Some Favorite River and Water Quotations

Posted July 6, 2007 by Robyn Suddeth
 

I’m feeling a little bit sappy today. Which, by the way, I just learned can also be expressed by saying: I’m feeling a little bit schmaltzy today. (Gotta love those Thesaurus tools in Word). Anyway, I’ve been reading a really good book written by a ranger on the Green River, and it has inspired me to dig up some of my favorite quotations about rivers. And lucky you, I’m sharing them! Some provoke thought, but most just make me wish I was on a boat right now, in the middle of a canyon far far away…

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.
– Wallace Stegner

When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.”
– Leonardo da Vinci

All the water that will ever be is, right now.
– National Geographic, October 1993

Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, indian sildenafil, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents.
– Henry David Thoreau

“What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt – it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.”
-Hal Boyle

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
Loren Eiseley, “Four Quartets”, The Immense Journey

There’s nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats.
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (River Rat to Mole)

 
 

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