If this practice [of totalitarianism] is compared with […] [the desert] of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth.
The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms.
People find beauty in the desert. I don't know where they're looking because I haven't found it. It's ugly. It's nasty. It's dirt. It's desert. It's sand. It's rock. It's cactus. It's lizards and snakes.
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.
I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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.’
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.
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.
In my day, we had mastered high-intensity conflict, which is why I think we were so successful in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and then eventually the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.
I want to be a taxidermist! I wanna fill animals with sand. I wanna get more sand into an animal than anybody has ever bloody got in one. I wanna fill a rat with the entire Gobi Desert, so it’s really quite tight.
For me, exploration was a personal venture. I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. At heart I knew that to write or even to talk of my travels was to tarnish the achievement. I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples. I set myself a goal on these journeys, and, although the goal itself was unimportant, its attainment had to be worth every effort and sacrifice... No, it is not the goal but the way there that matters, and the harder the way the more worth while the journey.
Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare.
And all around is the desert; a corner of the mournful kingdom of sand.
I can't remember exactly the first thing I wrote, but one of the stories, was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a desert island, and the only other life on the island was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had... to survive, had taught itself to eat and get nutriments from sand. I guess, I've always been interested in adaptability and taking whatever life hands you and running with it.
They defended the grains of sand in the desert to the last drop of their blood.
... knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continually threatened with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of service must ever be at work, in order that the marble continue to lastingly shine in the sun. To these serving hands mine shall also belong.
It's only a world, after all, and they're just sand grains in the desert, worlds.