Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 4.
Works

Arabian Sands
Wilfred ThesigerFamous Wilfred Thesiger Quotes
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 110.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), pp. 209-210.
“As the plane climbed over the town and swung above the sea I knew how it felt to go into exile.”
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 310.
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 398.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 259.
Wilfred Thesiger Quotes about life
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p.168.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 22.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 32.
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 73.
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 210.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 177.
Wilfred Thesiger Quotes about men
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 146.
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 212.
Book Report by David Streitfeld https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1999/06/06/book-report/664d575b-8615-4d17-9275-dd7eb11de8bd/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.213c896c1ac0. The Washington Post. 6 June 1999.
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 94.
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p.115.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 8.
Wilfred Thesiger: Trending quotes
Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swjcpS6EpV4&feature=youtu.be&t=17m43s. 2001.
Variant: I think the harder the life, the finer the type
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 68.
Context: Yet I wondered fancifully if he had seen more clearly than they did, had sensed the threat which my presence implied – the approaching disintegration of his society and the destruction of his beliefs. Here especially it seemed that the evil that comes with sudden change would far outweigh the good. While I was with the Arabs I wished only to live as they lived and, now that I have left them, I would gladly think that nothing in their lives was altered by my coming. Regretfully, however, I realize that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame.
Prologue. p. 1.
Arabian Sands (1959)
Context: A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die. In the deserts of southern Arabia there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the years. It is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease….. No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.
Wilfred Thesiger Quotes
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 49.
“Personally, I would forgo any other comfort to drink clean water.”
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 153.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 138.
“I might have been homosexual if I was born in a different age but as it was I remained asexual.”
Stewart, Rory (2007). Arabian Sands (Introduction). London: Penguin Classics. p. xii. ISBN 9780141442075
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 255.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 71.
“I had felt the lure of the unexplored, the compulsion to go where others had not been.”
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 95.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 38.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 257.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 152.
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 202.
“I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future.”
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 20.
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 295.
BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009mx06, Fri 12 Oct 1979.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 82.
“God, you must be a couple of pansies.”
Newby, Eric (1958). A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Secker & Warburg.
The final sentence of the book as Thesiger watches Newby and Hugh Carless inflate their air beds
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 310.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 36.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 94.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 148.
“What use will money be to him in the Sands.”
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 122.
Preface to the 1984 edition
Arabian Sands (1959)
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 56.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 103.
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 85.
Prologue. p. 1.
Arabian Sands (1959)
Answer to “Do you think that hardship and, indeed, suffering bring nobility?”
Interview with Sir David Attenborough first broadcast on Channel 4 in August 1994.
Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, edited by Chris Morton and Philip Grover (2010), p. 82.
Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 443.
“To me it is always the people rather than the places that matter.”
Source: Desert, Marsh and Mountain (1979), p. 122.