Red Desert Quotes & Sayings

And the wind blows, the dust clouds darken the desert blue, pale sand and red dust drift across the asphalt trails and tumbleweeds fill the arroyos. Good-bye, come again. (p. 34) — Edward Abbey

The desert to us is tohu wabohu, a place of chaos that is unformed and unfilled. When we crossed the Red Sea, Yahweh had promised us that he would crush the heads of Leviathan and Rahab and create the heavens and the earth out of the chaos. This was another way of saying that Yahweh would establish his kingdom covenant order out of the disorder and lawlessness that was Canaan. Sending the goat out into the desert to Azazel, was not an offering to the damnable goat demon, but rather it was a banishment of Israel's sin to the realm of chaos outside Yahweh's kingdom - the same realm of Azazel. — Brian Godawa

She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It's that kind of story. — Catherynne M Valente

The problem isn't that I'm uncomfortable with it, the problem is that I want it!" I yelled. It was official; I'd lost it. Oh well, I wasn't known for having a long fuse.
"Are you happy? Jesus. You say something like that and then expect me to just be whatever about it. That's like teasing someone with a giant red velvet cake and then putting it in one of those glass rotating desert thingies." I wasn't my most eloquent at the moment.
"Does this mean I'm the cake?"
"Shut up, it was a metaphor."
"So you want me?"
So much it hurt. "Yes," I whispered.
"Right now?"
"Yes."
"Oh." Now he was the one who sounded nervous.
"It's just... a surprise."
"I told you I would entertain the idea."
"I know. I just didn't think you'd be so enthusiastic so soon."
"Hunter, I'm a virgin. Not a nun."
He didn't talk for a moment.
"That was the sexiest thing you've ever said. God, why do you do this to me? — Chelsea M. Cameron

Adam Larey gazed with hard and wondering eyes down the silent current of the red river upon which he meant to drift away into the desert — Zane Grey

Celaena had a sudden moment of clarity then, as her hair ripped from her braid and the wind tore at her clothes. Of all the girls in all the world, here she was on a spit of beach in the Red Desert, astride an Asterion horse, racing faster than the wind. Most would never experience this - she would never experience anything like this again. And for that one heartbeat, when there was nothing more to it than that, she tasted bliss so complete that she tipped her head back to the sky and laughed. — Sarah J. Maas

I met Pendragon when I made the journey to the far desert. He is from the tribe known as ... as ... " Loor was scrambling. Bokka didn't know about the Travelers. I had to bail her out.
Yankees," I said. "The Yankees tribe." Hey, what can I say? It was the first thing that came to mind. "It's a strong tribe," I added. "Respected by all ... except for our mortal enemies, the Sox tribe. They hate us. Especially the Red ones. Cannibals. Nasty characters. — D.J. MacHale

Why didn't I know about Sedona before? Why did no one tell me? It's breathtaking. It's ... indescribable.
Well, all right, not literally indescribable. You can describe it. You can say, There are these huge red sandstone rocks everywhere, jutting up from the desert, making you feel all tiny and insignificant. You can say, There's a kind of rawness to the landscape which gives you goosebumps. You can say, There's a solitary bird of prey hanging above us, high in the sky, which seems to put all of humankind into perspective.
You can say all that. But it's not the same as being there. — Sophie Kinsella

The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying 'welcome, most welcome' and drowning each other in tea until the end of time. — Tony Horwitz

Ansel smiled, a winning grin. "Half of them are on their way there now. Ready to join with Terrasen. The country of my friend Celaena Sardothien, who did not forget it, even when she was in the Red Desert; and who did not stop looking north every night that we could see the stars. There was no greater gift I could offer to repay her than saving the kingdom she did not forget. And that was before I got her letter months ago, telling me who she was and that she'd gut me if I didn't assist in her cause. I was on my way with my army already, but . . . then the next letter arrived. Telling me to go to the Gulf of Oro. To meet her here and follow a specific set of instructions. — Sarah J. Maas

The red Sahara in an angry glow, / With amber fogs, across its hollows trailed / Long strings of camels, gloomy-eyed and slow ... — Jean Ingelow

For a second it looked like a mortal horse. The next it was pure sand. Shifting from bright gold to violent red, fire and sun in a windswept desert. — Alwyn Hamilton

Under a red desert sky all thought seems superfluous. — Marty Rubin

The sand of the desert is sodden red, --
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; --
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! play up! and play the game! — Henry Newbolt

The curly red lines across the African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces, would leave just one small desert for me. — Rosita Forbes

When you give your master his letter, also give him this. And tell him that in the Red Desert, we do not abuse our disciples. — Sarah J. Maas

Just as Mars - a desert planet - gives us insights into global climate change on Earth, the promise awaits for bringing back to life portions of the Red Planet through the application of Earth Science to its similar chemistry, possibly reawakening its life-bearing potential. — Buzz Aldrin

I can only tell where I feel most at home, which is in the erosional landscape of the red rock desert of southern Utah, where the Colorado River cuts through sandstone and the geologic history of the Earth is exposed: our home in Castle Valley. — Terry Tempest Williams

I read more widely. I made friends more widely. I wore more red. I stayed home on Sundays. I did things that were never in the realm of possible things to do before. That was a real desert experience for me. — Barbara Brown Taylor

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed. — T.E. Lawrence

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

Our Lord has sovereignly ordained that our refining process take place as we go through difficulties, not around them. The Bible is filled with examples of those who overcame as they passed through the desert, the Red Sea, the fiery furnace and ultimately the cross. God doesn't protect Christians from their problems - he helps them walk victoriously through their problems.4 — Gary L. Thomas

We flew out of the city and we landed on the page where Moses split the sea and the Jews marched between those suspended mountains of water, hovering, humming on both sides, and the poor expelled merchants wondered if Moses knew what the fuck he was doing. What if his hand got tired and he accidentally dropped his magic cane, or got distracted by a wet desert ass, or lost his sandals, or what if that lush single malt of a God changed his mind again and the fucking Red Sea closed in on them with its menstrual red liquid? — Rawi Hage

The girl who'd taken on a Pirate Lord and his entire island, the girl who'd stolen Asterion horses and raced along the beach in the Red Desert, the girl who'd sat on her own rooftop, watching the sun rise over Avery, the girl who'd felt alive with possibility ... that girl was gone. — Sarah J. Maas

APPROACH
Rain is falling. Winter approaches. I drive towards it. In the slow rain. In the semi-darkness. Cello music is playing in the car. The deep sad sound of the cello. It almost swamps me. Routine endeavours to swamp me. The everyday paying of bills.
But I paint men walking in a city of icebergs and crystal. Some of the icebergs are red. I paint a woman swimming in green wavy water. Surrounded by desert mesas. Bright orange in the sunlight. With darker orange for shadows. I paint two people. With purple and pink and yellow and blue circles overlapping the boundaries of their bodies. Dancing.
Life is not ordinary. When I see you tonight I will press my lips to your eyelids. Each one in turn. I will rub my fingertips over the skin on the back of your hands and around your wrists. I will sigh. I will growl. I will whinny. I will gallop into your smile. One sharp foot after the other. — Jay Woodman

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. — Steven Soderbergh

She never had many friends, and the ones she had often disappointed her. Sometimes with devastating consequences, as she'd learned that summer with the Silent Assassins of the Red Desert. After that, she'd sworn never to trust girls again, especially girls with agendas and power of their own. Girls who would do anything to get what they wanted. — Sarah J. Maas

The planet's famous red colour is from iron oxide coating everything. So it's not just a desert. It's a desert so old it's literally rusting. — Andy Weir

Turn up the radio. Turn up the tape machine. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the windows down for a better taste of the cool desert wind. Ah yes. This is what it's all about. Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapple-red convertible ... stoned, ripped, twisted ... Good People. — Hunter S. Thompson

Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous. — Nevada Barr

I remember being in the mood for love at the slightest provocation- your nubile body feeling undeniably illicit, under mine, rhyming, heaving, breathing together, each other, squirrel hands, down and across and stolen kisses, on and not on the lips. Then leaving scorching beds the color of the red desert sun and strawberry flavored. Your mysterious skin, salt lips: touching, each other. My libido, your mascara- getting all messed up in those rains, realizing for the first time that lust gnaws had no language, race, religion or brotherhood.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') — Kunal Sen

But every town had been promising. Every place at first had said, Here you go- You can live here. You can rest here. You can fit. The enormous skies of the Southwest, the shadows that fell over the desert mountains, the innumerable cacti- red-tipped, or yellow-blossomed, or flat-headed- all this had lightened him when he first moved...
...But as with them all, the same hopeful differences--...-- they all became places that sooner or later, one way or another, assured him that he didn't, in fact, fit. — Elizabeth Strout

I was inspired by [Michelangelo] Antonioni's Red Desert - very big and moody. — Lykke Li

Do you see the Field of Mars, where I walked next to my bride in her white wedding dress, with red sandals in her hands, when we were kids?"
"I see it well."
"We spent all our days afraid it was too good to be true, Tatiana," said Alexander. "We were always afraid all we had was a borrowed five minutes from now."
Her hands went on his face. "That's all any of us ever has, my love," she said. "And it all flies by."
"Yes," he said, looking at her, at the desert, covered coral and yellow with golden eye and globe mallow. "But what a five minutes it's been. — Paullina Simons

My home is a red desert that trembles with spirits and bones.

There are two reasons I came here: my father's death, and the lion man who prowled my dreams. Perhaps it was coincidence, but a man--half wild, ravenous beyond words--slid from the dream world into the mud of the waking one the same year my father left this world for another.

Ghosts. Paw prints. I have tried to stay put. — Amy Irvine

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. — Liu Cixin

Tell me,' I said. 'Tell me when you notice me.'
I notice you going into church,' Joshua said. 'I notice your hair, how blond it is. But how in some light it looks like it has red in it. I notice the way you smell when we're close. And the way you walk when we're headed home from church and your family gets out of the Temple first. I notice how you are with your family and how you hold your little sisters. I've seen you stand out on your doorstep and look across the desert. I've watched you walk toward the Compound fence and then on past that. You've been walking for years. — Carol Lynch Williams

What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. On — Liu Cixin

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

Rising, the woman who had carried the jar began to dance to the music of the rebab, fevered music that was like to the flashing of the recurved blade she flourished aloft. Ever the chimings of the red-gold finger cymbals slipped through, around, and over the exigent strains, and in a minute or three (though it had grown dark) the fluting notes of a syrinx joined them, an eerie piping, more distant far in time than space, that railed against death and the desert, and like a child forlorn sobbed of wildflowers. "Flitting — Gene Wolfe

She had believed she could love Sam and not pay the price. Everything has a price, she'd once been told by a Spidersilk merchant in the Red Desert. How right he was. — Sarah J. Maas