Maynard James Keenan Quotes

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.

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*.

I would go out into the desert. The desert was my teacher. I didn't know about gurus and wise people-I wasn't a reader.

A desert is a place without expectation.

No phone. No pool. No pets. No cigarettes. Ultimate freedom... No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become Lost in the Wild.

I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams.

Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens.

First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence--lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage.

The Great Arizona Desert is full of the bleaching bones of people who waited for me to start something.

The high desert has an effect on people. The place has a way of swallowing you up.

What I was reading was already part of my psyche, but finally someone else was saying it's okay to walk alone.

I now walk into the wild.

Jurgen loved London because he could get lost here. He said that it was the first time he could do that in eight years. No one knew him or bothered him. It is great for a person to be able to get lost.

Artists walk alone.

France was very opposite of the show-business experience I'd been living; I was anonymous and alone. I wore no makeup, wore the same clothes every day. And I wrote and wrote and wrote.

I did a film once in the Sahara. It was pretty awe-inspiring. I remember sitting up on the roof of our hotel, watching the sun go down, and all around me, for 360 degrees, was nothing but sand. It took your breath away but also made you feel tiny.

The desert feels Irish in a way - lonely and barren.

Unknown in Paris, I was lost in the great city, but the feeling of living there alone, taking care of myself without any aid, did not at all depress me. If sometimes I felt lonesome, my usual state of mind was one of calm and great moral satisfaction.

That's what my music is good for - clearing out the house and being alone.

In those first few hours officially single again the world seems like it expands, suddenly bigger and more vast now that you have to get through it alone.

The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!

He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.