Desert quotes: 24 lines with the book, the chapter and the year
Mary Austin on the Mojave, Van Dyke in love with the Colorado Desert, Kinglake on a camel in the Sinai and Twain disappointed in Utah, every line read out of the book it came from. Plus the desert lines page one prints with no source at all.
Search desert quotes and the first page is mostly captions. The top result is a list of Instagram lines, several of the rest are too, and the quotes that do appear arrive with a name at best and never with a book. A desert is a place without expectation turns up with no author at all on one page and with Nadine Gordimer on another, and nobody says where she wrote it.
That is a shame, because the desert has a real literature, and most of it is free to read. Mary Austin lived for years on the edge of the Mojave and wrote the book that named it the Country of Lost Borders. John C. Van Dyke wrote of two years wandering the deserts of the Southwest and produced a love letter to them. Alexander Kinglake crossed the Sinai on a camel and Richard Burton went on to Mecca.
Every line below was read out of the complete text it came from and fenced to the chapter, section or stanza named on its card. The handful of modern lines still in copyright are held to one short line each, with the book and the chapter, and checked against a full text rather than against another quote page.
This page keeps to arid country: sand, heat, drought and the long crossing. Remote country in general lives on wilderness quotes, the woods on forest quotes, and the wider set on the nature travel quotes hub.
What are the best desert quotes? The short answer
Mary Austin and the Country of Lost Borders
The Land of Little Rain came out in 1903, a set of sketches of the country east of the Sierra Nevada, from Death Valley to the Owens Valley. Austin is the writer desert people quote to each other and almost nobody else has heard of. The book is short, and the opening chapter alone is worth the afternoon.
Not the law, but the land sets the limit.
Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil.
Austin’s answer to the word desert itself. She thought the map name was lazy, and the rest of the chapter is a catalogue of what does live there.
A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably.
The line people mean when they say the desert gets into you. Note the honesty of little in it to love, before the admission that you come back anyway.
Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.
Written about the small animals and birds of Death Valley. It reads as a warning and as a comfort, depending on the day you read it.
This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.
From the chapter on the Shoshone country. Room enough and time enough is the desert’s one luxury, and she saw it before anyone sold it.
The mesquite is God's best thought in all this desertness.
A botanical judgement delivered as theology. The mesquite finds water where nothing else can, which is why she ranks it so high.
But you have not known what force resides in the mindless things until you have known a desert wind.
From her chapter on weather. Anyone who has been caught in a desert wind will recognise the mindless things.
John C. Van Dyke: the desert’s only lover
Van Dyke was an art historian from New Jersey who wrote of two years wandering the deserts of California, Arizona and Sonora. The Desert (1901) is the result, and it opens with a dedication letter that is still the best argument ever made for loving empty country.
The desert has gone a-begging for a word of praise these many years. It never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover.
From the dedication that opens the book. He was right about the timing: the desert had been written up as an obstacle, never as a place worth praising.
One begins by admiring the Hudson-River landscape and ends by loving the desolation of Sahara.
Same letter. The idea that a taste for bare country is learned, not born, is the most useful thing anyone has said about why some people fall for deserts.
The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love.
The paradox stated plainly: the things that should repel you are the attraction. He calls it the grandeur of the desolate a sentence later.
Things that lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peaceful with them.
Why a flat horizon calms people, in a single sentence. It is as good an account of desert quiet as the page has.
How often have we wondered why the sailor loves the sea, why the Bedouin loves the sand!
The sea and the desert paired, the way nearly every writer on this page pairs them. His answer follows: a simplicity about large masses.
This is a land of illusions and thin air.
Said of riding all morning at a range that never got closer. Every desert traveller has ridden at that mountain.
Desert lines page one gets wrong
The desert quote pages copy from each other, so the same few mistakes travel together. Here is what checking them turned up.
The Land of Little Rain, not A Land of Little Rain. The AI summary on this search, when we read it, cited Mary Austin’s book with the wrong article. The title of the 1903 book, and of the full text every Austin card above was read from, is The Land of Little Rain. It is a small thing, and it is the kind of small thing that tells you nobody opened the book.
A forest is a mystery, but the desert is truth. Credited to a Keith Miller, on the strength of a photography blog. Every instance we could find is a social post, a quote page or a film review repeating it, and none names a book, an essay or a speech. We could not tell you who Keith Miller is or where he wrote it, so the line has no card here.
A desert is a place without expectation. Printed with no author on the top result and with Nadine Gordimer in the AI summary. The one quote site that gives a locator points to Telling Times, her collected nonfiction, published in 2010. We have not read that page, so this is a lead rather than a verdict, and the line has no card.
What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote. Credited to Edward Abbey and usually to Desert Solitaire. It sounds like him, but none of the pages repeating it gives a chapter or a page, and we could not place it in the text ourselves. Abbey is on this page with a line we could place: the first sentence of the book, further down.
The crossing: Kinglake, Burton and Twain
Three Victorians went into the desert on purpose and wrote down what it did to them. Kinglake crossed from Gaza to Cairo in 1835 with a handful of Arab guides and a jar of Irish butter. Burton set out from Cairo toward Suez and on to Mecca in disguise. Mark Twain rode an overland stagecoach across the Great Basin and was disappointed, loudly.
the hills and the valleys are sand, sand, sand, still sand, and only sand, and sand and sand again.
From Eothen, Kinglake’s account of travelling the Near East, in the chapter he simply called The Desert. The sentence does what the crossing did: it repeats itself until you give in.
You look to the sun, for he is your task-master, and by him you know the measure of the work that you have done, and the measure of the work that remains for you to do.
The same passage, and the reason a desert day has a shape. The sun is the clock, the boss and the only landmark.
Man's heart bounds in his breast at the thought of measuring his puny force with Nature's might, and of emerging triumphant from the trial. This explains the Arab's proverb, "Voyaging is victory."
Burton on the road from Cairo toward Suez, a few days into the journey that ended in Mecca. The proverb at the end is the desert traveller’s creed.
The poetry was all in the anticipation—there is none in the reality.
Twain crossing an alkali flat in Utah in August, an hour after deciding it would be romantic. The rest of the chapter is the reality, in detail.
Poets and prophets
The oldest desert lines in English are scripture and poetry. Byron wished for a desert home in 1818, in a poem rather than from a tent. Kinglake, who had actually camped with the Bedouin, answered him a generation later.
The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.
The desert as promise rather than punishment, from the King James Bible. It gave generations of travellers the phrase for a desert in bloom.
Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair Spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, And, hating no one, love but only her!
From the last canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The desert as the one place far enough from other people, which is a romantic wish, not a travel plan.
Practically, I think, Childe Harold would have found it a dreadful bore to make “the Desert his dwelling-place,” for at all events, if he adopted the life of the Arabs he would have tasted no solitude.
Kinglake’s reply to that stanza, written after nights in Arab tents. Dreadful bore is the best put down in desert writing.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The close of Ozymandias. A broken statue of a king and nothing else: the desert as the thing that outlasts every empire.
Abbey, Saint-Exupery and Herbert
Three twentieth century books carry most of the desert quotes people actually share. All three are in copyright, so each gets one short line, with the chapter, checked against a full text.
This is the most beautiful place on earth.
The first sentence of Desert Solitaire, Abbey’s account of his seasons as a ranger at Arches in Utah. He means the red rock country around Moab, and he means it.
Desert Solitaire (Edward Abbey, Touchstone paperback)
Best for: The modern desert book, if you only read one
Abbey’s account of his seasons as a park ranger at Arches, published in 1968 and still the book most desert lovers were handed first. It is in copyright, which is why this page quotes only its opening line. Worth knowing before you buy: the older classics on this page, Austin and Van Dyke included, are free in full at Project Gutenberg, which is exactly where we checked them.
Check price“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well . . .”
The little prince, stranded with the narrator in the Sahara. The translation is Katherine Woods, whose version is the one most people quote. Saint-Exupery had crashed in that desert himself.
Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.
A Fremen saying in Dune, the novel set on a desert planet. Herbert built the Fremen partly on Bedouin life, which is why the line sits so well beside Burton.
Short desert quotes
Many of the searches on this term want something caption length, so here are the shortest fully sourced lines on the page: card 1, card 6, card 13, card 17, card 22 and card 24. The shortest of the lot is card 1, at nine words, and it still carries a book and a year.
What this page will not do is hand you a wall of six word captions with no author. If you need something short, cut from a sourced line and keep the name with it.
Which desert: Mojave, Sonora, Sinai, Arabia
Desert is a loose word, as Austin said. The writers here were in very different country, and it shows in what they noticed.
Where the writers went
| Writer | Which desert | What they noticed | Work and year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mary Hunter Austin | Mojave and Death Valley, California | What lives there, and how the land sets the terms | The Land of Little Rain, 1903 |
| John C. Van Dyke | Colorado and Mojave deserts, into Arizona and Sonora | Light, colour, and the beauty of desolation | The Desert, 1901 |
| Mark Twain | Great Basin alkali flats, Utah | Heat, dust, and the gap between romance and reality | Roughing It, 1872 |
| Alexander William Kinglake | Sinai, from Gaza to Cairo | Sand, the sun as a clock, and the tedium of the crossing | Eothen, 1844 |
| Richard Francis Burton | Egypt, Cairo toward Suez | Danger as the point of going | Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, 1855 |
| Edward Abbey | Canyon country around Arches, Utah | The desert as the most beautiful place on earth | Desert Solitaire, 1968 |
Notes on the selection
How this page was built. Eight complete public domain texts were read as plain text and twenty-one lines were matched against them word for word, with each extraction fenced inside the chapter, section or stanza the card names, so the locator is measured rather than remembered. The three modern lines are in copyright, so each author gets one short line, checked against a named full text: the Library of Congress sample text for Desert Solitaire, a full text of the Katherine Woods translation of The Little Prince, and a chapter guide to Dune that quotes the Fremen saying in context. Eleven writers are represented and Mary Hunter Austin carries the most, with seven cards. Every line appears on this site for the first time. The year on each card is the standard publication date of the work; for Byron it is the fourth canto, for Burton the first edition of the narrative.
What was cut, and why. Every candidate was checked against the nature hub, the published nature pages, the site pillar, the live author profiles and every draft in the same pipeline, 81 pages in all, so that no quote runs on two of them. One verified line failed that check and was cut: Mary Austin, for all the toll the desert takes of a man, from The Land of Little Rain. It is live on wilderness quotes, with its source.
Gustave Flaubert crossed the Egyptian desert in 1849 and wrote about it in his letters, and his profile on this site carries his travel lines. The letters are in French and the English wording people quote comes from modern translations, so none is carded here. Thoreau never saw a desert, but readers who like Van Dyke on solitude will find the same argument in Walden.
Desert quotes: the questions people actually ask
What did Saint-Exupery say about the desert?
The famous line is the little prince’s: what makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. It is in chapter XXIV of The Little Prince, 1943, and the wording most people quote is Katherine Woods’s translation. Later translations word it slightly differently, so name the translator if the exact words matter.
Who wrote The Land of Little Rain?
Mary Hunter Austin, published in 1903. The title has a definite article: The Land of Little Rain, not A Land of Little Rain, which is how the AI summary on this search gives it. The book is out of copyright and free to read in full.
What is the most famous desert quote from Dune?
Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert. It is a Fremen saying in Book One of Frank Herbert’s Dune, 1965, rather than a line spoken by Paul, so credit it to the novel and the Fremen, not to a character.
What is a good short desert caption?
Use a real line and keep the name with it. Three that work: “Not the law, but the land sets the limit.” Mary Hunter Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 1903; “This is a land of illusions and thin air.” John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901; and “Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.” Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965. Each is a full card on this page, so you can see where it comes from.
The first page of the book. It is a statement about who gets to live out there, and it is the whole desert in one sentence: the land decides, not you.