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

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

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