#desert

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that. ↗

— Richard M. Nixon

#believe #desert #freedom #garden #guts

The devout have laid out gardens in the desert. ↗

— Robert Duncan

#devout #gardens #laid #out

He would not now conduct little Nell to the coast; he would not convey her by a steamer to Port Said, would not surrender her to Mr. Rawlinson; he himself would not fall into his father's arms and would not hear from his lips that he had acted like a true Pole! The end, the end! In a few days the sun would shine only upon the lifeless bodies and afterwards would dry them up into a semblance of those mummies which slumber in an eternal sleep in the museums in Egypt ↗

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

#death-and-dying #desert #doubt #hopelessness #sahara

More than anything, this place feels familiar. I bury my hands in the hot sand and think about the embodiment of memory or, more specifically, our natural ability to carry the past in our bodies and minds. Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation. I quietly thank this ancestor of mine for surviving the trip so that I could one day return. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#ancestral-continuum #ancestral-dna #ancestral-memory #journeying #life-journey

When I came to this city, I would have agreed with anyone who said there was little mystery left in the world. But in you, madam, first in your image, then in your living self, I saw the allure of something far away and as secret as the stars. As I reached towards this unknown, I began to feel like a man who has ridden through a vast desert, never knowing anything but the sand around him and the dry road under him, then comes upon the mirage of a garden and a city, and finds that the mirage is real, and that it is bigger than the desert; that the desert was, after all his walking, only a small part of the mirage” “Then you felt love, which is the state of feeling desire and the fulfillment of desire at the same time,” she said. ↗

— K.J. Bishop

#beth-constanzin #desert #desire #fulfillment #gwynn

He said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D. "Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that," he said, "People don’t go to a place like that to look for other people. That’s the opposite of the whole concept that’s behind the thing. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#desert #religion #religion

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#away #beauty #desert #feel #gas

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. ↗

— Christian Nestell Bovee

#enemy #going #imagination #our #over

Work is something you can count on, a trusted, lifelong friend who never deserts you. ↗

— Margaret Bourke-White

#deserts #friend #lifelong #never #something

I started to draw desert islands. They were just rough, shapes in the middle of the page. Then I began drawing shapes within those shapes and I was amazed how quickly the islands got better. It took off from there. ↗

— Billy Connolly

#began #better #desert #draw #drawing