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“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash, flipped through in succession, leaving a richness of images imprinted on a sunburned retina.”
― Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon

“You came up this gut-wrenching road yesterday by yourself?" Cassie exclaimed. "You deserve a good cuffing just for driving this goat path on your own."
"It's not so bad once you get used to dodging the ruts."
"You've got some nerve calling these canyons ruts."
"Cassandra Hudson, where is your sense of adventure?"
"I dropped it off going over that last rut-crossing when only two wheels were on the ground."
"Those ones are a bit exhilarating, aren't they?" Alexandra shot Cassie a quick look and wink. 
"Keep your eyes on the road!"
"What road?"
"Exactly!”
― H.H. Laura, Larkspur

“We're only lucky enough to see the wonders of nature's canyons because they're gracious enough to show us the places they've been damaged.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“It is a spectacular illusion â€� a deeply three-dimensional scene flattened onto an earthly canvas.”
― Stefanie Payne, A Year in the National Parks: The Greatest American Road Trip

“Now come the floods. They charge down atavistic canyons drinking furiously out of thunderstorms, coming one after the next with vomited boulders and trees pounding from one side of a canyon to the other, sometimes no more than hours apart. Sometimes a hundred years apart. Sometimes a thousand. The floods always come.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“The train was moving too fast to see much beyond the pines stepping up rock walls, but she knew from memory the bird species that would be endemic. She could picture the colored plates in her textbooks- the greater roadrunner, with its shaggy pompadour crest; the yellow eyes of burrowing owls; the shiny, jet-black plumage of the phainopepla, which gobbled up hundreds of mistletoe berries a day.
She'd missed the Festival of the Cranes by only a few weeks. How tempting, to find herself just hours from Bosque del Apache, and the Rio Grande. She imagined lying on her stomach, binoculars trained on the sandhill cranes and snow geese in their winter quarters, watching in wonder the mass morning liftoffs and evening fly-ins. It was an old desire, but even now, though she knew the impossibility of it, it persisted; the world as one giant aviary she ached to see, all of its feathered inhabitants in their natural environment, a thousand times better to hear their cries dampened by verdant jungle foliage or echoed across the wells of canyons than to listen to abbreviated bits of captured songs emanating from a machine.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“The desire of water is scribed across the desert like graffiti, until all that is left of the desert is water.... In the scream of a flood, consummate carvings are left behind. Careful scallops are taken from the faces of canyons. This is not random work. It is artistry distilled from madness.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“Water in flood means exactly what it says. It has no hypocrisy. Even as it murders, it leaves life behind and carves elegant, intricate passages into raw stone, all the while having no debate about its intention. It is the same water that will sit complacently in a hole for months or years, the same arrangement of atoms that flows gently, singing lullabies, the same that fiercely consumes children and tears the walls from titanic canyons.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“The incline and height of the rocks increased sharply, making his climb more difficult. He needed his other hand totally free, as he knew his pursuers would as well. He holstered his pistol. He'd gotten more than three- quarters of the way to the top when even two free hands were barely enough to continue upward. The steps be- gan sloping on top, so that there was less and less to stand on. His legs pushed, toes searching for holds, arms pulling, fingers clutching, each new ascent more difficult than the last as the steps began to disappear altogether, until he found himself clinging to a nearly vertical slab of granite. Still he pushed upward, his chest and stomach in constant contact with the rock beneath, his hold growing more tenuous each moment. He looked up. Rock walls soared above him on both sides. He prayed there was somewhere to keep going, because he couldn't see it now. Up and up he climbed, every so often finding a small outcropping to grasp, but having to stretch more for each one, his legs almost dangling free as his boots sought purchase in the rock niches. Several times small rocks he tested for support broke free and clattered down the mountain. They fell, hit, split apart, and hit again, until they made a distant thud at the bottom. He shut his eyes, thinking he might sound like that, only softer. If it got any steeper, he knew, he couldn't hold on any longer.”
― David Ball, Empires of Sand by David Ball