Arid Environment Quotes

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.

You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.

Water is the true wealth in a dry land.

The prime communities of the Southwest are survival communities. Their sustenance is governed by rainfall and wind direction. You can study little enclaves of plant materials, how they huddle together for protection. Some are nurse crops.

The Big Cactus. I will stick you.

They are again in the dirt in the desert.

Nothing grows among its pinnacles; there is no shade except under great toadstools of sandstone whose bases have been eaten to the shape of wine glasses by the wind. Everything is flaking, cracking, disintegrating, wearing away in the long, inperceptible weather of time. The ash of ancient volcanic outbursts still sterilizes its soil, and its colors in that waste are the colors that flame in the lonely sunsets on dead planets.

We were just covered in dirt the whole time. It was so hot - and that was in winter. I can not imagine what it's like in summer and how the people who actually live out there survive.

In Arizona, we're at 7,000 feet, so we're above half of the world's atmosphere. It's crisp but hard, a side-raking light that can be revealing but doesn't have the softness that maritime air has.

I grew up in a desert, which has no kind of imagination.

I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.

Think Oman, and you think desert. But what we found was mile after mile of barren, spiky rubble, cliffs of jutting sharp rocks, unrelieved by a single piece of vegetation or water. We drove for hours across what felt like the surface of the moon. We saw goats foraging but couldn't work out what they could possibly be eating.

To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth.

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.

Being in the desert was brilliant and it was hard.

What makes Burning Man special is the location: a 9-mile circle of gypsum, an ancient dried ocean bed. The ground is like a flat crust with no plants or insects, a perfect outdoor gallery for monumental interactive sculpture and architecture.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.

In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas.

The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.

No committee could ever come up with anything as revolutionary as a camel - anything as practical and as perfectly designed to perform effectively under such difficult conditions.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

I always thought the desert was the antithesis of peace - something that attacks you. So you don't go to the desert for peace.

What really grabs me about living in Tucson is the color beige.