You know you live in Phoenix when you are willing to park three blocks away because you actually found shade from a palm tree imported 300 miles from California and nurtured with water piped 250 miles from Nevada. – Author unknown

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

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

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