T. E. Lawrence Quotes

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.

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

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.

The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence...

Once again there was the desert, and that only.

A desert is a place without expectation.

Not a living thing was to be seen and the cottages that sat huddled close to the ground remained fast shut; the smoke from the chimneys alone still gave a sign of life.

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 emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

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

It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

The world is a navy in an empty ocean.

Nowhere, not at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains.

The desert wears... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting -- but waiting for what?

He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

Even Echo speaks not on these radiant moors.

I want to be around people, not crickets.

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.

It is not a life at all. It is a reticence, in three volumes.

If you study my paintings, there are no signs of human life.

Now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud, and we three were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us; and it was very still; but there were whispers.