Quotes & Sayings About Dunes

An early fly landed on Mara's eyelid.
She shooed it off with a dozy paw as she awakened to peachgold dawn stealing softly over the sleeping dunes.The land lay in a pool of serinity;the sand,now still and cool,awaited sun-warmed day.Somewhere a lark began trilling as it fluttered its morning ascent into the airy heights. — Brian Jacques

The day had begun sombrely in grey cloud and mist, but had ended in a pomp of scarlet and gold. Over the western hills beyond the harbour were amber deeps and crystalline shadows, with the fire of sunset below. The north was a mackerel sky of little, fiery golden clouds. The red light flamed on the white sails of a vessel gliding down the channel, bound to a Southern port in a land of palms. Beyond her, it smote upon and incarnadined the shining, white, grassless faces of the sand-dunes. — L.M. Montgomery

Love is the falcon's flight over your sands. Because for him, you are a green field, from which he always returns with game. He knows your rocks, your dunes, and your mountains, and you are generous to him. — Paulo Coelho

She preferred to lie up by the dunes with the waves bursting, to listen while they crashed like the final chords of a symphony except they went on and on. There was nothing as fine as that. — James Salter

I do not expect anyone will ever have the opportunity of constructing another course like Cypress Point, as I do not suppose anywhere in the world is there such a glorious combination of rocky coast, sand dunes, pine woods and cypress trees. — Alister MacKenzie

He struggled to find himself, struggled to talk, his head now filled with sand dunes and desert winds. - Who are you? he asked again, gasping for the words. She stared at him with eyes the color of dark amber, then lowered her mouth to his and kissed — Neil Gaiman

I never really liked weightlifting because there is no problem solving, whereas when I am fighting, I am trying to solve a problem, so I don't think about being tired. I box, wrestle, do jujitsu, run up sand dunes; every single day is something different so that I am mentally engaged. That's what makes me want to train longer. — Ronda Rousey

What is going on inside me I cannot tell. In the sky a thousand stars are magnetized, and I lie glued by the swing of the planet to the sand. A different weight brings me back to myself. I feel the weight of my body drawing me towards so many things. My dreams are more real than these dunes, than that moon, than these presences. My civilization is an empire more imperious than this empire. The marvel of a house is not that it shelters or warms a man, nor that its walls belong to him. It is that it leaves its trace on the language. Let it remain a sign. Let it form, deep in the heart, that obscure range from which, as waters from a spring, are born our dreams. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

So when their campfire was nothing but embers and the horses were dozing behind them, Ansel and Celaena lay on their backs on the side of a dune and stared up at the stars.
Her hands tucked behind her head, Celaena took a long, deep breath, savoring the balmy night breeze, the exhaustion ebbing from her limbs. She rarely got to see stars so bright - not with the lights of Rifthold. The wind moved across the dunes, and the sand sighed. "That's the stag," Celaena breathed. "The Lord of the North." ... the smile faded when she stared at the familiar constellation. "Because the stag remains constant - no matter the season, he's always there. — Sarah J. Maas

I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
And walking up the long beach all alone
I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder
As you and I once heard their monotone.
Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
The cold and sparkling silver of the sea
We two will pass through death and ages lengthen
Before you hear that sound again with me. — Sara Teasdale

Everybody needs to go to Mongolia just to see what it is to be a human being again. — Milla Jovovich

Why do we look to everyone else to see what to do? Why don't we understand that they're all as lost and scared as we are? Why do we look at a random consensus, shaped by opinions and powers that drift like dunes, as an absolute truth? If "normal" could change tomorrow, why are we such slaves to it? And where has "normal" gotten us, anyway? We live in a society that can't stop pollution or environmental destruction, that can't raise educational standards, can't stay healthy and non-obese, can't balance a budget, has no sense of fiscal responsibility, is in an economic tailspin, and is rife with crime and murder and violence. Most people in this "normal" society of ours begin sitting still in a room for six to eight hours beginning in childhood. They continue that for twelve years and then begin sitting still in a different room for another forty years, at which point they hope to retire and sit still in a chair in front of the TV until they die. — Johnny B. Truant

Robert Vavra is one of these artists, part magician, part alchemist, who is able to create a series of photographs in unforgettable compositions. Only visible are the dunes, the blinding fields of flowers and the vast sky, the epic intimacy of Robert Vavra's vision. — Peter Ustinov

Leamas saw. He saw the long road outside
Rotterdam, the long straight road beside the
dunes, and the stream of refugees moving
along it; saw the little aeroplane miles away,
the procession stop and look towards it; and
the plane coming in, nearly over the dunes;
saw the chaos, the meaningless hell, as the
bombs hit the road.
"I can't talk like this, Control," Leamas
said at last. "What do you want me to do? — John Le Carre

I thought, then, that I could see your own soul in the constant
waves tearing unconcerned at the impenetrable dunes.
I wanted, then, to believe the moon is a flower,
fragrant, its stem tossed across the water. It was then
that I entered some other world, the way your life wakes
suddenly in the middle of the night to find your own
worn-out dreams lying in sheets around you... — Richard Jackson

I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes. — Marisha Pessl

Now the Fates are here on the beach, three shadows blacker than black, walking through the dunes and looking for their own. Just shadows, lamb-white hands beneath black robes spun of tears, glide among the celebrants on this night wherein the spirits of Thebes have found a home, if serendipitously. — Janet Morris

Said Finn ... "Only remember, Clare. In a dream, what you want will come out, one way or the other. "
"So ... So I should be careful about what I want, then, right?"
"No, you can't be careful with what you want. Wanting isn't a pet who stays at your heels; it's a wild animal. You must become friendly with it. It will make an offer, and you will respond. Converse with what you want that way."
"So what should I try to want? What should I look for?"
"Never look for what you should want and desire, but what you do want and desire. You should know that from your poetry. It is the only way to 'make' true. What you desire will appear, no matter how you try to erase or recolor it."
"All right," said Clare. She turned her back on the ocean and the fire, and began to walk toward the dunes. — Katherine Catmull

My grandfather was an architect, and his father, and his father; one of them built houses only for millionaires in California, and that was where the family wealth came from, and one of them was certain that houses could be made to stand on the sand dunes of San Francisco, and that was where the family wealth went. — Shirley Jackson

I take golf trips with my brother or with friends. We usually go to Pebble or Bandon Dunes. One year we went to Hawaii. — Greg Maddux

Otherwise it was barren as a desert, just long dunes of brick and cement and slate and asphalt. — Peter Dickinson

What could we do, then? We asked ourselves the question while crossing the dunes. Live? It's precisely in this kind of situation that, crushed by the sense of their own insignificance, people decide to have children; this is how the species reproduces, although less and less, it must be said. — Michel Houellebecq

People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets. — Diane Ackerman

They were all day among the dunes and in the evening coming down from the last low sandhills to the plain below among catclaw and crucifixion thorn they were a parched and haggard lot man and beast. Harpie eagles flew up screaming from a dead mule and wheeled off westward into the sun as they led the horses out onto the plain. — Cormac McCarthy

The wind was just above them. It seemed to skim the tops of the surrounding dunes, bending the grass. But here the sun on his knees and on his forearm felt warm. — Alice McDermott

Dunes slithered slowly across the landscape like ravenous parasites, leeching the plants of their nutrients, leaving behind withered husks. The sand rode the wind currents, swirling like dervishes. The worst, though, were the monster wind storms that raked the land, prefaced by a wall of sand reaching a mile or so into the sky, bringing the blackness of night. — J.R. McLemore

The wind was off shore, and only broke the sea's surface in to long, silvery ripples, and sent sheeny shadows flying out across it, from every point and headland, like transparent wings. The dusk was hanging a curtain of violet gloom over the sand-dunes and the headlands where gulls were huddling. The sky was faintly filmed over with scarfs of silken vapor. Cloud fleets rode at anchor along the horizons. An evening star was watching over the bar. — L.M. Montgomery

And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. 'Do not look behind you...lest you be swept away.' That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot's wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday's met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes. — Barbara Davis

By the time we reach the stretch of dunes that lead to Nur, the moon is high, the galaxy a blaze of silver above. But we are all exhausted from fighting the wind. Izzi's walk has deteriorated to a stumble, and both Keenan and I pant in tiredness. Even Elias struggles, stopping short enough times that I begin to worry for him. "I — Sabaa Tahir

The best place for discovering what a man is is the heart of the desert. Your plane has broken down, and you walk for hours, heading for the little fort at Nutchott. You wait for the mirages of thirst to gape before you. But you arrive and you find an old sergeant who has been isolated for months among the dunes, and he is so happy to be found that he weeps. And you weep, too. In the arching immensity of the night, each tells the story of his life, each offers the other the burden of memories in which the human bond is discovered. Here two men can meet, and they bestow gifts upon each other with the dignity of ambassadors. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Professor Khupe rubbed his hand along the sand dunes of her windswept form. The static charge made her skin feel like the surface of a cactus. He recoiled. How he wished he had gone into the priesthood when he had had the chance. Embracing celibacy was far easier than battling the consequences of shunning it. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year. — Henry Beston

Cloves

Where is the scent of cloves coming from?
her hair?
armpit?
or her dress
thrown on the Tunisian rug?
From the third step in the house?
Layla
makes everything smell of cloves.
Layla
is the orchard when it's wet.
She is
what the orchard breathes
when it's watered at night.
Layla knows now
that I am drunk with the scent of cloves,
she stiches together my clouds
and then scatters them together
in a sky like a sheet
as she clasps me.
Layla
feels that my fingers are numb,
over the dunes she knows
my pulse is hers,
my water is hers.
Layla
leaves me sleeping,
rocking between clouds
and cloves. — Saadi Youssef

And down the dunes a thousand guns lie crouched,Unseen, beside the flood -Like tigers in some Orient jungle crouchedThat wait and watch for blood.Meanwhile, through streets still echoing with trade,Walk grave and thoughtful men,Whose hands may one day wield the patriot's bladeAs lightly as the pen. — Henry Timrod

They had nothing to eat but Ryan's food, and they ate little of that because it was so dry, but it seemed to sustain them. Their greatest worry was water. Though they drank only a little each day, Westerly's flask was empty and the bottle in Cally's pack now only half-full.
"I wish I was a camel," Cally said.
Westerly said, "I wouldn't want
to spend this much time with a girl who looked like a camel."
She tried to laugh, but her tongue felt thick in her mouth, and her mind full of hopelessness. "When this is gone, we shall just die of thirst."
"We'll be out of the dunes by then," Westerly said encouragingly. But he knew that the mountains, though nearer now on the hazy horizon, were far more than a day's walk away. — Susan Cooper

The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That's the way it will be with our love for each other — Paulo Coelho

As it turned out, the sachem had been dead wrong.
The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old women in charge of the children, he had apologized for this error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come.
They would come with languages that sounded like a dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred place and worship a dull, unimaginative god.
They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth's soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable.
It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples. — Toni Morrison

And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes. — Mary Oliver

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tried to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger. — Anna Quindlen

Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland. — P. J. O'Rourke

Best of Death Valley Attraction: Zabriskie Point Runner-up: Titus Canyon 2nd Runner-up: The Racetrack 3rd Runner-up: Dante's View 4th Runner-up: Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes — Michael Joseph Oswald

If your voice could overwhelm those waters, what would it say?
What would it cry of the child swept under, the mother
on the beach then, in her black bathing suit, walking straight out
into the glazed lace as if she never noticed, what would it say of the father
facing inland in his shoes and socks at the edge of the tide,
what of the lost necklace glittering twisted in foam?
If your voice could crack in the wind hold its breath still as the rocks
what would it say to the daughter searching the tidelines for a bottled message
from the sunken slaveships? what of the huge sun slowly defaulting into the clouds
what of the picnic stored in the dunes at high tide, full of the moon, the basket
with sandwiches, eggs, paper napkins, can-opener, the meal
packed for a family feast, excavated now by scuttling
ants, sandcrabs, dune-rats, because no one understood
all picnics are eaten on the grave? — Adrienne Rich

If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain. If you're not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain. If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape. I'm the lady you've looked for, write to me, and escape. — Rupert Holmes

And as anxious as he was to fulfill this vision, Pug knew that musings were rewarded after patient waiting because things always happen for a reason and not before the time is right. — Jackson Dunes

When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom - goddammit! - herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon! - by God, yes! Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers — Edward Abbey

It's hard to explain, but it's related to me know that for every moment of beauty this place gives me, I probably miss a thousand more. And I want them all. I swear I'd live on the dunes if I could. I was born out of my time. I should have been around during the end of the eighteenth century, when the Romantic Era kicked off, and writers and artists were obsessed with nature: the ocean, the mountains, the sky. And they believed in following their own path, experimenting, not blindly obeying rules.
I found a quote by Henry David Thoreau- "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life" ... It made me cry. Urgency is so beautiful. — Kirsty Eagar

She smiled at his flirtations. "Have I ever told you how incorrigible you are?"
He chuckled. "Several times. But I do have some redeemable qualities. Don't you think?"
She kissed him lightly on the lips. "You sure do."
"Name one."
"Well!" Amelia tapped her forehead as if to think. Do you mean besides being so irresponsible that it drives me crazy? Well, I have to say that you're not bad to look at. That why I keep you around."
A smile was playing at the corners of Rick's lips and a mischievous glint appeared in his eyes. Without warning, he pulled her into his arms and gave a kiss to remember. — Linda Weaver Clarke

I think the Netherlands will become one big city at a point. It is inevitable when you live in a country with so many people. You cannot afford to leave nature as it is. Some people believe that the dunes should be left in their original state, but I think it's strange to let things become how they were 500 years ago. — Theo Jansen

Chaos awaited him on the beaches near Arzew. An unanticipated westerly set had pushed the transports and landing craft off course. Dozens of confused coxswains tacked up and down the coast in the dark, looking for the right beaches. Most of the soldiers carried more than 100 pounds of equipment; one likened himself to a medieval knight in armor who had to be winched into the saddle. Once ashore, feeling the effect of weeks aboard ship with a poor diet and little exercise, they staggered into the dunes, shedding gas capes, goggles, wool undershirts, and grenades. Landing craft stranded by an ebb tide so jammed the beaches that bulldozers had to push them off, ruining their propellers and rudders. The — Rick Atkinson

They walked side by side along the dark beach toward Monterey, where the lights hung, necklace above necklace against the hill. The sand dunes crouched along the back of the beach like tired hounds, resting: and the waves gently practiced at striking, and hissed a little. The night was cold and aloof, and its warm life was withdrawn, so that it was full of bitter warnings to man that he is alone in the world, and alone among his fellows; that he has no comfort owing him from anywhere. — John Steinbeck

The canyon country does not always inspire love. To many it appears barren, hostile, repellent - a fearsome mostly waterless land of rock and heat, sand dunes and quicksand, cactus, thornbrush, scorpion, rattlesnake, and agaraphobic distances. To those who see our land in that manner, the best reply is, yes, you are right, it is a dangerous and terrible place. Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noonday sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently. — Edward Abbey

Books lay on the floor in literary dunes. — Chris Columbus

Once back home I would adjust my lens to the resolution through which I perceived the people and provinces of the globe. My daily commute, the supermarket check out line, neighborhood walks, pedestrian tasks of any job would inspire me as much as the stir of white linen canopies in Venice's Piazza San Marco; the velvety dunes of the eastern Sahara; Bali's kaleidoscope of color; my Vietnamese sisters. — Gina Greenlee

Just as the sand-dunes, heaped one upon another, hide each the first, so in life the former deeds are quickly hidden by those that follow after. — Marcus Aurelius

When the cities are gone and all the ruckus has died away. when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways. when the Kremlin & the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents, & other such shit heads. when the glass-aluminum sky scraper tombs of Phoenix, AZ barely show above the sand dunes. why then, by God, maybe free men & wild women on horses can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom ... and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon! — Edward Abbey

As you wake up to sort of Morocco coming to life, and you drive a two hour journey through the desert as the sun is rising over the sand dunes ... I saw landscapes and visual stuff that I'll never forget. It was special. — Jim Sturgess

What she knew was sand and wind and innumerable stars. The rumble in a camel's throat as it swayed over shifting dunes, its trappings jingling in time with its steps beneath her. She knew the sting of thirst and the taste of dried fruit, the glare of sun and the frigid, bone-numbing cold of the air when the sun gave her throne over to the moon. She knew that, to survive, one must often revise one's caliber, and one must completely depend upon Jesus Christ. — V.S. Carnes

There is a saying in the Middle East that goes something like this: "My grandfather rode a camel, my father drove a car, I travel on a jet, and my grandchild will ride a camel." Not necessarily. The deserts of the Middle East and North Africa have more solar potential per square inch than any other region in the world - more energy potential, in fact, than all of the oil ever extracted from deep beneath its sand dunes. The — Jeremy Rifkin

The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn - an illusion still in the land - rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence. — N. Scott Momaday

The house had a private walk down to a private spit of beach, and in the mornings the four of them would troop downhill and swim - even he did, in his pants and undershirt and an old oxford shirt, which no one bothered him about - and then lie on the sand baking, the wet clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea. — Hanya Yanagihara

But, don't you see, since we happened to have M. de Cambremer here, and he is a Marquis, while you are only a Baron ... " "Pardon me," M. de Charlus replied with an arrogant air to the astonished Verdurin, "I am also Duc de Brabant, Damoiseau de Montargis, Prince d'Oloron, de Carency, de Viareggio and des Dunes. However, it is not of the slightest importance. Please do not distress yourself," he concluded, resuming his subtle smile which spread itself over these final words: "I could see at a glance that you were not accustomed to society. — Marcel Proust

The morning was fresh from the rain. The smell of the tide pools was strong. Sweet odors came from the wild grasses in the ravines and from the sand plants on the dunes. I sang as I went down the trail to the beach and along the beach to the sandspit. I felt that the day was an omen of good fortune. It was a good day to begin my new home. — Scott O'Dell

We had, as men, time
So our thirst could slowly be satisfied,
the ancestral longing to enumerate things and sum them up,
to render them into dust,
dunes of numbers — Pablo Neruda

There's something incredibly sexy about sand and sweat and dunes photographed like women's backs. — Kristin Scott Thomas

see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, — Katherine Mansfield

Incredibly, almost every hotel I ever played in Vegas was blown up shortly afterward: The Dunes, The Sands, The Landmark, The Aladdin, The Frontier, The Hacienda, The Stardust - all were imploded. — Elayne Boosler

Today, I declare your rule to be at its end. Your cities are not your cities. Your vessels are not your vessels. Your planets are not your planets. They were built by us. And they belong to us, the common trust of man. Now we take them back. Never mind the darkness you spread, never mind the night you summon, we will rage against it. We will howl and fight till our last breath, not just in the mines of Mars, but on the shores of Venus, on the dunes of Io's sulfur seas, in the glacial valleys of Pluto. We will fight in the towers of Ganymede and the ghettos of Luna and the storm-stricken oceans of Europa. And if we fall, others will take our place, because we are the tide. And we are rising." Then — Pierce Brown

His life was crowded , public and impersonal as a city square. The friend of humanity had no single private friend. People came to him; he came close to no one. He accepted all. His affection was golden, smooth and even, like a great expanse of sand; there was no wind of discrimination to raise dunes; the sands lay still and the sun stood high.
Toohey. — Ayn Rand

Raised herself on one round elbow and looked out on a tiny river like a gleaming blue snake winding itself around a purple hill. Right below the house was a field white as snow with daisies, and the shadow of the huge maple tree that bent over the little house fell lacily across it. Far beyond it were the white crests of Four Winds Harbour and a long range of sun-washed dunes and red cliffs. — L.M. Montgomery

You have been here before.

The highway winding north through dark New England forests. White dunes towering above the sides of the road, looking like the moon.

You can come back. Even after you hurt each other too deeply to comprehend. Even after the impossible becomes just that. Too far out of reach even to dream.

Love remembers the places where it touched down, left an invisible trail on your bodies. Follow it back. You can follow it back to them. — Kate Scelsa

The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints ... — Simone De Beauvoir

I've had a reoccurring dream about hanging out with Britney Spears, so maybe it would be fun to chill with her for a bit? Like, see what makes her tick. I had this dream once about Britney, that we were going to get married or something, and so I had to meet her parents but we were stuck on a beach in these sand dunes - and at this point between the dreams and self-portrait, you know way too much about me. — Gabriel Mann

The truth for a man, it's what makes him a man. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The air was cool and soft. The desert looked empty from our great height, enough to believe the geographers and travel writers who tell of the terrible desert life, the stillness, harshness, and death. I lay against the cold sand, tiny grains dancing fast and furious across my skin. I saw insects and scorpions, the line of a snake. Mohammed said the dunes moved millimeters a day. They inched across the desert floor toward the ocean. I smiled. The geographers were blind. — C. Lynn Murphy

Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes cliched. And vice versa. — Ella Leya

If you like making love at midnight in the dunes of the cape, you're the love that I've looked for, come with me and escape. — Rupert Holmes

To a person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there's no sand. At least not the sort of sand you find at the beach. The ground does have a sandy color to it, or gray, but your feet won't sink in. It's hard, as if it's been tamped. And pebbly. And glinting with
what else
mica. — Jerry Spinelli

Fermi thought plutonium production needed an area a mile wide and two miles long for safety. Compton proposed building piles of increasing power to work up to full-scale production and was considering alternative sites in the Lake Michigan Dunes area and in the Tennessee Valley. — Richard Rhodes

People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. "Stephen," they say, accusingly, "you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited. — Stephen Fry

Still all "realities" and "fantasies" can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses - pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind. — Italo Calvino

Lily liked the fog, and didn't even mind the cold wind. She reckoned that Ocean Beach, the dunes there, and the Sunset were the closest San Francisco was going to come to the foreboding, wind-swept moors of England, where she had aspired to suffer romance and heartache when she was a kid. The foghorn, however, rather than a lonesome lament that conjured images of Heathcliff's dark figure, waiting with clenched jaw on the moor for her to bring light and warmth into his life, sounded like a distressed moose tied up in her neighbor's garage, having his nut sack singed with jumper cables at a precise interval calculated to keep her from falling asleep. Which, in turn, made her think of what complete douche bags people could be when all you wanted to do was borrow a defibrillator. Then she was awake and angry. — Christopher Moore

Your anger was a climate I inhabited like a desert in a dry frigid weather of high thin air and ivory sun, sand dunes the wind lifted into stinging clouds that blinded and choked me where the only ice was in the blood. — Marge Piercy

The trebling of the population in this small and impoverished country, flowing with milk and honey but not with sufficient water, rich in rocks and sand dunes but poor in natural resources and vital raw materials, has been no easy task: Indeed, practical men, with their eyes fixed upon things as they are, regarded it as an empty and insubstantial utopian dream. — David Ben-Gurion

And Will knew what it was to see his daemon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra's fingers putting the fruit between his lips under the gold-and-silver trees; her warm mouth pressing against his; his daemon being torn from his unsuspecting breast as they entered the world of the dead; and the sweet rightfulness of her coming back to him at the edge of the moonlight dunes. — Philip Pullman

He immediately began to de-privatize. He revoked the licences to the unpopular Imperial Continental Gas Association and fashioned it into a company owned by the municipality. The same happened with the water pipeline over the dunes and the Amsterdamse Omnibus Maatschappij (Amsterdam Omnibus Company), which had run a number of horse-drawn trams in the city since 1875. In doing all this, Treub instigated an evolutionary process that was to give a lasting social basis to city policy. From — Geert Mak

Her shadow crossed the dunes, smaller now. Ahead lay the south desert, limitless. Soon she turned slowly, with the sun swinging across the port wing-tip, and headed west as they had planned. — Elleston Trevor