No horse's cry was that, most like the roar Of some pained desert lion, who all day Hath trailed the hunter's javelin in his side, And comes at night to die upon the sand.

-Arnold, Matthew
  Poems:  A New Edition,'Sohrab and Rustum', l.501^4.

Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.

-Beerbohm, Sir (Henry) Max(imilian)
Zuleika Dobson, ch.2.

He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.

-Bible (Old Testament)
Deuteronomy 32:10.

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.

-Bible (Old Testament)
Isaiah 35:5^7.

These are the gardens of the Desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no nameö The Prairies.

-Bryant,William Cullen
  Poems,'The Prairies'.

Fair Italy! Thou art the garden of the world, the home Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree; Even in thy desert, what is like to thee?

-Rochdale
^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza 26.

Oh! that desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, And, hating no one, love but only her!

-Rochdale
^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza177.

It wasn't exactly carelessness; her knowledge of literate English contained such vast areas of desert that she took it for granted that half of what she wrote would be meaningless to her.

-Chandler, Raymond
  On the shortcomings of his ex-secretary. Letter to Erle Stanley Gardner,1  Jul.

What shall we do without you? Think where we are. Carlyle has led us all out into the desert, and he has left us there.

-Clough, Arthur Hugh
  Parting words to Ralph Waldo Emerson,15  Jul. Quoted in E E Hale James Russell Lowell and His Friends (1898), ch.9.

   Leonora, Leonora, How the word rollsöLeonoraö Lion-like, in full-mouthed sound, Marching o'er the metric ground With a tawny tread sublime; So your name moves, Leonora, Down my desert rhyme.

-Craik, Dinah Maria ne¤  e Mulock
Collected Poems,'Leonora'.

In squandering wealth was his peculiar art: Nothing went unrewarded, but desert. Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late: He had his jest, and they had his estate.

-Dryden,John
Absalom and  Achitophel, pt.1, l.559^62.

Full manya gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear: Full manya flower is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

-Gray,Thomas
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, l.52^6.

To say nothing is out here isincorrect; tosay the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stoneand earth is closer to the truth.

-Heat-Moon,William Least originally  WilliamTrogdon
  Blue Highways:  A  Journey Into  America.

A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues, that syllable men's names On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.

-Milton,John
  Comus,  A Mask, l.204^8.

There was nothing but pain in the desert, for human beings and animals alike.Lifewaspain.Only indeathwas there relief.

-Moorhouse, Geoffrey
  The Fearful Void.

   Your anger was a climate I inhabited like a desert in a dry frigid weather of high thin air and ivory sun, sand dunes the wind lifted into stinging clouds that blinded and choked me where the only ice was in the blood.

-Piercy, Marge
  Stone, Paper, Knife,'TheWeight'.

On est un peu seul dans le de¤  sert. öOn est seul aussi chez les hommes. One is a little bit alone in the desert. One is also alone among others.

-Saint-Exupe¤  ry, Antoine de
  Le Petit Prince.

I asked you to be the thunder and lightning of Desert Storm.You were all of that and more.

-Schwarzkopf, H Norman
  Message to US units on the cease-fire that ended the Gulf War.

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said:Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
  'Ozymandias'.

But he was never, well, What I call A Sportsman: For forty days He went out into the desert öAnd never shot anything.

-Sitwell, Sir (Francis) Osbert
  Of Jesus Christ.'Old Fashioned Sportsmen'.