Michael Ondaatje's book

The English Patient

There are many interesting descriptions that I came across, but these word-pictures gripped me:

The desert could not be claimed or owned - it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treatises quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember.

and,

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.