Quotes About Oases

There were no large-scale irrigation facilities or huge tracts of irrigated and cultivated land in medieval Arabia. Combined with the isolation of the oases, this meant that there was no need for a centralized government.

life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Arabia had not changed greatly since medieval times. For the overwhelming majority of people in Najd, al-Hasa and Hijaz, life was connected chiefly with two kinds of economic activity – irrigated farming in the oases and nomadic animal husbandry.

In the midst of nature's savagery, human beings sometimes (rarely) succeed in creating small oases warmed by love. Small, exclusive, enclosed spaces governed only by love and shared subjectivity.

But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up to two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.

Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time.

Before terminating at the Berlin Wall, the front in the Cold War ran through the hellish jungles of Vietnam to the oases and deceptively idyllic dunes of the Middle East.