“It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.”

“Humidity did terrible things to me. I‘d be much prettier if I lived in the desert.”

“Children ask me sometimes what book I'd take to a desert island, but I think I couldn't go to a desert island unless it had a library.”

“The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible.”

“It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.”

“Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light -- a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.”