Barren Landscape Quotes

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

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Once again there was the desert, and that only.

A forest is mystery but the desert is truth. Life pared to the bone.

The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance.

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

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.

A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.

This desert town was man's own miracle of pure purposelessness.

I'm standing in the desert, waiting for my ship to come in.

There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust.

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...

Nothing grows among its pinnacles; there is no shade except under great toadstools of sandstone whose bases have been eaten to the shape of wine glasses by the wind. Everything is flaking, cracking, disintegrating, wearing away in the long, inperceptible weather of time. The ash of ancient volcanic outbursts still sterilizes its soil, and its colors in that waste are the colors that flame in the lonely sunsets on dead planets.

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.

They are again in the dirt in the desert.

The surface of the moon is like nothing here on Earth! It's totally lacking any evidence of life. It has lots of fine, talcum-powderlike dust mixed with a complete variety of pebbles, rocks, and boulders. Many pebbles, fewer rocks, and even fewer boulders naturally make up its surface. The dust is a very fine, overall dark gray. And with no air molecules to separate the dust, it clings together like cement.

I always thought of Djibouti as a place where human history hasn't really begun yet - or perhaps it's already over. There's something in the landscape that's stronger than human civilisation. There's no agriculture, for example, and there are live volcanoes.

I grew up in a desert, which has no kind of imagination.

The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.

To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth.