redwoods and driving along the coast, it's got everything, man. It's got the desert, the mountains, and the ocean. It's beautiful. — Chad Smith

I am sorry," I whispered to Reyes.
He wrapped his long fingers around my neck and buried his face in my hair. He smelled like a lightening storm. His emotions electricity. His body the desert after a rain. Fresh. Starkly beautiful. Dangerous.
"Are you okay?" he asked, his breath on my neck.
"I am now. — Darynda Jones