“Once again there was the desert, and that only.”

“Wonderful but true! Shall future progeny of men believe, when crops grow again and this desert shall once more be green, that cities and peoples are buried below and that an ancestral countryside vanished in a common doom? Nor does the summit yet cease its deadly thrust.”
Mira fides! credetne virum ventura propago, cum segetes iterum, cum iam haec deserta virebunt, infra urbes populosque premi proavitaque tanto rura abiisse mari? necdum letale minari cessat apex.

“Digging deep in a Martian desert
men discovered an enormous brain.
It suddenly started to think at them —
So they covered it up again…”

“The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.”

“For once in my life
I won’t let sorrow hurt me,
Not like it’s hurt me before, oh
For once I have something I know won't desert me
‘Cause I’m not alone anymore.”

“There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. […] A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.”

“She takes the rain, turns it to sun,
And my soul she fills it.
Where once was a desert
Rivers now run, and my storms she stills it…”

“Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.”

“Those who have never fought suppose that the deserter who flies the field is consumed by shame. He is not, or he would not desert; with only trifling exceptions, battles are fought by cowards afraid to run.”

“Missing like water in the desert, as a source of heat, you miss: my only perception of love.”