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

In the desert, I had discovered the West of my imagination, my childhood canyon infinitely magnified. I went there for inspiration and insight. – Julene Bair, The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning, 2014

Desert rains are usually so definitely demarked that the story of the man who washed his hands in the edge of an Arizona thunder shower without wetting his cuffs seems almost credible. – Administration in the State of Arizona, U.S. public relief program, 1935-1943