A Quote by Unknown
He'd always had a quickening of the heart when he crossed into Arizona and beheld the cactus country. This was as the desert should be, this was the desert of the picture books, with the land unrolled to the farthest distant horizon hills, with saguaro standing sentinel in their strange chessboard pattern, towering supinely above the fans of ocotillo and brushy mesquite.
Related Quotes
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.
The cardones cactus is very similar to saguaro cactus in Arizona. These cacti only grow in very specific, particular places.
A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.
You can't learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do.
I've crossed these sands many times," said one of the camel drivers one night. "But the desert is so huge, and the horizons so distant, that they make a person feel small, and as if he should remain silent." The boy understood intuitively what he meant, even without ever having set foot in the desert before. Whenever he saw the sea, or a fire, he fell silent, impressed by their elemental force.
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.
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.’
When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.
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.
The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil's fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo.
I grew up in Arizona. I love it. I'm a part of the desert. I feel like, really, I'm from the Sonoran Desert, which is - extends to both sides of the border. I'm really from that part of Mexico, also. And I hate that there's a fence, you know, running through it.
To wake in that desert dawn was like waking in the heart of an opal. ... See the desert on a fine morning and die - if you can!
I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.
Gradually I came to realize that the process of saving the desert of the human heart and revegetating the actual desert is actually the same thing.
I think it's important to understand that in the big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing.
For 'Avengers,' in the Albuquerque desert, we shot New York there. And I was standing on a platform, nine feet high... and it was the rooftop of a skyscraper in New York. And it was all desert around me!
