Desert Column

Famous quotes containing the words desert and/or column:

    The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    I stand on top
    of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
    a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
    She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
    of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
    and will not scare.
    Robert Lowell (1917–1977)