“The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness…All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.”

—  John Fante, book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Fourteen

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John Fante113
1909–1983; American novelist, short story writer and screen… 1909–1983

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