Quotes about river
page 10

“He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.”

Book I, epistle ii, lines 41–42
Epistles (c. 20 BC and 14 BC)
Original: (la) Qui recte vivendi prorogat horam,
Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis.

Waiting

“Traumas, or very powerful, primal experiences, especially when they’re experienced by large numbers of people, have a tendency to affect everything they touch. At that border, it wasn’t just one person who died. It was many, untold numbers—mouths full of earth. I think when you have a massive collective experience like that, the trauma remains in the earth. I think the earth has a memory, trees have a memory, rivers have a memory. If we’re a little bit open to it, we pick it up…”

Kapka Kassabova (1973) author

On land holding the ghosts of trauma in “Mouths Full of Earth: An Interview with Kapka Kassabova” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/12/mouths-full-of-earth-an-interview-with-kapka-kassabova/ in The Paris Review (2017 Sep 12)

Tree, Personality, People, Thinking

“Not only can you not step into the same river twice; it is not even the same you who can’t step into the same river twice. Everything modifies everything. There is no niche in the past waiting for him to come back and occupy it. Nature will tolerate a paradox, but she abhors a vacuum.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Slaves of Time (p. 18)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Past, Waiting, Nature

“I think often, especially with immigrant narratives, or narratives from marginalized communities, there is room for only one narrative or that there’s only stereotypes or statistics. A River of Stars does kind of show that we do have different histories, dreams, flaws, and ambitions, and I hope people are able to really see the fullness of the humanity of each character, whether they’re major or minor.”

Vanessa Hua American journalist and writer

On how she believes her novel expands the immigrant narrative in “A Conversation with Vanessa Hua” https://www.readitforward.com/author-interview/a-conversation-with-vanessa-hua/ in Read It Forward

History, Star, Dreams, Hope

“When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill, as did U.S. Congressman Mendel Rivers, who fed appropriations to the military machine and said he was the most powerful man since Julius Caesar. We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas
The Denial of Death (1973)

Home, Time, Children, People

“And yet, and yet... Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Other Inquisitions

And yet, and yet … Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges. "A New Refutation of Time" (1946) [" Nueva refutación del tiempo http://www.monografias.com/trabajos11/filoylit/filoylit.shtml"] Variant translations: And yet, and yet... Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are obvious acts of desperation and secret consolation. Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. Other Inquisitions (1952)

Time, Success, Universe, Self-confidence

“The real explanation of this failure of Hindu-Muslim unity lies in the failure to realize that what stands between the Hindus and Muslims is not a mere matter of difference, and that this antagonism is not to be attributed to material causes. It is formed by causes which take their origin in historical, religious, cultural and social antipathy, of which political antipathy is only a reflection. These form one deep river of discontent which, being regularly fed by these sources, keeps on mounting to a head and overflowing its ordinary channels. Any current of water flowing from another source, however pure, when it joins it, instead of altering the colour or diluting its strength becomes lost in the main stream. The silt of this antagonism which this current has deposited, has become permanent and deep.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Water, Failure

“In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there. In the fertile fields and boundless prairies, and it was not there. In her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits, aflame with righteousness, did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

This has often been attributed to de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, but erroneously, according to "The Tocqueville Fraud" http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/the-tocqueville-fraud/article/8100 in The Weekly Standard (13 November 1995). This quote dates back to at least 1922 (Herald and Presbyter, September 6, 1922, p. 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=3sYpAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA3-PT21&vq=%22I+sought+for+the+greatness+and+genius+of+America+in+her+commodious%22&source=gbs_search_r&cad=0_1) There's an earlier variant, without the memorable ending, that dates back to at least 1886: I went at your bidding, and passed along their thoroughfares of trade. I ascended their mountains and went down their valleys. I visited their manufactories, their commercial markets, and emporiums of trade. I entered their judicial courts and legislative halls. But I sought everywhere in vain for the secret of their success, until I entered the church. It was there, as I listened to the soul-equalizing and soul-elevating principles of the Gospel of Christ, as they fell from Sabbath to Sabbath upon the masses of the people, that I learned why America was great and free, and why France was a slave. Empty Pews &amp; Selections from Other Sermons on Timely Topics, Madison Clinton Peters; Zeising, 1886, p. 35 http://books.google.com/books?id=f54PAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA35&dq=de+tochneville&ei=w1YCSbS3JoTkygS2g_mvDQ Misattributed

World, Secret, People, Understanding

“Dismal and fearsome to view was this strong place of Carcë, most like to the embodied soul of dreadful night brooding on the waters of that sluggish river: by day a shadow in broad sunshine, the likeness of pitiless violence sitting in the place of power, darkening the desolation of the mournful fen; by night, a blackness more black than night herself.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Chapter 4, "Conjuring in the Iron Tower"

Strong, Water, Night, Soul

“I jumped in the river and there’s piranhas and sharks, but I have a 500-foot lead on them.”

Questlove (1971) American rapper, multi-instrumentalist and journalist from Pennsylvania

On what he would tell his teenaged self in “The Last Word: Questlove on Why He Doesn’t Drink, Idolizing Dave Chappelle” https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-last-word-questlove-on-why-he-doesnt-drink-idolizing-dave-chappelle-629466/ in Rolling Stone (2018 Apr 19)

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A. M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree, Time, Business, Past

“Nature is the universe, including ourselves. And are we not all the time tinkering at the universe, especially the garden patch that is next to us—the earth? Every time we dig a ditch or plant a field, dam a river or build a town, form a government or gut a mountain, slay a forest or form a new resolution, or do anything else almost, do we not change and reform Nature, make it over again and make it more acceptable than it was before? Have we not been working hard for thousands of years, and do our poor hearts not almost faint sometimes when we think how far, far away the millennium still is after all our efforts, and how long our little graves will have been forgotten when that blessed time gets here?”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 164

Time, Mountain, Heart, Nature

“Let us be true to our ideals, true to the spirit of Universal Compassion—whether we walk with the lone worm wandering in the twilight of consciousness, the feathered forms of the fields and forests, the kine of the meadows, the simple savage on the banks of the gladed river, the political blanks whom men call wives, or the outcasts of human industry.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", p. 328
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Universe, Men

“Look at the manner in which the aborigines are swept away from continent after continent by the sword and beverage of the Aryans. See how the red children of America have been cheated and debauched and driven from homes where they and their fathers had lived from immemorial generations. When the banner of Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, America was inhabited by a noble, magnanimous, and happy people. They were not like the sodden, suspicious, revengeful remnants that to-day huddle on barricaded reserves, the vindictive survivors of four centuries of injustice. They were kind and generous. They came to the invading Europeans as children, with minds of wonder and with hands filled with presents. They were treated by the invaders like refuse. They were plundered, and their outstretched hands cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. They are gone from the valleys where once their camp-smokes curled to heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle the moonlight of the rivers no more. They that remain are too weak to rise in warlike challenge to the aggressions of the mighty white. But the story of the meeting of the pale and the red, and of the wrongs of the vanquished red, will remain as one of the mournful tales of this world when the kindred of Lo, like fleecy clouds, have melted into the infinite azure of the past.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 133–134

Home, Cheating, Past, Children

“The long struggle is ended. I must pass away. Good-by. O, men are so cold and hard and half conscious toward their suffering fellows. Nobody understands. O my mother! and O my little girl! What will become of you? And the poor four-footed! May the long years be merciful! Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Suicide note

Singing, Understanding, Girl, Suffering

“Religion has had a natural origin, like coal, and rock salt, and mountains, and river valleys, and everything else. It has been made in the laboratory of human feeling and imagination. The gods did not make men; men made the gods.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"The Source of Religion", International Socialist Review, Vol. 16, Iss. 12, Jun. 1916

God, Religion, Imagination, Mountain

“For many years my nerves were like electric wires. Then I discovered the first axiom of human accord: I accept each person on his own terms. I keep a close tongue in my head; I offer opinions only when so solicited. What a remarkable change! Dissension vanishes, novel facts emerge, digestion flows like a wide river.”

Jack Vance Demon Princes

Source: Demon Princes (1964-1981), The Face (1979), Chapter 7 (pp. 75-76)

Personality, Change

“Wise men say that time is like a river. I say time is like a river of SHIT… and as you float down that river in your little canoe, your paddles are getting smaller and smaller.”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

Last Laugh ‘06 (2006)

Time, Men

“I once walked to school in my underpants and a soggy shoe because my shoe flew off into the river when I tried kicking a ball. My brother retrieved it, but then demanded my trousers, because his were soaked.”

Rik Mayall (1958–2014) British comedian and actor

News of the World, November 1999 https://rikmayallinterviews.wordpress.com/category/1999/

School, Shoe

“Our maturity is evidenced by our beginning to take responsibility for our planet on a global scale, albeit in a very tentative, barely discernible way. We are beginning to realize what we are doing to our environment… We are beginning to see that we cannot go on despoiling the planet, polluting the air, rivers and oceans.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Art of Co-operation (2002)

Way

“One would have thought that conservatives would care far more about the conservation of the old ecological order, and about protecting their ancestral lands, forests and rivers. In contrast, progressives could be expected to be far more open to radical changes to the countryside, especially if the aim is to speed up progress and increase the human standard of living. However, once the party line has been set on these issues by various historical quirks, it has become second nature for conservatives to dismiss concerns about polluted rivers and disappearing birds, while left-wing progressives tend to fear any disruption to the old ecological order.”

Yuval Noah Harari book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Speed, Nature, Bird, Fear

“Witzel starts out with the intention of pitting the linguistic evidence of place-names and river-names against the evidence of archaeology; and he ends up having to try and argue against, or explain away, this linguistic evidence, since it only confirms the archaeological evidence.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 7 : The Indo-European Homeland

“Luke had to use all his willpower to keep from drinking the whole sixteen-ounce bottle of water at a single go. He left a quarter of it, set it down, then snatched it up again and screwed on the cap. He thought if the train took a sudden yaw and it spilled, he would go insane. He gobbled the sausage biscuit in five snatching bites and chased it with another big swallow of water. He licked the grease from his palm, then took the water and the Hostess pie and crept back into his nest. For the first time since riding down the river in the S. S. Pokey and looking up at the stars, he felt that his life might be worth living. And although he did not exactly believe in God, having found the evidence against just slightly stronger than the evidence for, he prayed anyway, but not for himself. He prayed for the highly hypothetical higher power to bless the man who had called him outlaw and thrown that brown bag into the boxcar.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: The Institute (2019), p. 348

God, Time, Drink, Star

“The onset of the Civil War, the greatest preponderance, the greatest population per capita of millionaires and multimillionaires in this country was in the Mississippi River Valley. It wasn’t in Boston, wasn’t in Chicago, wasn’t in New York. The richest people in this country were slaveholders. Most of our earliest presidents were slaveholders. And the fact that they were presidents is not incidental to the fact that they—to their slaveholding. That was how they built their wealth. That was how Thomas Jefferson built his wealth. That was how George Washington built his wealth. Individual slaves were the equivalent of, say, owning a home today. They were people, but turned into objects of extreme wealth. So, just from the economic perspective, there’s that.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Reparations Are Not Just About Slavery But Also Centuries of Theft & Racial Terror, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

Home, Country, War, Wealth

“Benares is holy. Europe, grown superficial, hardly understands such truths anymore….. I feel nearer here than I have ever done to the heart of the world; here I feel everyday as if soon, perhaps even today, I would receive the grace of supreme revelation…The atmosphere of devotion which hangs above the river is improbable in strength; stronger than in any church that I have ever visited. Every would be Christian priest would do well to sacrifice a year of his theological studies in order to spend his time on the Ganges; here he would discover what piety means.”

Hermann von Keyserling (1880–1946) German philosopher

Count Hermann Keyserling, The Huston Smith Reader

Study, Time, Understanding, Heart

“The Indo-Aryan influence, whether due to actual settlement, acculturation, or, if one prefers, the substitution of Indo-Aryan names for local ones, was powerful enough from early on to replace local names, in spite of the well-known conservatism of river-names. This is especially surprising in the area once occupied by the Indus civilization, where one would have expected the survival of earlier names, as has been the case in Europe and the Near East. At the least, one would expect a palimpsest, as found in New England, with the name of the State of Massachussetts next to the Charles River formerly called the Massachussetts River, and such new adaptations as Stony Brook, Muddy Creek, Red River, etc. next to the adaptations of Indian names such as the Mississippi and the Missouri. The failure to preserve old hydronomes even in the Indus Valley (with a few exceptions noted above) indicates the extent of the social and political collapse experienced by the local population.”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

p 107
Early Indian history: Linguistic and textual parametres

Failure

“This leads to the conclusion that the Indo-Aryan influence, … was powerful enough from early on to replace local names, in spite of the well-known conservatism of river names. This is especially surprising in the area once occupied by the Indus Civilisation where one would have expected the survival of older names, as has been the case in Europe and the Near East. At the least, one would expect a palimpsest, as found in New England with the name of the state of Massachussetts next to the Charles river, formerly called the Massachussetts river, and such new adaptations as Stony Brook, Muddy Creek, Red River, etc., next to the adaptations of Indian names such as the Mississippi and the Missouri.”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

Early Indian history: Linguistic and textual parametres

“River names in northern India are thus principally Sanskrit, with few indications of Dravidian, MuNDa or Tibeto-Burmese names. However, Kosala, with its uncharacteristic -s- after -o- may be Tibeto-Burmese (Sanskrit rules would demand KoSala or KoSala, a corrected form that is indeed adopted in the Epics).”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

... To sum up, what does the evidence of
Early Indian history: Linguistic and textual parametres

“The river Yavyavati is mentioned once in the RV; it has been identified with the Zhob in E. Afghanistan. At PB 25.7.2, however, nothing points to such a W. localisation. The persons connected with it are known to have stayed in the Vibhinduka country, a part of the Kuru-PañcAla land.”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

[....] “A dolphin lying on the sands, dried out by the North wind, could refer to the Gangetic dolphin, as in fact it does at 1.17.6...
India and the Ancient World: History, Trade and Culture Before A.D. 650 edited by Gilbert Pollet (Paper by Michael Witzel), Department Oriëntalistiek Leuven, 1987.

Personality, Parting, Country

“He excels in description of forests and the hermitages of sages. Nature, in all its aspects and varieties — trees, mountains, rivers, clouds, dawn, sunset, had a great fascination for him. His sketches of some of the sages have a deft touch and they dwell on the greatness of penance and the sublimity of a spiritual life of self-realisation.”

Vālmīki Legendary Indian poet, author of the Ramayana

Source: The Epic Civilization, p. 51.

Tree, Mountain, Nature, Self-confidence

“Finally I realized that I was a demi-god and that I was beyond all the low, petty desires of mankind. I felt the eternal flux within me. What is eternity? Eternity for me was playing hide-and-seek with that whore on the banks of the Suren river; it was a momentary closing of my eyes when I hid my head in her lap.”

Sadegh Hedayat book The Blind Owl

The Blind Owl

Whore, God

“Karnak was the first great statement of what technology could do with unlimited manpower and the approval of the gods. Ironically, the modern equivalent lies, again, in the desert. This time, the nomads also settled by a river… a river of oil. But what had took the pharaohs 4,000 years to build took the Kuwaitis 4,000 days.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

What's happened in Kuwait, the change from a nomadic existence to being able to buy and use everything modern technology has to offer has come in much less than one generation. Kuwait represents the immense power of technology used in a way most of us have never experienced, because we've lived with the kind of change it can bring for more than a hundred years. Here it's been focused. Change has been instant and total. Kuwait has suddenly become like New York, or any other of the great urban islands on technology, totally dependent on that technology. Like them, without it, Kuwait would return to the desert.
Connections (1979), 1 - The Trigger Effect

God, Time

“All I do is track a profane route to something (I hope) profound. Like swimming a river of shit for a kiss.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

On what sets him apart from others in his genre. Online chat transcript http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=599285, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (2007-05-01)

Hope, Kiss

“Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.”

Julio Cortázar book Historias de cronopios y de famas

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money, Question, Way, Search

“With a soldier the flag is paramount. I know the struggle with my conscience during the Mexican War. I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subject. I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign. I had taken an oath to serve eight years, unless sooner discharged, and I considered my supreme duty was to my flag. I had a horror of the Mexican War, and I have always believed that it was on our part most unjust. The wickedness was not in the way our soldiers conducted it, but in the conduct of our government in declaring war. The troops behaved well in Mexico, and the government acted handsomely about the peace. We had no claim on Mexico. Texas had no claim beyond the Nueces River, and yet we pushed on to the Rio Grande and crossed it. I am always ashamed of my country when I think of that invasion. Once in Mexico, however, and the people, those who had property, were our friends. We could have held Mexico, and made it a permanent section of the Union with the consent of all classes whose consent was worth having. Overtures were made to Scott and Worth to remain in the country with their armies.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

On the Mexican–American War, p. 448 https://archive.org/details/aroundworldgrant02younuoft/page/n4 1870s, Around the World with General Grant (1879)

Courage, Peace, Time, Country

“On a tree by a river a little tomtit
Sang "Willow, titwillow, titwillow"
And I said to him, "Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing ‘Willow, titwillow, titwillow?'.
"Is it weakness of intellect, birdie?" I cried,
"Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?"”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

With a shake of his poor little head he replied,
"Oh, Willow, titwillow, titwillow!"
The Suicide's Grave (from The Mikado).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Singing, Bird, Tree

“And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river."”

W. H. Auden book Spain

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. Descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."
Source: Spain (1937), Lines 33–44

Loss, Time, History

“The Mississippi and its paddle boats, and the rivers of Bengal and their gleaming steamers evoked a similar atmosphere of romance, of long, song-filled voyages, high winds and lonely sunsets.”

Qurratulain Hyder (1927–2007) Urdu author

Qurratulain Hyder, Fireflies in the Mist

“Change is not a sentiment, although it certainly can start to feel that way in the midst of a campaign. The change we were talking about was meaningful. It was change for people’s lives for the better. It was about decent housing, being able to go to the doctor when you need to, being able to swim in a river. It was meaningful, material change.”

Jacinda Ardern (1980) Prime Minister of New Zealand

Interview with Lisa Owen at Newshub Nation, 21 October 2017

Housing, People, Way, Feeling

“If we all, as a society, did go vegan, and we moved away from eating animal foods and toward a plant-based diet, what would happen? If we didn’t kill all these cows and eat them, then we wouldn’t have to breed all these cows because we’re breeding cows, and chickens, and pigs, and fish. We’re breeding them over and over again, relentlessly. So if we didn’t breed them, then we wouldn’t have to feed them. If we didn’t have to feed them, then we wouldn’t have to devote all this land to growing grains, and legumes, and so forth to feed to them. And so then the forests could come back. Wildlife could come back. The oceans would come back. The rivers would run clean again. The air would come back. Our health would return.”

Will Tuttle (1953) American writer, speaker and musician

Interview in the documentary-film Cowspiracy by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn (2014).

Animals, Fish, Health, Food

“Too many misinterpretations have been made; too many misunderstandings have come up between the white men and the Indians. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented nor will he grow and prosper. I have asked some of the Great White Chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me.”

Chief Joseph (1840–1904) Nez Percé Chieftain

Lincoln Hall Speech (1879)

Peace, Chance, Law, People

“This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
[...]
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
[http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#fiftysevensixty In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
]Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
[http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#sixtyonesixtytwo Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear]
[http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#sixtyfoursixtythree As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose]
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.”

T.S. Eliot book The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men (1925)

Dead, Star, Hope, Death

“The sky is colored like a peacock's breast;
There lingers yet one thin, chill line of gold
Down where the woods their somber branches hold
In silhouette against the fading west.
Dark leaves, dark earth, slow-breathing and at rest,
Whence frail scents rise of dew-wet grass and mold.
A single star gleams diamond-clear and cold,
Like one sharp note from elfin viol wrest.
This is the haunted hour,—such woods surround
Grey Merlin in his oak, adrouse with dwale;
In such a gloaming once the lorn knight found
⁠The faery woman in the river-vale;
And underneath this star long, long ago
The Dark Tower heard a lonely slug-horn blow!”

Leah Bodine Drake (1914–1964) American writer

1941, Weird Tales, Vol. 36, p. 105
Haunted Hour

Star, Grass, Color

“I learned to love my country, in two ways. I began to learn the geography of the South-the mountains, the rivers, the valleys. The other thing was the incredible heroism on both sides. It's hard to believe men were as brave as those men were. Somehow sense of honor was stronger than fear. God knows, they felt fear. I would really like it to be stressed that my work helped me to love my country. I hope my work does that for other people, learning both our virtues and our vices.”

Shelby Foote (1916–2005) Novelist, historian

Interview for the Lexington Herald-Leader, 1997

God, Country, Mountain, Help

“A group of women around a shattered man.
I said with a smile: Let's call him Qais, Laila's mad lover.
The termperature sank abruptly.
Never in my life did I see eyes like those with trailing dresses.
The moment I left him they had, of course, to come after me.
And there they waited for me, one after the other.
I was in a rural city, a strange place on the banks of a river.
And even without my smiling, the shattered man had tired me.
It was in the old house that our meeting took place, and my jokes turned into blood.
I killed them with classic boredom.”

Ounsi el-Hajj (1937–2014) Lebanese poet, journalist, and translator

An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry, p. 75
Poetry, Rendezvous

Housing, Waiting, Smile, Lovers

“The river of time flowed unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.”

Stephen Baxter book Ring

Source: Ring (1994), Chapter 35 (p. 891; closing words)

Sea, Time

“I remember the birds and the animals and going down to the river with my dog to play…My grandparents and uncles who farmed in Puerto de Luna were so beautiful, I wanted to keep them around, to contain them.”

Rudolfo Anaya (1937) Novelist, poet

On his childhood in “Rudolfo Anaya: Man of visions” https://www.abqjournal.com/1074636/man-of.html in Albuquerque Journal (2017 Oct 7)

Animals, Bird, Dogs, Beauty

“Should I say, that the river (in this place) from shore to shore, and perhaps near half a mile above and below me, appeared to be one solid bank of fish, of various kinds, pushing through this narrow pass of San Juan's into the little lake, on their return down the river, and that the alligators were in such incredible numbers, and so close from shore to shore, that it would have easy to have walked across on their heads, had the animals been harmless? What expressions can sufficiently declare the shocking scene that for some minutes continued, whilst this mighty army of fish were forcing the pass? During this attempt, thousands, I may say hundreds of thousands, of them were caught and swallowed by the devouring alligators. I have seen an alligator take up out of the water several great fish at a time, and just squeeze them betwixt his jaws, while the tails of the great trout flapped about his eyes and lips, ere he had swallowed them. The horrid noise of their closing jaws, their plunging amidst the broken banks of fish, and rising with their prey some feet upright above the water, the floods of water and blood rushing out of their mouths, and the clouds of vapor issuing from their wide nostrils, were truly frightful.”

William Bartram (1739–1823) American naturalist

[Van Doren, Mark, The travels of William Bartram, An American Bookshelf, volume 3, 118–119, 1928, New York, Macy-Masius, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b281934&view=1up&seq=124]
Travels of William Bartram (1791)

Time, Animals, Water, Appearance

“It is like what I said, that the elite of the world have all seceded into outer space, and they have a country up there, and they look down and say, “What is our water doing in their rivers, and what’s our timber doing in their forests?””

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

So there is a psychotic refusal to understand that the survival of the species is connected to the survival of the planet, you know? Because this sort of progress is a kind of church now. It is not amenable to reason. So it is very difficult to know how any real conversation can happen... A month or two ago, the Supreme Court of India...said that two million indigenous people should be evicted from their forest homes... Because that forest needs to be preserved as a sanctuary. But when, for the last 25 years, people were fighting against projects which were decimating millions of hectares and acres of forest, nobody cared... And when you are talking about evicting two million of the poorest people, stripping them of everything they ever had, there is little outrage. Any sense of talk of equality or justice seems to just have the same effect that blasphemy has in religious societies. That is what capitalism has become—a form of religion that will brook no questioning. Democracy Now Arundhati Roy: Capitalism Is “a Form of Religion” Stopping Solutions to Climate Change & Inequality https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/13/arundhati_roy_capitalism_is_a_form, (13 May 2019) Interviews

World, Water, Country

“Here is your road, tyingyou to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.
Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river
cutting fast and direct into the town.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: "The Road" U.S. 1 (1938), The Book of the Dead

“You know a dream is like a river,
Ever changin' as it flows.
And a dreamer's just a vessel
That must follow where it goes.
Trying to learn from what's behind you,
And never knowing what's in store
Makes each day a constant battle
Just to stay between the shores...andI will sail my vessel
'Til the river runs dry.
Like a bird upon the wind,
These waters are my sky.
I'll never reach my destination
If I never try.
So I will sail my vessel
'Til the river runs dry.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

The River, written by Victoria Shaw and G. Brooks.
Song lyrics, Ropin' the Wind (1991)

Dreams, Learning, Water, Bird

“Did you see they found 50,000 ballots in like a river?”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2020s, 2020, October

“It is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.
Nevertheless, we make a beginning. it is not for the metal alone we go to the Dead Places now — there are the books and the writings. They are hard to learn. And the magic tools are broken — but we can look at them and wonder. At least, we make a beginning. And, when I am chief priest we shall go beyond the great river. We shall go to the Place of the Gods — the place newyork — not one man but a company. We shall look for the images of the gods and find the god ASHING and the others — the gods Lincoln and Biltmore and Moses. But they were men who built the city, not gods or demons. They were men. I remember the dead man's face. They were men who were here before us. We must build again.”

Stephen Vincent Benét book By the Waters of Babylon

Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)

God, Dead, Learning, Knowledge

“Now I tell what is very strong magic. I woke in the midst of the night. When I woke, the fire had gone out and I was cold. It seemed to me that all around me there were whisperings and voices. I closed my eyes to shut them out. Some will say that I slept again, but I do not think that I slept. I could feel the spirits drawing my spirit out of my body as a fish is drawn on a line.
Why should I lie about it? I am a priest and the son of a priest. If there are spirits, as they say, in the small Dead Places near us, what spirits must there not be in that great Place of the Gods? And would not they wish to speak? After such long years? I know that I felt myself drawn as a fish is drawn on a line. I had stepped out of my body — I could see my body asleep in front of the cold fire, but it was not I. I was drawn to look out upon the city of the gods.
It should have been dark, for it was night, but it was not dark. Everywhere there were lights — lines of light — circles and blurs of light — ten thousand torches would not have been the same. The sky itself was alight — you could barely see the stars for the glow in the sky. I thought to myself "This is strong magic" and trembled. There was a roaring in my ears like the rushing of rivers. Then my eyes grew used to the light and my ears to the sound. I knew that I was seeing the city as it had been when the gods were alive.”

Stephen Vincent Benét book By the Waters of Babylon

Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)

God, Drawing, Night, Dead

“Never have I been so much alone — I tried to think of my knowledge, but it was a squirrel's heap of winter nuts. There was no strength in my knowledge any more and I felt small and naked as a new-hatched bird — alone upon the great river, the servant of the gods.”

Stephen Vincent Benét book By the Waters of Babylon

Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)

God, Knowledge, Bird, Thinking

“The beauty of the forests of Indiana in the rich and lovely month of May surpasses all description. The rivers, swollen by the rains, flow through long lanes of verdure, caressing the islands they seem to carry with them in their course and which look like floating nosegays. The trees raise their straight trunks to the height of more than a hundred and twenty feet and are crowned with tops of admirable beauty. The magnolia, the dog-wood, the catalpa, covered with white flowers, the permed snow of the springtime, intermingle with the delicate green of the other trees.”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

Third Journal of Travel (1844-1845)

Tree, Beauty, Dogs, Flowers

“The old city of Ajoodhea is a ruin, with the exception of a few buildings along the bank of the river raised by wealthy Hindoos in honour of Ram, who once lived and reigned there, and is believed by all Hindoos to have been an incarnation of Vishnoo.”

William Henry Sleeman (1788–1856) British colonial administrator

Vol. 2, p. 27
‘A Journey Through The Kingdom Of Oudh (1849-1850)’ , 1858, quoted . in Kishore, Kunal (2016). Ayodhyā revisited.

“Ayodhya, an ancient Indian city, where the first Indian monarchs on the Ganges resided, was situated on the river Deva, in the latitude of 250, exactly in the spot where Faizabad now stands. It was the birthplace of Shirama, or Rama, an Indian hero, or the younger Bacchus, whose heroic achievements were celebrated in songs before the times of the Pagan Indians.”

Paulinus of St. Bartholomew (1748–1806) Austrian Carmelite missionary and Orientalist

Journey to the East Indies, 1800. as quoed in Kishore, Kunal (2016). Ayodhyā revisited.

Time

“For it may be very plausibly urged on their behalf, that it is impossible to extinguish evil until the origin thereof has been discovered and destroyed. This great river of human Time (rivers were expressly created to feed metaphors, allegories, and navigable canals) which comes flowing down thick with filth and blood from the immemorial past surely cannot be thoroughly cleansed by any purifying process applied to it here in the present for the pollution, if not in its very source (supposing it has a source), or deriving from unimaginable remotenesses of eternity indefinitely beyond its source, at any rate interfused with it countless ages back, and is perennial as the river itself. This immense poison-tree of Life, with its leaves of illusion, blossoms of delirium, apples of destruction, surely cannot be made wholesome and sweet by anything we may do to the branchlets and twigs on which, poor insects, we find ourselves crawling, or to the leaves and fruit on which we must fain feed; for the venom is drawn up in the sap by the taproots plunged in abysmal depths of the past. This toppling and sinking house wherein we dwell cannot be firmly re-established, save by re-establishing from its lowest foundation upwards.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

"The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery", part VIII, pp. 93–94
Essays and Phantasies (1881)

Tree, Time, Housing, Past

“You can find it on almost any tree. As we made our way through the forest, it was literally raining rubber juice. Our clothes were full of it. The Congo has so many tributaries that a well-organized company can easily extract a few tons of rubber per year here. You only have to sail up such a river and the branches with rubber hang almost up to your ship.”

Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) Welsh journalist and explorer

Leopold II, Het hele Verhaal, Johan Op De Beeck Horizon, 2020 https://klara.be/leopold-ii-aflevering-8-0 ISBN 9789463962094 Stanley Points out to King Leopold II Of Belgium that the Congo free State which was a loss-making endeavor at that time that rubber extraction has a possibility to make the colony profitable.

Way, Clothes, Tree, Relation ships

“What use the green river, the gold place, if time and
death pinned human in the pocket of my land not rest
from taking underground the green all-willowed and
white rose and bean flower and morning-mist picnic of
song in pepper-pot breast of thrush?”

Janet Frame (1924–2004) New Zealand author

Owls Do Cry, pt, 1, chap. 4, 1961

Flowers, Death, Time

“Every river is looking for an ocean.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

“Starting in a hollowed log of wood — some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself 'Why?”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

and the only echo is 'damned fool!... the Devil drives'.
Burton to Lord Houghton as quoted in The Devil Drives: A life of Sir Richard Burton (1984) by Fawn Brodie.

“You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in.”

Heraclitus (-535) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher

Water

“We grow old in people’s eyes / or when, opening a wardrobe, / the mirror takes us by surprise. / We grow old, half-plunged / in our rivers / seeing portraits reflected / when images flow among a thousand folds; / we grow old in twisted reflections of cutlery / and glasses.”

Menotti Lerro (1980) Italian poet

From The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, p. 41

People

“If life is a mixture of drained rivers / which carry to the sea echoes of water, / we are nothing but shadows – / reflected lights of dead bodies without no possible outlet or shore.”

Menotti Lerro (1980) Italian poet

From The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, p. 37

Light, Water, Sea, Dead

“Yes, warn her! Warn her that I’ve decided to put an end to her existence. Life is nothing but a river destined to dry itself, a source kept luxuriant for a few years by the rain that falls from our own eyes.”

Menotti Lerro (1980) Italian poet

Donna Giovanna, Act II, scene ii.
Theater Quotes

Life

“O water of the river Ganges, thou rememberst the day
When our torrent flooded thy valleys...”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

Source: quoted in Annemarie Schimmel - Gabriel's Wing_ Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1989, Iqbal Academy) also in Jain, M. (2010). Parallel pathways: Essays on Hindu-Muslim relations, 1707-1857.

Water

“Only what we have lost forever, we possess forever. Only where there are graves, are there resurrections. Only when we have drunk from the river of darkness, shall we truly see. Only when our legs have rotted off, shall we truly dance.”

Brother Theodore (1906–2001) German-American monologuist and comedian

Dance

“Arabs would have sat in the dark forever had not the Zionist engineers harnessed the Jordan river for electrification. Now they swarm into Palestine in seeking the light.”

Winston S. Churchill book The World Crisis

1922
The World Crisis (1923–1931)

Light

“The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end – you don’t come to an achievement; you don’t come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Knowledge

“The easy roads are crowded
And the level roads are jammed;
The pleasant little rivers
With the drifting folks are crammed.
But off yonder where it's rocky,
Where you get a better view,
You will find the ranks are thinning
And the travelers are few.Where the going's smooth and pleasant
You will always find the throng,
For the many, more's the pity,
Seem to like to drift along.
But the steeps that call for courage,
And the task that's hard to do
In the end result in glory
For the never-wavering few.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: Just Folks (1917), The Few

Courage, Travel

“Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of school time; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 6

Mountain, Secret, World, School

“Ultimately, it's not about meditation or belief in some scripture or religion, it's about flowing with the river of life, it's about living with compassion and gratitude.”

Om Swami (1979) Indian mystic

A Million Thoughts (2016)

Religion, Gratitude, Life

“Our country, our nation is built by two institutions, the state and the language. A language whose epicenter today is no longer on these banks of the Seine, but probably much more towards the Congo River basin.”

Emmanuel Macron (1977) 25th President of the French Republic

Macron lashes out at Zemmour: “Our identity is not built on narrow-mindedness" https://palnws.be/2021/09/macron-haalt-uit-naar-zemmour-onze-identiteit-is-niet-gebouwd-op-bekrompenheid/ 2017, 2021

Country

“There is one river of truth, which receives tributaries from every side.”

Clement of Alexandria book Stromata

Stromata (Miscellanies, c. 198–203 AD), I: 5.
Variant: Variant translation: There is one river of truth, but many streams fall into it on this side and that.

Truth