As we were designing a brochure on the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, we began to collect quotations. We asked people across the country to send us their favorite river quotes. The response was overwhelming. So many people asked for the full list when we were done, that we'd thought we'd share it here.
If you use any of these quotes, please be sure to attribute them to the authors. If you find an error, please let us know. And please, if you have a great quote on rivers, water, or the environment, please send it to us at [email protected].
My Favorite Quotations
I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars. — (Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire)
Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy. — (Edward Abbey, The Hidden Canyon — A River Journey)
If you' re not beside a real river, close your eyes, and sit down beside an imaginary one, a river where you feel comfortable and safe. Know that the water has wisdom, in its motion through the world, as much wisdom as any of us have. Picture yourself as the water. We are liquid; we innately share water's wisdom. — (Eric Alan, "Meditation Draws Its Power From the Water," (The Oregonian (September 11, 2005))
To have some parts flowing free again . . . with deer grazing on its banks . . . ducks and geese raising their young in the backwaters . . . eddies and twists and turns for canoeists . . . and fishing opportunities such as Lewis and Clark enjoyed . . . would be the finest possible tribute to the men of the Expedition, and a priceless gift for our children. — (Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage)
The river is one of my favorite metaphors, the symbol of the great flow of Life Itself. The river begins at Source, and returns to Source, unerringly. This happens every single time, without exception. We are no different. — (Jeffrey R. Anderson, The Nature of Things: Navigating Everyday Life with Grace)
And I count myself more fortunate with each passing season to have recourse to these quiet, tree-strewn, untrimmed acres by the water. I would think it a sad commentary on the quality of American life if, with our pecuniary and natural abundance, we could not secure for our generation and those to come the existence of . . . a substantial remnant of a once great endowment of wild and scenic rivers. — (William Anderson, Congressman from Tennessee, Arguing for passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968))
A brook can be a friend in a special way. It talks to you with splashy gurgles. It cools your toes and lets you sit quietly beside it when you don't feel like speaking. — (Joan Walsh Anglund, A Friend is Someone Who Likes You)
Sit by a river. Find peace and meaning in the rhythm of the lifeblood of the Earth. — (Anonymous)
If a man fails to honor the rivers, he shall not gain the life from them. — (Anonymous)
Boundaries don't protect rivers, people do. — (Brad Arrowsmith, Landowner along the Niobrara National Scenic River, Nebraska)
The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare to let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. — (Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah)
Wild rivers are earth's renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the authority of humans, always chipping away, and eventually always winning. — (Richard Bangs & Christian Kallen, River Gods)
Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way; the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents. — (Wendell Berry)
We labor long and earnestly for peace, because war threatens the survival of man. It is time we labored with equal passion to defend our environment. A polluted stream can be as lethal as a bullet. — (Senator Alan Bible from Nevada)
Choosing to save a river is more often an act of passion than of careful calculation. You make the choice because the river has touched your life in an intimate and irreversible way, because you are unwilling to accept its loss. — (David Bolling, How to Save a River: Handbook for Citizen Action)
Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part. — (Hal Borland, This Hill, This Valley)
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)
Sometimes luck is with you, and sometimes not, but the important thing is to take the dare. Those who climb mountains or raft rivers understand this. — (David Brower)
There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river. — (David Brower, Foreword to Oregon Rivers by Larry Olson and John Daniel)
You don't need it, but will you take some advice from a Californian who's been around for a while? Cherish these rivers. Witness for them. Enjoy their unimprovable purpose as you sense it, and let those rivers that you never visit comfort you with the assurance that they are there, doing wonderfully what they have always done. — (David Brower, Foreword to Oregon Rivers by Larry Olson and John Daniel)
Keep your rivers flowing as they will, and you will continue to know the most important of all freedoms—the boundless scope of the human mind to contemplate wonders, and to begin to understand their meaning. — (David Brower, The Foreword to Oregon Rivers by Larry Olson and John Daniel)
Let the mountains talk, let the river run. Once more, and forever. — (David Brower, Let the Mountains Talk; Let the Rivers Run)
In a mucked up lovely river,
I cast my little fly.
I look at that river and smell it
And it makes me want to cry.
Oh to clean our dirty planet,
Now there's a noble wish,
And I'm puttin' my shoulder to the wheel
'Cause I wanna catch some fish.
(Greg Brown, "Spring Wind" in Dream Cafe)
The song of the river ends not at her banks but in the hearts of those who have loved her. — (Buffalo Joe)
The affluent society has built well in terms of economic progress, but has neglected the protection of the very water we drink as well as the values of fish and wildlife, scenic, and outdoor recreation resources. Although often measureless in commercial terms, these values must be preserved by a program that will guarantee America some semblance of her great heritage of beautiful rivers. — (Senator Frank Church from Idaho, Arguing for passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968))
I know the sound the river makes, by dawn, by night, by day
But can it stay me through tomorrows that find me far away? — (Possibly Ralph Conroy, "Roger's River," Field and Stream, August 1990)
In spite of the durability of rock-walled canyons and the surging power of cataracting water, the wild river is a fragile thing—the most fragile portion of the wilderness country. — (John Craighead, Biologist and one of the architects of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act)
The river called. The call is the thundering rumble of distant rapids, the intimate roar of white water . . . a primeval summons to primordial values. — (John Craighead, Naturalist Magazine (Autumn 1965))
A river is the cosiest of friends. You must love it and live with it before you can know it. — (G.W. Curtis, Lotus Eating: Hudson and Rhine)
In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time. — (Leonardo da Vinci)
The stream sings a subdued music, a scarcely audible lilt, faint and fluid syllables not quite said. It slips away into its future, where it already is, and flows steadily forth from up the canyon, a fountain of rumors from regions known to it and not to me. — (John Daniel, Oregon Rivers)
We don't tend to ask where a lake comes from. It lies before us, contained and complete, tantalizing in its depth but not its origin. A river is a different kind of mystery, a mystery of distance and becoming, a mystery of source. Touch its fluent body and you touch far places. You touch a story that must end somewhere but cannot stop telling itself, a story that is always just beginning. — (John Daniel, Oregon Rivers)
We are never far from the lilt and swirl of living water. Whether to fish or swim or paddle, of only to stand and gaze, to glance as we cross a bridge, all of us are drawn to rivers, all of us happily submit to their spell. We need their familiar mystery. We need their fluent lives interflowing with our own. — (John Daniel, Oregon Rivers)
How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on. — (Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars)
I am beginning to understand that the stream the scientists are studying is not just a little creek. It's a river of energy that moves across regions in great geographic cycles. Here, life and death are only different points on a continuum. The stream flows in a circle through time and space, turning death into life across coastal ecosystems, as it has for more than a million years. But such streams no longer flow in the places where most of us live. — (Kathleen Dean Moore and Jonathan W. Moore, "The Gift of Salmon," Discover Magazine, May 2003)
I have seen salmon swimming upstream to spawn even with their eyes pecked out. Even as they are dying, as their flesh is falling away from their spines, I have seen salmon fighting to protect their nests. I have seen them push up creeks so small that they rammed themselves across the gravel. I have seen them swim upstream with huge chunks bitten out of their bodies by bears. Salmon are incredibly driven to spawn. They will not give up. This gives me hope. — (Kathleen Dean Moore and Jonathan W. Moore, "The Gift of Salmon," Discover Magazine, May 2003)
'The north changes the world. In the winter the snow comes, covers the land. When it breaks in the spring, the mountains and hills will gather all the deteriorated stuff and bring it down to the Columbia, the main channel, and take it away. What goes out in the ocean will never return. And we have a brand new world in spring. The high water takes everything out, washes everything down. That's why we pray to the water, every morning and night.' This is not an attitude found in the Army Corps of Engineers literature. — (Martin Louie, Sr., an elder of the Colville Tribe displaced by Grand Coulee Dam, Quoted by William Dietrich, Northwest Passage)
If you grew up in the country, chances are you have fond memories of lazy days down by a river, creek or pond. — (Darlene Donaldson, "The River" in Country Magazine)
When protected, rivers serve as visible symbols of the care we take as temporary inhabitants and full-time stewards of a living, profoundly beautiful heritage of nature. — (John Echeverria, Pope Barrow, Richard Roos Collins, Rivers at Risk: The Concerned Citizen's Guide to Hydropower)
To trace the history of a river or a raindrop . . . is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again. — (Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, The Universe, Home)
I stand by the river and I know that it has been here yesterday and will be here tomorrow and that therefore, since I am part of its pattern today, I also belong to all its yesterdays and will be a part of all its tomorrows. This is a kind of earthly immortality, a kinship with rivers and hills and rocks, with all things and all creatures that have ever lived or ever will live or have their being on the earth. It is my assurance of an orderly continuity in the great design of the universe. — (Virginia Eifert)
For an instant, as I bobbed into the channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast, titled face of the continent. It was then that I felt the cold needles of Alpine springs at my fingertips and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward. Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me in dancing springs of sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea. I was streaming over ancient sea beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time. — (Loren Eiseley, "Four Quartets," in The Immense Journey)
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable.
(T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets," in The Dry Salvages)
The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means? — (T.S. Eliot, Introduction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament. — (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature)
Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. — (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature)
Life is always flowing on like a river, sometimes with murmurs, sometimes without bending this way or that, we do not exactly see why; now in beautiful picturesque places, now through barren and uninteresting scenes, but always flowing with a look of treachery about it; it is so swift, so voiceless, yet so continuous. — (Faber)
There's a river somewhere that flows through the lives of everyone. — (Roberta Flack)
The woods are made for the hunters of dreams,
The brooks for the fishers of song;
To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
The streams and the woods belong.
(Sam Walter Foss, The Bloodless Sportsman)
Rivers hardly ever run in a straight line.
Rivers are willing to take ten thousand meanders
and enjoy every one
and grow from every one.
When they leave a meander,
they are always more
than when they entered it.
When rivers meet an obstacle,
they do not try to run over it.
They merely go around
but they always get to the other side.
Rivers accept things as they are,
conform to the shape they find the world in,
yet nothing changes things more than rivers.
Rivers move even mountains into the sea.
Rivers hardly ever are in a hurry
yet is there anything more likely
to reach the point it sets out for
than a river?
(James Dillet Freeman, Rivers)
The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear
A number in. But what about the brook
That held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length
And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed
A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
From growing under pavements of a town;
The apple tree be sent to hearth-stone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
In fetid darkness still to live and run—
And all for nothing it had ever done
Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps
That such a brook ran water. But I wonder
If from its being kept forever under
The thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep.
(Robert Frost, A Brook in the City)
Rivers are inherently interesting. They mold landscapes, create fertile deltas, provide trade routes, a source for food and water; a place to wash and play; civilizations emerged next to rivers in China, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They sustain life and bring death and destruction. They are ferocious at times; gentle at times. They are placid and mean. They trigger conflict and delineate boundaries. Rivers are the stuff of metaphor and fable, painting and poetry. Rivers unite and divide—a thread that runs from source to exhausted release. — (Edward Gargan, The River's Tale)
A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself. — (Laura Gilpin, The Rio Grande)
He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All as a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea. — (Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows)
"So-this-is-a-River."
"The River," corrected the Rat.
"And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!"
"By it and with it and on it and in it," said the Rat. "It's brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together! — (Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows)
"The River," corrected the Rat. . . . It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together! — (Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows)
A whole river is mountain country and hill country and flat country and swamp and delta country, is rock bottom and sand bottom and weed bottom and mud bottom, is blue, green, red, clear, brown, wide, narrow, fast, slow, clean and filthy water, is all the kinds of trees and grasses and all the breeds of animals and birds and men that pertain and have ever pertained to its changing shores, is a thousand differing and not compatible things in between that point where enough of the highland drainlets have trickled together to form it, and that wide, flat, probably desolate place where it discharges itself into the salt of the sea. — (John Graves, Goodbye to a River)
I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water . . . has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river. — (Roderick Haig-Brown)
To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things. — (John Haines)
The trees reflected in the river—they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we. — (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
In this sometimes turbulent world, the river is a cosmic symbol of durability and destiny; awesome, but steadfast. In this period of deep national concern, I wish everyone could live for a while beside a great river. — (Helen Hayes, Actress)
You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you. — (Heraclitus of Ephesus (540 BC - 480 BC), On the Universe)
The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. — (Herman Hesse, Siddhartha)
A river is more than an amenity—it is a treasure that offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have the power over it. — (Oliver Wendell Holmes, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Speaking About the Delaware River in 1931)
We grow up hearing so often that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points that we end up thinking it is also the best way to get there. A river knows better—:it has to do with how it dissipates the energy of its flow most efficiently; and how, in its bends, the sediment deposited soon turns into marshes and swampy islands, harboring all manner of interesting life, imparting charm and character to the whole waterway. I would defy you to find a river on this planet that prefers to run straight, unless it has been taught so by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. — (Tom Horton, Bay Country)
I've known rivers;
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers. — (Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers")
An unspoiled river is a very rare thing in this Nation today. Their flow and vitality have been harnessed by dams and too often they have been turned into open sewers by communities and by industries. It makes us all very fearful that all rivers will go this way unless somebody acts now to try to balance our river development. — (President Lyndon Johnson's remarks on signing the Wild & Scenic Rivers Act, October 2, 1968
. . . the time has also come to identify and preserve free-flowing stretches of our great rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory. — (President Lyndon Johnson's Message on Natural Beauty)
my mind shattered
in thousands of fragments
wishes to spend
the whole day on a boat
drifting with the river stream — (Okamoto Kanoko, 1889-1939)
Rivers have what man most respects and longs for in his own life—a capacity for renewal and replenishment, continual energy, creativity, cleansing. — (John Kauffman, A Look At Our North Atlantic Rivers)
(A Montana statue) holds that a river has a right to overwhelm its banks and inundate its floodplain. Well, that's interesting, because it's not a right that we assign to the river. The river has earned it through centuries of deluging and shaping the floodplain, and the floodplain has a right to its rampaging river. They've earned their rights through a kind of reciprocal action. — (Dan Kemmis, in Harper's Magazine (February 1991))
The river was beautiful and wise. There were the two of them being happy in a new way. For here, there was no man, no woman, no master, no yellow, no black, no white. We, we who were, we are the same no longer. — (David Paul Kirkpatrick, The Address Of Happiness)
I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers. Most of what I love about the country is a gift of the rivers. . . . America is a great story, and there is a river on every page of it. — (Charles Kuralt, On the Road With Charles Kuralt)
Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers. — (Charles Kuralt, On the Road With Charles Kuralt)
. . . perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters . . . glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. — (Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac)
A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans. — (Aldo Leopold)
A river is the report card for its watershed. — (Alan Levere, Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection)
To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together. — (Barry Lopez)
Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountains and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. — (John Lubbock)
A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us. — (Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It)
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters. — (Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It)
I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the water joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river. — (Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It)
We sat on the bank and the river went by. As always, it was making sounds to itself, and now it made sounds to us. It would be hard to find three men sitting side by side who knew better what a river was saying. — (Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It)
Change not the river, for rocks in the river are good and are like our problems—without them we would not know if there was any current. — (Dennis Mapes)
When time comes for us to again rejoin the infinite stream of water flowing to and from the great timeless ocean, our little droplet of soulful water will once again flow with the endless stream. — (William Marks, The Holy Order of Water)
This river's taught me a good bit. Probably why I don't leave here. It winds, weaves, snakes around. Rarely goes the same way twice. But, in the end, it always ends up in the same place and the gift is never the same . . . It's the journey that matters — (Charles Martin, Where the River Ends)
Men travel far to see a city, but few seem curious about a river. Every rivers has, nevertheless, its individuality, its great silent interest. Every river has, moreover, its influence over the people who pass their lives within sight of its waters. — (H.S. Merriman, The Sowers)
Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain's belly, sculpted the land, peeled back the planet's history exposing the texture of time itself. — (Harry Middleton, On the Spine of Time or Rivers of Memory)
Rivers know this: There is no hurry, we shall get there some day. — (A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh)
Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. — (A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh)
Instead of paying a psychiatrist, I go out there and get better. — (Vice President Walter Mondale on the St. Croix River; May 12, 2015, interview with the St. Paul Pioneer Press)
We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source of soul. — (Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life)
A river sings a holy song conveying the mysterious truth that we are a river, and if we are ignorant of this natural law, we are lost. — (Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life)
When in making our way through a forest we hear the loud boom of a waterfall, we know that the stream is descending a precipice. If a heavy rumble and roar, then we know it is passing over a craggy incline. But not only are the existence and size of these larger characters of its channel proclaimed, but all the others. Go to the fountain-canyons of the Merced. Some portions of its channel will appear smooth, others rough, here a slope, there a vertical wall, here a sandy meadow, there a lake-bowl, and the young river speaks and sings all the smaller characters of the smooth slope and downy hush of meadow as faithfully as it sings the great precipices and rapid inclines, so that anyone who has learned the language of running water will see its character in the dark. — (John Muir, Mountain Thoughts)
Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them. — (John Muir, Mountain Thoughts)
Wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and; tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love. — (John Muir, Mountain Thoughts)
Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves. — (Senator Ed Muskie of Maine, Arguing for the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 (Congressional Record Service, 1972 Legislative History))
Our planet is beset with a cancer which threatens our very existence and which will not respond to the kind of treatment that has been prescribed in the past. The cancer of water pollution was engendered by our abuse of our lakes, streams, rivers, and oceans; it has thrived on our half-hearted attempts to control it; and like any other disease, it can kill us.
We have ignored this cancer for so long that the romance of environmental concern is already fading in the shadow of the grim realities of lakes, rivers and bays where all forms of life have been smothered by untreated wastes, and oceans which no longer provide us with food. — (Senator Ed Muskie of Maine, Arguing for the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, (Congressional Record Service, 1972 Legislative History))
Ancient rock paintings remind us that there are no unclaimed lands, that people have always lived here. They are wayposts along the river journey to the interior of the mind and heart. — (Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers)
It's hard to see a river all at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn't a point where you stand. In the beginnings of the river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is always tipping the balance from one stream to another. History changes with each tiny event, shaping an outcome that we can only fully grasp in hindsight. And that view changes as we move farther downstream. — (Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers)
The ancient Irish bards knew the Salmon of Knowledge as the giver of all life's wisdom. In the salmon's leap of understanding like a leap of faith, we can see ourselves "in our element," immersed in the river of life. The cycle of the salmon's journey reminds us that all rivers flow to the same sea. — (Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers)
The rapids beat below the boat
Deep in the heart of the land
Feel the pulse of the river in the pulse at your throat
Deep in the heart of the land.
(Lynn Noel, "Veins in the Stone")
The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land. — (Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers)
The first river you paddle runs through the rest of your life. It bubbles up in pools and eddies to remind you who you are. — (Lynn Noel)
We are deep at the bottom of this river of time, caught up in the current of the moment where all the rivers rendezvous. — (Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers)
Our precious heritage of natural and unspoiled beauty and unpolluted streams, once exhausted and destroyed, can never be replaced. . . . We have a golden opportunity to save the few remaining scenic and wild rivers as part of our nation's heritage for this and coming generations. — (Alvin O'Konski, Congressman from Wisconsin (regarding the St. Croix River))
As long as there are young men with the light of adventure in their eyes or a touch of wilderness in their souls, rapids will be run. — (Sigurd Olson, Wilderness Advocate and Writer)
Lying like short curls of thread thrown onto a map, the protected rivers remain strongholds of the free-flow and refuges of the riparian Eden, of the mountain farmer and the rural landowner. The rivers are stretched-out green reserves overflowing with life, potential, and promise. — (Tim Palmer, The Wild and Scenic Rivers of America)
When we save a river, we save a major part of an ecosystem, and we save ourselves as well because of our dependence—physical, economic, spiritual—on the water and its community of life. — (Tim Palmer, The Wild and Scenic Rivers of America)
Rivers are exquisite in their abilities to nurture life, sublime in functioning detail, impressive in contributions of global significance. — (Tim Palmer, Lifelines)
Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills, fears. People stare into the moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire. What is it that draws and holds us? The rivers' reflections of our lives and experiences are endless. — (Tim Palmer, Lifelines)
Streams represent constant rebirth. The water flows in, forever new, yet forever the same; they complete a journey from beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again. — (Tim Palmer, Lifelines)
The river is the center of the land, the place where the waters, and much more, come together. Here is the home of wildlife, the route of explorers, and recreation paradise. . . . Only fragments of our inheritance remain unexploited, but these streams are more valuable than ever. — (Tim Palmer, 1986)
Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go. — (Blaise Pascal)
Don't push the river—it flows by itself. — (Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim)
The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river. — (Ross Perot)
The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother. — (Ted Perry, 1971, in the script for Home embellishing on a speech given by Chief Sealth, 1854)
When people pull a paddle in a free-flowing northern river—and discover what's really important in life—there's gonna be a shortage of canoes. — (Gary Peterson)
To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens without good reason . . . then it's a tragedy of diminishment for the whole planet, a loss of one more wild thing, leaving Earth just a little flatter and tamer and simpler and uglier than before. — (David Quammen, "Grabbing the Loop" in The Gift of Rivers: True Stories of Life on the Water)
Who owns Cross Creek? The redbirds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages. And after I am dead, who am childless, the human ownership of grove and field and hammock is hypothetical. But a long line of redbirds and whippoorwills and blue-jays and ground doves will descend from the present owners of nests in the orange trees, and their claim will be less subject to dispute than that of any human heirs. Houses are individual and can be owned, like nests, and fought for. But what of the land? It seems to me that the Earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers it seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time. — (Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek)
There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace, even for a day, changes us, reminds us of other rhythms beyond the sound of our own heartbeats. — (Jeff Rennicke, River Days: Travels on Western Rivers, A Collection of Essays)
Rivers are the primal highways of life. From the crack of time, they had borne men's dreams, and in their lovely rush to elsewhere, fed our wanderlust, mimicked our arteries, and charmed our imaginations in a way the static pond or vast and savage ocean never could. — (Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids from Hot Climates)
A river does not just happen; it has a beginning and an end. Its story is written in rich earth, in ice, and in water-carved stone, and its story as the lifeblood of the land is filled with colour, music and thunder. — (Andy Russell, The Life of a River)
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
(William Shakespeare, As You Like It)
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
(William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Everyone lives downstream. Even those idealists who live with their heads in the clouds live downstream . . . moreso those whose heads are buried in the sand. — (Duane Short, Illinois Forest Activist)
Ah . . . timelessness, a river's secret weapon. — (Duane Short, Illinois Forest Activist (January 17, 2006))
Mother Nature is our wild world. A wild, winding river is her autograph. — (Duane Short, Wild Species Program Director, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance (January 24, 2011))
From its fountains
In the mountains,
Its rills and its gills;
Through moss and through brake,
It runs and it creeps
For awhile till it sleeps
In its own little Lake.
And thence at departing,
Awakening and starting,
It runs through the reeds
And away it proceeds,
Through meadow and glade,
In sun and in shade,
And through the wood-shelter,
Among crags in its flurry,
Helter-skelter,
Hurry-scurry. — (Robert Southly, The Cataract of Lodore)
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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)
Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever
With trees on either hand.
Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating,
Where will all come home?
On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.
Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.
(Robert Louis Stevenson, Where Go The Boats? in A Child's Garden of Verses and Underwoods)
There is no music like a little river's . . . It takes the mind out-of-doors . . . and . . . it quiets a man down like saying his prayers. — (Robert Louis Stevenson)
To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same—follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road. — (Edwin Way Teale)
Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything. — (Henry David Thoreau)
It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went. — (Henry David Thoreau)
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. — (Henry David Thoreau, Walden)
I was born upon thy bank, river,
My blood flows in thy stream,
And thou meanderest forever,
At the bottom of my dream.
(Henry David Thoreau, Journals 1906, 1842 entry)
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, 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)
After the doctor's departure Koznyshev felt inclined to go to the river with his fishing rod. He was fond of angling, and seemed proud of being able to like such a stupid occupation. — (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)
Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythm of the natural world. — (Ted Turner, The Rivers of South Carolina)
The face of the river, in time, became a wonderful book . . . which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. — (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi)
It was a kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't even feel like talking loud, and it wasn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of low chuckle. — (Mark Twain)
A river is the most human and companionable of all inanimate things. It has a life, a character, a voice of its own, and is as full of good fellowship as a sugar-maple is of sap. It can talk in various tones, loud or low, and of many subjects grave and gay . . . For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the animal kingdom that is comparable to a river. — (Henry van Dyke, Little Rivers)
It is with rivers as it is with people: The greatest are not always the most agreeable nor the best to live with. — (Henry van Dyke, Little Rivers)
May the countryside and the gliding valley streams content me. Lost to fame, let me love river and woodland. — (Virgil, Eclogues)
If you gave me several million years, there would be nothing that did not grow in beauty if it were surrounded by water. — (Jan Erik Vold, What All the World Knows)
But I also know that in places, the river still runs deep, and though I've floated it in these places, it hasn't revealed itself in such obvious ways. I know that it might be months—years, even—before I understand what it has to teach me. I still need to give myself over to the flow and pattern and rhythm of it to learn its lessons and hear its messages. The river is inside me now, I know, and I need only wait and see where the current takes me, and what lies beneath it. — (Jeff Wallach, What the River Says)
It's clear to me that I will return here, as well as to other wilderness frontiers within me—whether next year or some time later—because I know that what the river says is what I need to hear: to know myself, to feel wild again, to confront my own limits and move beyond them into the untamed country on the other side. I will return here in spite of the river's name; but I will never return the same again, and that, after all, is most clearly what the river says. — (Jeff Wallach, What the River Says)
There is comfort in knowing that no matter what aspect my life takes on, this river will flow freely here, and that I might come to this place any time, in sadness or joy, alone or with someone I love. The waters will run smooth and fast, and though it will be a different river coming down out of the mountains it will also retain its constancy. — (Jeff Wallach, What the River Says)
Whether by snowshoe in winter or a hike in the spring, with canoe paddle, fly rod, or shotgun in the fall—to those who would listen, the river valley is a magic music box. To those who would observe, the pattern of color and movement paint a picture that is a masterwork resulting from millions of years of nature's efforts, yet dynamic and ephemeral. Minnesota is rich with stream and river resources, that beyond economic utility, make up our living environment, delight our senses, and indeed, form and mold our culture. — (Tom Waters, The Streams and Rivers of Minnesota)
Where can you match the mighty music of their names? — The Monongahela, the Colorado, the Rio Grande the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Hudson (Sweet Thames!); the Kennebec, the Rappahannock, the Delaware, the Penobscot, the Wabash, the Chesapeake, the Swannanoa, the Indian River, the Niagara (Sweet Afton!); the Saint Lawrence, the Susquehanna, the Tombigbee, the Nantahala, the French Broad, the Chattahoochee, the Arizona, and the Potomac (Father Tiber!)—these are a few of their princely names, these are a few of their great, proud, glittering names, fit for the immense and lonely land that they inhabit. — (Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River)
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