125 Desert Quotes For Instagram Captions That Define Its Beauty

Are you looking for inspirational desert quotes? Well, you are in the right place. Whether you are looking for the best words to describe the desert, its surreal beauty, and the mystic charm it casts upon its visitors, or you want some travel inspiration to some of the best deserts in the world, you have got it covered here. This post has the best collection of quotes about deserts, perfect for Desert Instagram captions to go with your latest trip pictures.

I am a fan of the mountains around the world, followed by the beaches, and camped in the desert. I can say that the experience of exploring a desert is unparalleled. The vast expanse of the seemingly endless landscape filled with golden-colored heaps of sand may not be everyone’s cup of tea, especially if you are a creature of comforts.

Nevertheless, you should plan a trip to the deserts, at least for a few days, as you will end up having one of the unique travel experiences. For now, virtually get lost in the sands through these beautiful desert quotes.

THE BEST DESERT QUOTES

Below is the list of the best desert quotes that describe the beauty of deserts. If you are looking for the perfect description of a desert, you may end up finding one or two amazing desert quotes.

“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence, something throbs, and gleams.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across the desert sky.” ― Benjamin Alire Sáenz

“What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.” – Edward Abbey

“When you are young, there is so much ahead of you, it’s like the Saharan desert. You can’t even see across it.” – Henry Rollins

“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.” – Pablo Neruda

“I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of the living desert is worth a hundred ‘great books’ – and one brave deed is worth a thousand.” ― Edward Abbey

“The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he’d always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past.” ― Don DeLillo

“I had to live in the desert before I could understand the full value of grass in a green ditch.” – Ella Maillart

“Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.” ― Jean Baudrillard

“The desert became grim, dark, and foreboding. A silence of death lay over the land, and it seemed as though the very stars held their breath and twinkled no more.” ― Alan Kinros

“The desert is so huge, and the horizon so distant, that they make a person feel small, and as if he should remain silent.” – Paulo Coelho

“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.” – Byron Katie

“For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.” ― Mary Hunter Austin

“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?” – Edward Abbey

“That’s what Alice liked about the desert, its constant relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once.” ― Joy Williams

“I left a piece of my soul that will always rightfully belong in the desert.” ― M.B. Dallocchio

“Ahead of me is the open desert, hot and merciless. Behind me is Sand. I don’t turn back; I don’t say goodbye. The Bullet Catcher carves a straight line through the desert, walking towards the distant mountains. And I follow.” ― Joaquin Lowe

“There is a certain fine simplicity in a landscape from which the element of water, with all the varied life it brings in it murmuring train, is entirely absent.” ― Gertrude Bell

Although it is not visible, deserts nourish and harbour lives in its ways. These desert quotes describe the way of life there.

“He’d lived in the desert all his life, and he loved it. He was its child. It was his home.” ― Tony Taylor

“The shadows of the deserts are so magical that we completely forget the owners of the shadows!” ― Mehmet Murat Ildan

“In the desert, I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquility was to be found there.” ― Wilfred Thesiger

“The desert is so vast that no one can know it all. Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return.” – Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio

“If seeds waited for perfect conditions to grow, there would be no plants in the desert.” – Matshona Dhliwayo

 “No law. No order. No time or space. The danger was the desert’s breath, and the landscape changed with every wind.” ― Zita Steele

“We affect the desert and desert affects us. Deserts are an integral part of the story of humanity and thus are the object of fascination for many of us.” – Michael A. Mares

“You are struck by the awesome beauty of the desert landscape even as you view it in the relentless glare of the midday sun. It is at once a kaleidoscope of images, a land of contrasts and paradoxes.” – Fred Punzo

“It was either the chaos of a crowd of thoughts or the silence of solitude, nothing in between.” ― Sanhita Baruah

DESERT CAPTIONS FOR INSTAGRAM

Check this list of desert quotes for Instagram captions that you can use for pictures of deserts from Arizona to the Sahara desert. From comparing the deserts to life as we experience to rejoicing the beauty of sunrises and sunsets, these quotes about the desert will inspire a trip.

“I shivered in those solitudes when I heard the voice of the salt in the desert.” ― Pablo Neruda

“Let the desert wind cool your aching head. Let the weight of the world – drift away instead.” – Beck

“The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it.” – Robert Edison Fulton JR

“Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.” — Joyce Carol Oates

“If a flower can flourish in the desert, you can flourish anywhere.” – Matshona Dhliwayo

“The immense desert, empty as a bird’s wing, inspired him with promise.” ― Mike Bond

“Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.” ― Rebecca Solnit

“The breeze across the desert as the light died was so sweet she could almost drink it.” ― Mike Bond

“The witch snipped off her golden hair and cast her out into a great desert” ― Marissa Meyer

“Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.” ― Stephen King

“The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence – free of the networks of dead speech.” – Freya Stark

“Mountains and deserts, with their sparse life at the limit of existence, make one restless and disconsolate; one becomes an explorer in an intellectual realm as well as in a physical one.” – George Schaller

“To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can’t imagine what that’s like.” – Nicole Krauss

“Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find the means frightening.” ― Floriano Martins

“Dubai, with all of its glitz and glamour rose in the heart of the desert.” ― Soroosh Shahrivar

More desert quotes for Instagram captions for inspiring a trip.

“A desert, which might be considered the antithesis of the sea, actually poses similar challenges to the evolution of life.” – Michael A. Mares

“I have this personal affinity for the desert. I am fascinated by the desert. I love it.” – Erika Slezak

“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.” – Jean Baudrillard

“If you sing of beauty though alone in the heart of the desert you will have an audience.” – Khalil Gibran

“For now, the world of Altadas was mostly an empty desert, but in the future, it might be a world of iron.” ― Dean F. Wilson

“When you’re in the desert, you look into infinity. It makes you feel terribly small, and also in a strange way, quite big.” ― David Lean

“The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.” – Khaled Hosseini

“Deserts are barren, inhospitable places. The very word conjures an image of featureless and dunes stretching beautiful but terrible for as far as the eye can see.” – Michael Allaby

“Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.” ― Michael Ondaatje

“Only the desert has a fascination, to ride alone in the sun in the forever unpossessed country- away from the man. That is a great temptation.” – D. H. Lawrence

“The rules of survival never change, whether you’re in a desert or in an arena.” – Bear Grylls

SHORT DESERT QUOTES

These short desert quotes are perfect Instagram captions for deserts if you want to keep it short, and crisp, to go with your hashtags.

“Once again there was the desert, and that only.” ― Stephen King

“New York is the great stone desert.” – Israel Zangwill

“In the desert, the only god is a well.” ― Vera Nazarian

“The desert mocked the map-makers.” ― Dean F. Wilson

“A rose in a desert can only survive on its strength, not its beauty.” – Matshona Dhliwayo

“A night spent in the desert means a night spent in the space!” ― Mehmet Murat Ildan

“The desert surrounds your every step and you walk forever a thirsty man.” – Christopher Pike

“A desert is a place without expectation.“ – Nadine Gordimer

“The desert mocked the map-makers.” ― Dean F. Wilson

“Anything less than the desert was a dream.” ― Kameron Hurley

“The vast sage desert undulates with almost imperceptible tides like the oceans.” – Frank Waters

“In the desert of the heart, tears do not touch the ground.” ― Charles de Leusse

“To see the desert is like peeling the skin off a landscape.” – Fred Williams

“She laughed, and the desert sang.” – Jerry Spinelli

“A desert blessing, an ocean curse.” – John Green

“When you escape to a desert, the silence shouts in your ear.” – Graham Greene

“In the desert, the line between life and death is sharp and quick.” – Brian Herbert

“The sand has rules. Fucked up rules, but rules nonetheless.” ― Kameron Hurley

“In the empire of the desert, water is the king and shadow is the queen.” ― Mehmet Murat Ildan

“The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it.“ – Robert Edison Fulton Jr.

“Life is like a desert. You only regret the oasis you let pass.”

“Somehow, the stars are just better out here.”

“The desert’s an old dream of the sea.” ― Holly Ringland

“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.” -Anakin Skywalker

“Even in the most barren desert one would still feel one’s heart beating.” ― Marty Rubin

“You can‘t fight the desert. You have to ride with it.“ – Louis L’Amour

“It is better to make an irrational noise in a bush than in a desert.” ― Duop Chak Wuol

“The desert works constantly to forbid it, and still the cactus blooms.“

“Peace, love, and desert dust.”

“Sadly, it’s much easier to create a desert than a forest.” – James Lovelock

“If you spend enough time in the desert, you will hear it speak.” ― Nnedi Okorafo

“Sand is my favorite color.”

“Like water in the desert is wisdom to the soul.” – Edward Counsel

“Without music, life is a journey through a desert.” – Pat Conroy

“If you want water, do not go to a desert.” ― Alen Sargsyan

“There’s no WiFi in the desert, but I’m definitely going to find a better connection out here.”

“The sand doesn’t care if you’re made of flesh or stone.” ― Joaquin Lowe

“The magic of the desert is hard to define.” – Henno Martin

“True understanding lies beyond the desert” ― Bangambiki Habyarimana

“And the desert shall reclaim, its wealth!” ― Danikelii

“Water is a desert’s gold.” – Matshona Dhliwayo

“Wanderlust and desert dust.”

“I love the desert and its incomparable sense of space.” — Robyn Davidson

“The desert lay in wait, more infinite than God, no less remote.” ― Debora Greger

“Deserts never believe in cactus. seeds so.” ― Deepak Gupta

 “Windows down, wind through my hair, desert dust in my shoes.”

“A desert is a place without expectation.” – Nadine Gordimer

“Though one praises all the gods, Birds will not come down to deserts.” ― Miriam Lichtheim

“Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.” – Frank Herbert

BEAUTIFUL QUOTES ABOUT DESERTS

Here is the list of the magical desert quotes that describe the enchanting beauty found in the land of sand dunes.

“The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.” – Donald C. Peattie

“Maybe that is the one real division between men: woodmen and desert men.” ― Kurban Said

“There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That’s what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed.” – Terry Pratchett

“The desert is like that – you think thoughts you haven’t thought before and you feel feelings that you’ve always believed are someone else’s feelings.” – Katja Rudolph

“Noontime here is like a drug. The light is psychedelic, the dry electric air narcotic. To me, the desert is stimulating, exciting, exacting” ― Edward Abbey

“Deserts are full of sand and winds are full of air, both are full of something but both look quite empty, and when they get to pair it’s easy to see they are almighty.” ― Alain Bremond-Torrent

“The sin of the desert is knowing where the water is and not sharing it.” – Richard Paul Evans

“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.” – Terry Tempest Williams

“Simplicity is the heart of everything. If you look to the desert, apparently the desert is very simple but it’s full of life, it’s full of hidden places and the beauty is that it looks simple but it’s complex in the way that it expresses the soul of the world or God.” ― Paulo Coelho

“The desert does not mean the absence of men, it means the presence of God”. – Carlo Carretto

“It’s no wonder most religions are born in the desert because when men lay beneath that boundless night sky and look up at the infinite expanse of creation they have an uncontrollable urge to put something in the way.” – Terry Pratchett

“All you have to do is contemplate a simple grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation.” – Paulo Coelho

“On your journey to your dream, be ready to face oasis and deserts. In both cases, don’t stop” – Paulo Coelho

“But then the war didn’t always harden you on the outside. The desert did that. The war crisped you up within.” ― Dean F. Wilson

“We all have our own deserts. Thet may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.” ― Yeonmi Park

“Something strange happened to me out there in the desert; I don’t know what.” ― Kim Stanley Robinson

“The desert sings of loss, always loss, and if you stand quiet with your eyes closed, it will grieve you too.” ― Nafiza Azad

“This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.” -T. E. Lawrence

“Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?” ― Dejan Stojanovic

“The vastness of the desert frightened her. Everything looked too far away, even the cloudless sky. There was nowhere you could hide in such emptiness.” ― James Carlos Blake

“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.” – Antoine de Saint

“Climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the seashores, the deep recesses of the earth, for only in this way and no other will you arrive at the true nature of things.” – Peder Soerensen

RAIN IN DESERT QUOTES

Being there in a desert when it rains is one of the blissful and rare things you can enjoy. It is certainly special when the rain drops kiss the sand dunes. Read these beautiful desert quotes that depict the magic.

“The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest.” ― Tahir Shah

“The desire of water is scribed across the desert-like graffiti until all that is left of the desert is water. In the scream of a flood, consummate carvings are left behind. Careful scallops are taken from the faces of canyons. This is not random work. It is artistry distilled from madness.” ― Craig Childs

“In the desert, the two primary elements are stone and water. Stone comes in abundance, exposed by weathering and a lack of vegetation. It is a canvas. Water crosses this stone with such rarity and ferocity that it tells all of its secrets in the shapes left behind.” – Craig Childs

“Nothing can be born and grown without her nourishment. She is a life-giving river that gives and loves without holding anything back. And without her water, man would walk around aimlessly, feeling incomplete and hollow like an empty well. The longer he roams, the deeper the hole within his soul expands, growing bigger and bigger like a barren tree whose branches resemble the cracks on hard, dry soil. And he shall continue to feel incomplete and malnourished, until – he encounters a godly woman, to show him life and quench his thirst.” ― Suzy Kassem

“And maybe it’s foolish of me to save up for a rainy day in a world of desert sand, but I’ve lived, and worked, through enough rainy days to feel the need to save up for an umbrella.” ― Dean F. Wilson

“The field of the soul must be watered by the rain with tears of love; otherwise it will become a desert.” ― Sorin Cerin

“For every poet knows that the sea herself has never loved, beloved, and she is thick with our tears. Only the desert knows what love is. Only the desert opens herself when the rains come, breathing in our pain, breathing out acacia and tamarisk and flowers. Only the wadi knows what it is to hold its breath. Only the wadi knows what it is to cry for joy, saying, yes, there was death here and will be dead again one day, and between the two are laughter and the rhythmic breathing in of generations.” ― Zeyn Joukhadar

“I feel like sand that’s blown away. Back into the storm, I’m inside this dream. That feels just like desert rain.” – Edward Maya

“One by one and then together the birds chanted, warbled, whistled, and cooed, like a rare desert plant bursting into life after the rain.” ― Mike Bond

“Time passes in the rain that doesn’t fall, in the lakes and rivers that we don’t reach.” ― Kimberley Starr

“I don’t see the desert as barren at all; I see it as full and ripe. It doesn’t need to be flattered with rain. It certainly needs rain, but it does with what it has and creates amazing beauty.” — Joy Harjo

“Like the desert waiting for the rain. Like a school kid waiting for the spring.” – Norah Jones

“Why are the desert blooms that spring to life after a monsoon so magnificent? The answer is – their impermanence. The lush growth and blooming flowers do not last very long here in the desert, and this new growth only happens once a year. If this growth was never-ending, we would soon take it for granted. Likewise, our human lives. What makes them so special and unique? Our fleeting impermanence.” ― Alaric Hutchinson

“You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.” — William Langewiesche

DESERT SUNSET QUOTES

Sunsets in the deserts are special, and one of the must-experiences that you should have on your travel bucket list. If you are not convinced, let these authors and writers share their desert quotes about sunsets.

“Ô, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.” ― Roman Payne

“Never met a desert sunset I didn’t like.”

“The desert, when the sun comes up. I couldn’t tell where heaven stopped and the Earth began.“ – Tom Hanks

“The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert. Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. Even the sun goes down.” ― Guy Gavriel Kay

“All at once the desert was everywhere, and I was overcome with a feeling of relief. Sand, rocks, hills—the whole landscape was tinted the same shade of orange as the sky.” ― Jasmin Darzni

“The Moon was the most spectacularly beautiful desert you could ever imagine. Unspoiled. Untouched. It had a vibrancy about it and the contrast between it and the black sky was so vivid, it just made this impression of excitement and wonder.” – Charles Duke

“The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface. A desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust. The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being.”

“So they drove again, Vivien sitting up and looking now, but as navigator only, letting the desert scratch its own thorny poetry on the enormous moon.” ― Douglas Woolf

“Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water. Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life. The only veil that stands between the perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage. Dare to breach the surface and sink.” ― Vera Nazarian

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

“The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light—the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter’s hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn’t expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert.” ― Don DeLillo

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?” – Richard P. Feynman

“She knows that it’s the perfect time of day out there in the desert. She imagines the colors making a show of themselves outside. The glittering gray pavement, the aching red land. The colors streaking flamboyantly across the sky. When she closes her eyes, she can see them, the paint in the firmament. Dazzling. Purple, yellow, orange, pink, and blue. She can see those perfect colors, hot and bright, a feathered headdress. Beneath, the landscape stretches out its arms.” ― Jeanine Cummins

“When the banner of countless colors spreads on the wind, and the Riders of the Desert storm arise, then shall the Sleeper awake beneath his sand shroud and bring the Judgement to the world.” ― Mladen Đorđević

FUNNY DESERT QUOTES

Desert quotes don’t all have to be poetic, morbid, or short. Being in a desert can be a funny experience too – like when you are dripping in sweat! Check these funny desert quotes that bring in the humour out of the heat.

“The desert is a capricious lady, and sometimes she drives men crazy.” – Paulo Coelho

“I bought a cactus. A week later it died. And I got depressed, because I thought, Damn. I am less nurturing than a desert.” ― Demetri Martin

“Out in the desert what doesn’t kill you just pisses you off and will probably kill you the next time.” ― James Anderson

“If not prevented, desertification of the world can one day make the camels as the best and the sole cars of our civilization!” ― Mehmet Murat Ildan

“The region is altogether valueless. After entering it, there is nothing to do but leave.” ― Lt. Edward Beal

“As a remedy to life in society, I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.” ― Albert Camus

“Shall I run back into the desert, and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet humankind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven’t had enough desert yet.” ― Saul Bellow

“I guess somebody else made the country in these parts. It’s not nearly so well done. They forgot the water and the trees.” ― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“Are you in a desert? Then be a camel! Be compatible with the reality!” ― Mehmet Murat Ildan

“The desert was outside my range, it was an alien being, it was science fiction, both saturating and remote, and I had to force myself to believe I was here.” ― Don DeLillo

Share these hilarious desert quotes with your friends and family for a good laugh.

“I don’t look like a desert person because I stay indoors most of the day and fool around at night. That’s what the desert animals do – they don’t have a tan either. ” – Don Van Vliet

“If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn’t take Freud’s books with me, because I’ve already read them all.” – Anne Roiphe

“I always thought the desert was the antithesis of peace – something that attacks you. So you don’t go to the desert for peace.” – Sam Shepard

“Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas” ― Mary Hunter Austin

“I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.” ― Anne Lamott

MORE AMAZING DESERT QUOTES FOR INSTAGRAM

Keep reading, because this list contains more beautiful desert quotes to entice your imagination, create the enigma found in the barren lands.

“I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occupation.” ― Michael Ondaatje

“It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man’s insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speaks of his insignificance right now.” – Edwin Way Teale

“I am convinced now that the desert has no heart, that it presents a riddle which has no answer, and that the riddle itself is an illusion created by some limitation or exaggeration of the displaced human consciousness.” ― Edward Abbey

“It is like being in the desert. At first, you listen to the absence of sounds and call it silence. Then suddenly you may be taken by the presence of stillness where you are one with listening to itself.” – Jean Klein

“But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself.” – Father Dioscuros

“The high desert has an effect on people. The place has a way of swallowing you up.” – Campbell Scott

“A flower blooming in the desert proves to the world that adversity, no matter how great, can be overcome.” – Matshona Dhliwayo

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” ― Paul Hoffman

“Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes cliched. And vice versa.” – Ella Leya

“Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through them. Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit.” – Taisen Deshimaru

“Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, you find yourself.“

“They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They appeared as in a dream, at the crest of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky.” ― J.M.G. Le Clézio

“This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.” — Mary Hunter Austin

“A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.” – Michael Ondaatje

“You are a nomad, a wanderer – just like me. You roam the desert and I roam the world. What’s the difference between us?” ― Linda Ruth Horowitz

“It is poetic and lyrical; words that spill forth like cool waters into the dusty dry rock bed of the Soul desiring love. It has been said that I’ve lived in the desert all my life and do not know what it means to be wet.” ― H. Raven Rose

“In the desert, you become a discoverer. You discover your soul, which had been submerged in vain pursuits, which had been lost in the coils and toils of modern life.” ― Ameen Rihani

“I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.” ― Edward Abbey

“At such moments felt my mind wake up with the temptation of life gathering courage for flowering beauty even in the desert of living.” ― Suman Pokhrel

“The desert still has a memory of water. And that memory is a living thing. It is infused into the sand. It is part of its essence.” ― Thomas Lloyd Qualls

“Anglesey has two deserts, one made by Nature, the other made by Man: Newborough and Parys Mountain.” ― Edward Greenly

“I will fill myself with the desert and the sky. I will be stone and stars, unchanging and strong and safe. The desert is complete; it is spare and alone, but perfect in its solitude. I will be the desert.” – Kiersten White

“But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself.” – Father Dioscuros

“A cactus doesn’t live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet.” – Hope Jahren

Share these desert quotes for expressing how you enjoyed being there.

“She smiled, and said, “Take care that the voice of God and the Devil sound one and the same in the desert. Trust your instincts. You were not put on this earth to be naïve, blindly optimistic, or passive; you are here to be vigilant, to survive.” ― M.B. Dallocchio

“This was the desert, everything all at once, whether it was needed or not. What survived had learned to save, live carefully, and keep a low profile, even appear to be dead for long periods. Perseverance and patience.” ― James Anderson

“On the desert, the wind was a constant, and when you paid attention, it seemed like the earth’s own breathing.” – Sonia Sotomayor

“The desert is an ideal illusion of a blank slate – so much mystery in endless layers is hidden underneath its bright, pseudo-sterile surface.” – Vera Nazarian

“She might’ve had the skill to get them out of the Hold, but God knew how she’d fare across the desert of Altadis. And God wasn’t telling.” ― Dean F. Wilson

“He who puts his brother in the ground is everywhere. The word of the wise has fled without delay. Lo, the son of man is denied recognition,

The child of his lady became the son of his maid. Lo, the desert claims the land, The nomes are destroyed.” ― Miriam Lichtheim

LONG QUOTES ABOUT THE DESERTS

These are some detailed desert quotes for those that want to capture the beauty of the desert in many words, as these authors and writers have beautifully done.

“He’d always had a quickening of the heart when he crossed into Arizona and beheld the cactus country. This was as the desert should be, this was the desert of the picture books, with the land unrolled to the farthest distant horizon hills, with saguaro standing sentinel in their strange chessboard pattern, towering supinely above the fans of ocotillo and brushy mesquite.” ― Dorothy B. Hughes

“Your will is free means: it was free when it wanted the desert, it is free since it can choose the path that leads to crossing the desert, it is free since it can choose the pace, but it is also unfree since you must go through the desert, unfree since every path in a labyrinthine manner touches every foot of the desert’s surface.” ― Franz Kafka

“She was beautiful in the way people call the desert beautiful, which is to say that although some people actually believed it, most of the time it was said in response to someone else’s denigration of it.” ― Chris McCormick

“Water, water, water. There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.” ― Edward Abbey

“The Gobi wasn’t completely devoid of life; its ecosystem was unexpectedly extensive and varied given the extremes to which it subjected its denizens, but some of those forms of life weren’t the kind that Anna wanted to admire too closely.” ― L. Ashley Straker

“Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads, they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.” ― Terry Pratchett

“I will love you like the desert burns along with the sun when they are together, and when you will be gone, just like everyone else, I will cry for you like the snow that melts at the first hint of summer and hoping that you’ll be back I will miss you like the clouds lose themselves when it rains.” ― Sanhita Baruah

“The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts, and cultures left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into the landscape.” ― Michael Ondaatje

More desert quotes that brilliantly capture the elements of being in a desert – the ways in which we can experience slices of life differently here.

“I’d forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn’t cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was “sublime” in the way that the romantic poets had used the word- not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth’s skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight.” ― Julene Bair

“The weather here is windy, balmy, sometimes wet. Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and in the evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement – mating season. And lots of fresh rabbit meat hopping about to feed the young ones with.” ― Edward Abbey

“I had to clear up my messy life. By letting go of the debris and filth, I have come to a deeper, more soulful beauty and clarity like an oasis in the desert. From that place of clarity, a vision of what I could have, what I could do, who I could be has emerged if I allow my heart to become a place of compassion, acceptance, and forgiveness.” ― Sharon E. Rainey

“Many of the tribal peoples of the world recognize that there are four places in nature where you can find deep peace and remember who you really are. One is in the deep woods; one is in the desert; one in the mountains and one near the ocean.” – Angeles Arrien

“He sat back on his heels and watched the stars one by one cut their way through onrushing darkness, till all was reversed, the day was night, and the blackness glittered with all the desert’s sands, each a tiny flame beyond the bounds of time.” ― Mike Bond

“The land afterward was cleared by oxen, the fallen trees stripped of their bark and cut for lumber that would be used in the construction of the villa, in which the women would live as servants, on whose property their daughters terraced the mountain for orange and lemon groves, where they could see to the east from the peak of Mount Terminus their sons raising swine in the valley below.” ― David Grand

“It is very hard to live in silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silent. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.” – Edmond Jabes

“During the night a fine, delicate summer rain had washed the plains, leaving the morning sky crisp and clean. The sun shone warm—soon to bake the earth dry. It cast a purple haze across the plain—like a great, dark topaz. In the trees the birds sang, while the squirrels jumped from branch to branch in seeming goodwill, belying the expected tension of the coming days.” ― Cate Campbell Beatty

“Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.” – Edward Abbey

“But silence continued in the layers of the earth, and this density that I could feel at my shoulders continued harmonious, sustained, unaltered through eternity. I lay there pondering my situation, lost in the desert, and in danger, naked between sky and sand and stars, withdrawn by too much silence from the poles of my life.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface. Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life. The only veil that stands between the perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage. Dare to breach the surface and sink.” ― Vera Nazarian

“I would enter the desert alone, to leave in the sand endless footprints only to be obliterated by the wind, to walk the same path each day expecting the same path tomorrow, and perhaps to cease wondering at the bloom and wither of lilies only to linger for death. But no, even in the desert, I would seek a new sanctuary, to contemplate a grain of sand in a sea of dryness.” ― Leonard Seet

“They hike almost three miles without incident, and it’s amazing to watch the colors leach back into the desert after the day’s blanching. There’s a moment, Lydia realizes, or no, more than a moment – a span of perhaps fifteen minutes just at twilight – when the desert is the most perfect place that exists. The temperature, the light, the colors, all hang and linger at some unflawed precipice, like the cars of a roller coaster ticking ever so slowly over their apex before the crash. The light droops ever farther from the sky, and Lydia can smell the heat of the day wicking away from her skin.” ― Jeanine Cummins

If you want poetic desert quotes that vividly paint pictures of the way the deserts function, these beautiful quotes about sand will inspire you.

“It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drew up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chow dogs, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sand vipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.” ― Cormac McCarthy

“I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert’s dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.” ― Neil Gaiman

“Time has a different meaning for me, and these events that seem so monumental at the moment will one day be nothing more than a line in a scroll. These humans are but letters to be inked into history. A hundred years from now, I will be free. I will have forgotten their names and faces, and the struggles they have will not matter. Time has a way of burying things, shifting like the desert and swallowing entire civilizations, erasing them from map and memory. Always, in the end, everything returns to dust.” ― Jessica Khoury

“Alone in the silence, I understand for a moment the dread which many feel in the presence of primeval desert, the unconscious fear which compels them to tame, alter or destroy what they cannot understand, to reduce the wild and prehuman to human dimensions. Anything rather than confront directly the antihuman, that other world which frightens not through danger or hostility but in something far worse – its implacable indifference.” ― Edward Abbey

“But it’s all still there in my heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain, and pleasure—they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days to come, like a treasure found and then, voluntarily, surrendered. Returned to the mountains with my blessing. It leaves a golden glowing on the mind.” ― Edward Abbey

“Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?” ― Wilkie Collins

“No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however, faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.” ― Wilfred Thesiger

That’s its about the list of the best desert quotes for you. Did you find your favorite quote about the desert? If you have more desert quotes that you would like to share, do so in the comments below.

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