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 Culross Peattie, The Road of a Naturalist, 1941

…letting the desert scratch its own thorny poetry on the enormous moon. – Douglas Woolf, Wall to Wall

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

It was the farthest she had ever been from home, not only in miles but in feeling. 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, The Rules of Wolfe: A Border Noir, 2013