“The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love."
― John C. Van Dyke, The Desert
I'm gonna make it to the place I need to go
We're all just walking through this darkness on our own
“No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me,
sleeping and walking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change,
but it remains the same.
For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear,
I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating
like islands above the cloud wrack;
I can fell the spirit of its woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks;
in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”
― Mark Twain, Letters from Hawaii
“All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.”
― Joan Didion, Where I Was From