You cannot blame the Sahara alone for the troubles. But you should also not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst. – William Langewiesche, Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert

God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden. – Paul E. Miller

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. РAntoine de Saint-Exup̩ry

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