“As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”

—  Wangari Maathai

Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/2004/maathai-lecture.html (10 December 2004)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update May 26, 2024. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my m…" by Wangari Maathai?
Wangari Maathai photo
Wangari Maathai 9
Kenyan environmental and political activist 1940–2011

Related quotes

David Lynch photo

“When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time… and my father would bring paper home … and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns… that was my favorite.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

As quoted in Pretty as a Picture : The Art of David Lynch (1997)

“Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.”

Anita Shreve book The Weight of Water

Source: The Weight of Water

Virgil photo

“Let my delight be the country, and the running streams amid the dells—may I love the waters and the woods, though I be unknown to fame.”
Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes, Flumina amem sylvasque inglorius.

Virgil Georgics

Book II, lines 485–486 (tr. Fairclough)
Georgics (29 BC)

Han-shan photo

“Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams
Here lives an idle man
In the daytime wandering over green mountains
At night coming home to sleep by the cliff
Swiftly springs and autumns pass
But my mind is at peace, clear and free
By now I need nothing to lean on
To be still as the waters of the autumn river”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Ono no Komachi photo

“So lonely am I
My body is a floating weed
Severed at the roots.
Were there water to entice me,
I would follow it, I think.”

Ono no Komachi (825–900) Japanese poet

Source: Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature (1955), p. 79

C.G. Jung photo

“I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.”

C.G. Jung book Memories, Dreams, Reflections

On a phallic dream he had as a young child. p. 14
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

Toni Morrison photo

“I would have known right away who you was when the sun blotted out your face the way it did when I took you to the grape arbor. I would have known at once when my water broke. And when I did see your face it had more than a hint of what you would look like after all these years. I would have known who you were right away because the cup after cup of water you drank proved and connected to the fact that you dribbled clear spit on my face the day I got to 124. I would have known right off, but Paul D distracted me. Otherwise I would have seen my fingernail prints right there on your forehead for all the world to see. From when I held your head up, out in the shed. And later on, when you asked me about the earrings I used to dangle for you to play with, I would have recognized you right off, except for Paul D.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 20

Haruki Murakami photo

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o'clock in the morning.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995)

Albert Camus photo

“If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), An Absurd Reasoning
Context: If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. <!-- 159

Related topics