Quotations about Arizona

The trip across Arizona is just one oasis after another.  You can just throw anything out and it will grow there, I like Arizona.  ~Will Rogers


Desert rains are usually so definitely demarked that the story of the man who washed his hands in the edge of an Arizona thunder shower without wetting his cuffs seems almost credible.  ~Administration in the State of Arizona, U.S. public relief program, 1935-1943


You know you're an Arizona native when you take rain dances seriously.  ~Skip Boyer, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993


Arizona looks like a battle on Mars.  ~Author Unknown


A three-inch rain in Phoenix means three inches between drops.  ~Local Saying


Welcome to Arizona, where summer spends the winter - and hell spends the summer.  ~Popular saying, modified from a booster slogan in the 1930s


Fort Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at one hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time—except when it varies and goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it. There is a tradition... that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition,—and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets. ~George Derby, quoted in Mark Twain, Roughing It, 1872


You know you're an Arizona native when you think Taco Bell is the local phone company.  ~Emma Louise Philabaum, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993


The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.  ~Donald Culross Peattie, The Road of a Naturalist, 1941


You know you're an Arizona native when... a rainy day puts you in a good mood.  ~Marshall Trimble, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993


I'll take heat rash over frost bite any day.  ~Ken Travous


I am enamored with desert dew because it's usually the closest thing we get to rain.  ~Linda Solegato


You know you're from Arizona when you drive two miles around a parking lot looking for a shady place - even in the dead of winter.  ~Local Saying


Once, it was so damned dry, the bushes followed the dogs around.  ~Nancy Dedera


In Phoenix summer is
the title, the refrain,
And every other verse.
~Terri Guillemets

You know you're an Arizona native when you run to the window just to watch a dust storm.  ~Marshall Trimble, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993


Baseball, it is said, is only a game.  True.  And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.  ~George F. Will


You know you're from Arizona when you feed your chickens ice cubes to keep them from laying hard-boiled eggs.  ~Local Saying


In Arizona, shade trees are your best friends... and occasionally the basis of small civil wars over parking.  ~Terri Guillemets


I live in the dry dusty desert
Where we're always short on water
And even if the sun fell upon us
It couldn't get any hotter.
~Linda Solegato


You know you live in Phoenix when the cold-water faucet is hotter than the hot-water faucet.  ~Author Unknown


It's so hot even my fake plants are wilting.  ~Linda Solegato


You know you live in Phoenix when the four seasons are:  tolerable, hot, really hot, and are you freakin' kidding me?!  ~Author Unknown


You know you live in Phoenix when you can drive four hours in any one direction and never leave the Valley.  ~Author Unknown


Land of extremes. Land of contrasts. Land of surprises. Land of contradictions.... That is Arizona. ~Federal Writers Project, Arizona: The Grand Canyon State, 1956


Each season of adventure reality television gets more and more challenging.  I'm waiting for them to come out with a Survivor: Phoenix in July edition.  ~Linda Solegato


Most of those old settlers told it like it was, rough and rocky. They named their towns Rimrock, Rough Rock, Round Rock, and Wide Ruins, Skull Valley, Bitter Springs, Wolf Hole, Tombstone. It's a tough country. The names of Arizona towns tell you all you need to know. ~Charles Kuralt, Dateline America, 1979


You know you're an Arizona native when you "hug" a cactus only once in your lifetime.  ~Nancy Dedera, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993


You know you live in Phoenix when you are willing to park 3 blocks away because you actually found shade from a palm tree imported 300 miles from California and nurtured with water piped 250 miles from Nevada.  ~Author Unknown


These lands are too parched, rain-bless our hearts!  ~Terri Guillemets


What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June?  ~Edward Abbey


Winter in 'Zona is spring
Spring is summer
Autumn is our winter
And summer is Hell.
~Cherishe Archer


You know you're an Arizona native when you have to look up "mass transit" in the dictionary.  ~Paul Johnson, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993


You know you live in Phoenix when you've experienced condensation on your butt cheeks from the hot water evaporating in the toilet bowl.  ~Author Unknown


A hundred ten in the shade is sorta hot, but you don't have to shovel it off your driveway.  ~Author Unknown


"Heat, ma’am!" I said; "it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones."  ~Sydney Smith, Lady Holland’s Memoir  (It's actually not about Arizona, but it fits!)


What dreadful hot weather we have!  It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.  ~Jane Austen  (Also not about Arizona, but fitting!)