Oliver Goldsmith Quotes

My mother's English, and she always was fascinated by the desert.

Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation.

Desert, in generally, is a very good place to find yourself. Or lose yourself.

Chickens are cheerless birds, I advise you to keep geese which can be taught to follow like dogs, one needs all the companionship one can get in these days.

The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.

A pine tree standeth lonely In the North on an upland bare; It standeth whitely shrouded With snow, and sleepeth there. It dreameth of a Palm tree Which far in the East alone, In the mournful silence standeth On its ridge of burning stone.

...the sound of our lack of conversation amplified by the echo of our footsteps on the stone around us.

We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.

It's a treat to see the sun rise over the desert. What am I saying? It's a treat to fire off a rocket car over the desert!

In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian era, some three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand.

It's like going out to the desert and screaming and then having little kids throw their sandbox at you. I'm only 24.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

Birds are flyin' south for winter. Here's the Weird-Bird headin' north, Wings a-flappin', beak a-chatterin', Cold head bobbin' back 'n' forth. He says, "It's not that I like ice Or freezin' winds and snowy ground. It's just sometimes it's kind of nice To be the only bird in town.

We bear our shades about us; self-deprived Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread, And range an Indian waste without a tree.

I should never stand alone in this desert world, but that manna would drop from heaven, if I would but rise with every rising sun to gather it.

Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.

When the railroad trains moaned, and river-winds blew, bringing echoes through the vale, it was as if a wild hum of voices, the dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: "Peter, Peter! Where are you going, Peter?" And a big soft gust of rain came down. He put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along.

I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

My heart beats, echoes into the cold streets where nightmares and darkness begin to meet.

What birds were they? (...) He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice be- hind the wainscot : a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.

Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.

Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains, And feeds her grief.

The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature's torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by - or despite - its outcry.

There’s a hollow where he used to be, and it echoes with self-imposed loss.

And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless october, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dog and the echo of louis' voice dying away