A Quote by Elizabeth Bowen

We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

Elizabeth Bowen

Quote Topics

Afford Cannot Desert How Live Must Suffer Those Us We Cannot

Quote Author

Elizabeth Bowen
Irish - Novelist
June 7, 1899 - February 22, 1973

How are we to live with the desert, in the desert, within the desert?

Magnus Larsson

I always thought that people who live in the desert are a little crazy. It could be that the desert attracts that kind of person, or that after living there, you become that. It doesn't make much difference. But now I've done my 40 years in the desert.

James Turrell

A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.

Hope Jahren

The serious person becomes handicapped, he creates barriers. He cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot celebrate. The very dimension of celebration disappears from his life. He becomes desert-like. And if you are a desert, you can go on thinking and pretending that you are religious but you are not.

Rajneesh

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.

Bruce Chatwin

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*.

Edward Abbey

If you can survive in the desert, you survive anywhere. I know more than anything life in desert. You can tell by looking at the dirt how long ago it rained, how hard it rained, how much water came through. You can by looking at a plant, a tree, from an animal's look. I can read the desert like I read my hand.

Waris Dirie

Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light -- a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.

John Muir

Those few members who desert the cause are abandoning an oasis to search for water in the desert.

Neal A. Maxwell

The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.

Edward Abbey

I will fill myself with the desert and the sky. I will be stone and stars, unchanging and strong and safe. The desert is complete; it is spare and alone, but perfect in its soltitude. I will be the desert.

Kiersten White

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

...to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself...the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.

Joanne Greenberg

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.

Kathleen Norris

I walked in a desert. And I cried, ‘Ah, God, take me from this place!’ A voice said, ‘It is no desert.’ I cried, ‘Well, But - The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.’ A voice said, ‘It is no desert.’