Quotes about river
page 8

“willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:
the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency,
water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves
wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky, course of a journey among the densities
of the days of the future and the fateful
brilliance of misery shining like a bird
that petrifies the forest with its singing
and the annunciations of happiness
among the branches which go disappearing,
hours of light even now pecked away by the birds,
omens which even now fly out of my hand, an actual presence like a burst of singing,
like the song of the wind in a burning building,
a long look holding the whole world suspended,
the world with all its seas and all its mountains,
body of light as it is filtered through agate,
the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays,
the solar rock and the cloud-colored body,
color of day that goes racing and leaping,
the hour glitters and assumes its body,
now the world stands, visible through your body,
and is transparent through your transparency”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Sun Stone (1957)

Fate, World, Color, Mountain

“By the letter that will accompany this, and was to have gone last night by Major Mifflin, your Excellency will see what measures I took before your favor came to hand. The passing of the ships up the river is, to be sure, a full proof of the insufficiency of the obstructions in the river to stop the ships from going up; but that garrison employs double the number of men to invest it that we have to occupy it. They must keep troops at King's Bridge, to prevent a communication with the country; and they dare not leave a very small number, for fear our people should attack them.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (9 October 1776)

Men, People, Fear, Communication

“The sun has burst the sky
Because I love you
And the river its banks.”

Jenny Joseph (1932–2018) Poet

Poem The sun has burst the sky http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-sun-has-burst-the-sky/

Love, Sun

“If I were so time-poor as to have only one day to spend in Yosemite I should start at daybreak, say at three o'clock in midsummer, with a pocketful of any sort of dry breakfast stuff, for Glacier Point, Sentinel Dome, the head of Illilouette Fall, Nevada Fall, the top of Liberty Cap, Vernal Fall and the wild boulder-choked River Cañon.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

The Yosemite http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/ (1912), chapter 12: How Best to Spend One's Yosemite Time Advice for visitors to Yosemite given by John Muir at age 74 years. Compare advice given by the 37-year-old Muir above. 1910s

Time

“By March, 1908, we were ready to announce Model T, but not to produce it, On October 1 of that year the first car was introduced to the public. From Joe Galamb's little room on the third floor had come a revolutionary vehicle. In the next eighteen years, out of Piquette Avenue, Highland Park, River Rouge, and from assembly plants all over the United States came 15,000,000 more.”

Charles E. Sorensen (1881–1968) American businessman

Source: My Forty Years with Ford, 1956, p. 110 ; As cited in: EyeWitness to History (2005)

Cars

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Last lines
Middlemarch (1871)

Life, World, Nature, Dependency

“I beg your pardon,' said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. 'You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So — this — is — a — River!”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

The River,' corrected the Rat.
Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 1

Thinking, Effort

“But you and I know the seasons are slow the rivers they froze, the wind always blows down all our dreams, the engine's out of steam. **All Of Your Days Will Be Blessed”

Ed Harcourt (1977) British musician

Dreams, Season

“I'm gonna live where the green grass grows, watch my corn pop up in rows.
Every night, be tucked in close to you.
Raise our kids where the good Lord's blessed.
Point our rocking chairs towards the west.
Plan our dreams where the peaceful river flows.
Where the green grass grows.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Where the Green Grass Grows
Song lyrics, Everywhere (1997)

Peace, Dreams, Grass, Night

“I've found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning, or things you have a sentiment for or something. Because your life closes up in so many ways or doesn't become as flexible or exciting or whatever you want to call it. You tend to be nostalgic. And I think about my boats. It's more complicated than that, but also it's going out and also there's a lot of references to crossing over. But the thing of the Nile boat in Winter's Passage: Luxor was about the wonderful thing, the lazy thing, of being two or three months in Luxor by the river. It was just that, it explains a winter passage. From a certain point to the other side: it's like the Greek boat that ferries you over to the other world. That sculpture didn't have it. But sometimes the large painting in Houston does have it. It's a passage through everything.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 174

Life, World, Way, Thinking

“So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 27 (at page 219)

Sea

“I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old. And I reply and say, "Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

From the BBC documentary Life on Air (2002)

God, People, Truth, Beauty

“There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?”

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) Russian poet and writer

Есть книги настолько живые, но все боишься, что, пока не читал, она уже изменилась, как река — сменилась, пока жил — тоже жила, как река — шла и ушла. Никто дважды не вступал в ту же реку. А вступал ли кто дважды в ту же книгу?
Pushkin and Pugachev (1937)

Books, Change, Reading

“Janeway Smithson was a little, insane, grey-haired bantam rooster of a man. He loaded five or six of us in one cab, and we rolled down to the bed of the L. A. River. Now in those days the L. A. River was a fake - there was no water, just a wide, flat, dry cement runway. The bums lived down there by the hundreds in little cement alcoves under the bridges and overpasses. Some of them even had potted plants in front of their places. All they needed to live like kings was canned heat (Sterno) and what they picked out of the nearby garbage dump. They were tan and relaxed and most of them looked a hell of a lot healthier than the average Los Angeles business man. Those guys down there had no problems with women, income tax, landlords, burial expenses, dentists, time payments, car repairs, or with climbing into a voting booth and pulling the curtain closed.”

Charles Bukowski book Factotum

Source: Factotum (1975), Ch. 71

Women, Angels, Cars, Guy

“I kno plenty ov folks who are so kondem kontrary, that if they should fall into the river, they would insist uopon floating up stream.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

“Everything is like the rivers: the work of the slopes.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Todo es como los ríos, obra de las pendientes.
Voces (1943)

“Regeneration is the fountain; sanctification is the river (in deeper or shallower degree). 'Entire sanctification' is the river in fullest flow.”

J. Sidlow Baxter (1903–1999) Australian theologian

Divine Healing of the Body (1979), p. 287.

“A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.”

William Wordsworth Peter Bell

Part I, stanza 12.
Peter Bell (1798)

“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Last words (May 10, 1863); as quoted in "Stonewall Jackson's Last Days" by Joe D. Haines, Jr. in America's Civil War

Tree

“I can hear her heart beat from a thousand miles
And the heavens open every time she smiles
And when I come to her that's where I belong
Yet I'm running to her like a river's song.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Crazy Love
Song lyrics, Moondance (1970)

Smile, Time, Heart

“Like the dew on the mountain,
Like the foam on the river,
Like the bubble on the fountain,
Thou art gone, and forever!”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Canto III, stanza 16 (Coronach, stanza 3). The Lady of the Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3011 (1810)

Art, Mountain

“Emily, I saw you last night by the river
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever
In a mud cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Ys (2006)

Dreams, Water, Night

“Once cannot tame the voices of the flute, voices of such uncanny lightness yet miracle of being that they are able to tilt the two rivers, the visible and the invisible rivers, into diagrammatic discourse; and in so doing to create the four banks of the river of space into a ladder upon which the curved music of the flute ascends. Those banks are dislodged upwards into rungs in the ladder and into stepping stones into original space.”

Wilson Harris (1921–2018) Guyanese writer

The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990)

Music, Light

“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan… We will defend ourselves on every front, defensively and offensively.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Press conference http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-finally-speaks-his-mind/. 2010s, 2014

People, Understanding, Thinking

“Jordan itself is a beautiful country. It is wild, with limitless deserts where the Bedouin roam, but the mountains of the north are clothed in green forests, and where the Jordan River flows it is fertile and warm in winter. Jordan has a strange, haunting beauty and a sense of timelessness. Dotted with the ruins of empires once great, it is the last resort of yesterday in the world of tomorrow. I love every inch of it.”

Hussein of Jordan (1935–1999) King of Jordan

King Hussein http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/views_envi.html Cited in: Arab Information Center, The Arab World https://books.google.nl/books?id=_7AMAQAAMAAJ&q=%22Jordan+itself+is+a+beautiful+country.+It+is+wild,+with+limitless+deserts+where+the+Bedouin+roam,+but+the+mountains+of+the+north+are+clothed+in+green+forests,+and+where+the+Jordan+River+flows+it+is+fertile+and+warm+in+winter.+Jordan+has+a+strange,+haunting+beauty+and+a+sense+of+timelessness.+Dotted+with+the+ruins+of+empires+once+great,+it+is+the+last+resort+of+yesterday+in+the+world+of+tomorrow.+I+love+every+inch+of+it%22&dq=%22Jordan+itself+is+a+beautiful+country.+It+is+wild,+with+limitless+deserts+where+the+Bedouin+roam,+but+the+mountains+of+the+north+are+clothed+in+green+forests,+and+where+the+Jordan+River+flows+it+is+fertile+and+warm+in+winter.+Jordan+has+a+strange,+haunting+beauty+and+a+sense+of+timelessness.+Dotted+with+the+ruins+of+empires+once+great,+it+is+the+last+resort+of+yesterday+in+the+world+of+tomorrow.+I+love+every+inch+of+it%22&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiE34nT8Z_LAhWGLA8KHbTAAH0Q6AEIJTAB, 1965, p. 30

Love, World, Beauty, Mountain

“We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.”

Kalle Lasn (1942) Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor and activist

Hey President Obama http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/82/obama_economics.html/. Adbusters (March 24, 2009).

Nature, Fish, Past

“In America you can ease into middle age with the accoutrements of adolescence still prominent and suffer relatively minor embarrassment: okay, so the guy's still got his sideburns and rod and beer and beergut and wife and three kids and a duplex and never grew up. So what? You're not supposed to grow up in America. You're supposed to consume. But in Britain it seems there is some ideal, no, some dry river one is expected to ford, so you can enter that sedate bubble where you raise a family, contributing in your small way to your society and keep your mouth shut. Until you get old, that is, when you can become an "eccentric"”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

do and say outrageous things, naughty things, because it's expected of you, you've crossed to the other mirror of the telescope of childhood.
"The Clash" (December 1977), p. 239
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988)

Age, Family, Way, Guy

“Right now, because of the byzantine nature of the way that we regulate in this country, if you have a cheese pizza — you make a cheese pizza — that is governed by the United States Department of Agriculture. No, it’s the other way around. I always get these backwards. If you make a cheese pizza, it’s governed by the Food and Drug Administration. If you put a pepperoni on it, that’s governed by the USDA. If you have a chicken, it’s governed by the USDA. If that chicken lays an egg, it’s governed by the FDA. But if you break the egg and make it into an omelet, that is now covered again by the USDA.
If you have open-face roast beef sandwich, that’s one or the other. But you put the bread on top of it, it’s the other one. A hotdog — the hotdog meat is governed by one. You put it in a bun, it’s governed by another. One of my favorites: If you have a saltwater fish — you have a salmon, and it’s in the ocean, it’s governed by the Department of Commerce. Once it swims up river, it’s governed by the Department of Interior. And to get there, it has to go up a fish ladder governed by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. This is stupid. This is just — this makes no sense.”

Mick Mulvaney (1967) Director of the Office of Management and Budget

21 June 2018 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-cabinet-meeting-9/

Stupidity, Food, Way, Nature

“The nation is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain.”

Du Fu (712–770) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"Spring View" (trans. Gary Snyder), written in 755.
Variant translation (by David Hinton): The nation falls into ruins; rivers and mountains continue.

Mountain

“From the far reaches of the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River, the faithful approached the city of Mecca. All had the same objective to worship together at the most sacred shrine of Islam, the Kaaba in Mecca. One such traveler was Mansa Musa, Sultan of Mali in Western Africa. Mansa Musa had prepared carefully for the long journey he and his attendants would take. He was determined to travel not only for his own religious fulfillment, but also for recruiting teachers and leaders, so that his realms could learn more of the Prophet's teachings.”

Mahmud Kati (1468–1593) Malian historian

Faith, Travel, Learning, Teachers

“John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades — a small town on the Mississippi River — for several generations.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Family

“One should view the present situation – the status quo – as being maintained by certain conditions or forces. A culture – for instance, the food habits of a certain group at a given time – is not a static affair but a live process like a river which moves but still keeps to a recognizable form…Food habits do not occur in empty space. They are part and parcel of the daily rhythm of being awake and asleep; of being alone and in a group; of earning a living and playing; of being a member of a town, a family, a social class, a religious group... in a district with good groceries and restaurants or in an area of poor and irregular food supply. Somehow all these factors affect food habits at any given time. They determine the food habits of a group every day anew just as the amount of water supply and the nature of the river bed determine the ﬂow of the river, its constancy or change.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Kurt Lewin (1943) "Psychological ecology". In: D. Cartwright (Ed.) Field Theory in Social Science. London: Social Science Paperbacks. As cited in: Bernard Burnes (2004) " Kurt Lewin and the Planned Approach to Change: A Re-appraisal https://blackboard.le.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/institution/College%20of%20Social%20Science/School%20of%20Management/DL%20Materials/MBA/2.%20Organizational%20Behaviour/Section%208/Burnes.pdf" in: Journal of Management Studies. Vol 41. Nr 6. p. 977-1002. 1940s

Family, Food, Nature, Water

“He touched his harp, and nations heard, entranced,
As some vast river of unfailing source,
Rapid, exhaustless, deep, his numbers flowed
And opened new fountains in the human heart.”

Robert Pollok book The Course of Time

Book iv, line 684.
The Course of Time (published 1827)

Heart

“There is much to be known,” said Adaon, “and above all much to be loved, be it the turn of the seasons or the shape of a river pebble. Indeed, the more we find to love, the more we add to the measure of our hearts.”

Lloyd Alexander The Chronicles of Prydain

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book II: The Black Cauldron (1965), Chapter 3

Love, Heart, Season

“All earth’s full rivers can not fill
The sea that drinking thirsteth still.”

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) English poet

By the Sea; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919); Old and New, Volume 5 (1872), p. 169.

Drink, Sea

“Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, but mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this—astonishingly—in the name of advertising.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 9 (p. 148)

Color, Light, Learning

“Grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid, the voice rose through the evening like memory, and a gust of wind blew up from the river, dimming the song, rustling the trees, then died and became still. I’ll lay in de grave and stretch out my arms … Suddenly the voice ceased, and all was quiet.
Then what I done was wrong, Lord? I said. And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption?
I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem.”

William Styron book The Confessions of Nat Turner

Part I : Judgment Day
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

Tree, Memory, Night

“I remember I was In the tanning salon
When I heard that River Phoenix was gone
They say that only the good die young
But that ain't true where I come from
California, California”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

California by Belinda Carlisle

“Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies — in fact the very narrowness of primitive society gives their ornamental art a peculiar concentration and vitality. At some time in the ninth century one could have looked down the Seine and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river. Looked at today in the British Museum, it is a powerful work of art; but to the mother of a family trying to settle down in her little hut, it would have seemed less agreeable — as menacing to her civilisation as the periscope of a nuclear submarine.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 1: The Skin of Our Teeth

Family, Art, Time

“This is bliss, This is bliss, This is bliss, I proclaim
The real happiness lies in the chant of Lord’s name.
One should be on the banks of river of life firm like rocks along,
One should be a powerful bow in the midst of the strong.
One should softly adore Lord’s greatness in heart within,
Be like a lump of sugar to his kith and kin
One should keep correcting wisely his body and mind.
And pay respects to the great and sages kind.
One should be like fish in the Madhva philosophy ocean,
And be pure in his practice of the Triple Expression”.
One should ever be alert to grasp knowledge that abound,
And think of Lord (Sri Hari) night and day around.
One should pay respects to the servants of the Lord,
Purnadar Vittala the God of this world.”

Purandara Dasa (1484–1564) Music composer

In the above quote, Dasa gives some fundamentals for leading life in the community. Translation quoted from this [Narayan, M.K.V., Lyrical Musings on Indic Culture: A Sociology Study of Songs of Sant Purandara Dasa, http://books.google.com/books?id=-r7AxJp6NOYC&pg=PA79, 1 January 2010, Readworthy, 978-93-80009-31-5, 7]

Life, God, World, Knowledge

“Muse who in the past inspired me to sing of the throes of love:
Go and repose.
What I need is a sword, rivers of gold,
and acrid prose.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

"To My__" (December 1890)- translated by Nick Joaquin

Love, Singing, Past

“The rights of the poor majority are pure air and pure water, and sufficient space to walk about in, when the rich minority are befouling the air with manufactories, poisoning the rivers, and as in the neighborhood of Foots Cray and St. Mary's, adding "field to field, till there be no place" left, and the villagers cannot step out of the dusty high-road without a trespass..”

Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker

Letter to the Rev. J.P. Wright (1879), from The Life and letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher (AH Palmer, London, 1892)

Water

“Now you're my whole life;
Now you're my whole world.
I just can't believe
The way I feel about you girl.
Like a river meets the sea,
Stronger than it's ever been.
We've come so far since that day,
And I thought I loved you then.”

Brad Paisley (1972) American country music singer

Then, written by Chris DuBois, Ashley Gorley, and Brad Paisley.
Song lyrics, American Saturday Night (2009)

Love, Life, World, Way

“The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were now sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Raffaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable river. It was, in short, a dump, and was likely to remain so for as long as it remained in the custody of Mr Svlad, or 'Dirk', Gently, né Cjelli.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 3

Shoe, Soul, Coffee, Parting

“To say that man has already achieved the ultimate and absolute truth is like a tribal taboo which says that a given river may never be crossed because the witch doctor proves beyond all reason that there is only chaos beyond.
The most puzzling of all contradictory concepts given me is the human will to set up such arbitrary limits to his comprehension.”

Mark Clifton book They'd Rather Be Right

Source: They'd Rather Be Right (1954), p. 109.

Truth

“Despite a number of near misses, I came through the war unscathed. In Tunisia a shell hit my vehicle but without harm to me, and in Sicily an exploding mine blew up my vehicle, but I was thrown clear. On the Roer River in Germany, just as I got out of my Jeep and entered a company command post, a mortar shell struck my vehicle. In the Remagen bridgehead on the Rhine a shell demolished a latrine moments after I had departed. Somehow none of the enemy shells had my number.”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

A Soldier Reports (1976)

War

“They had a crush on you, River
Blue suede jacket and boots, River
And your face shaped like a moon, River
You were like my own James Byron Dean
Private idaho was my east of eden
Hit me like a stone when you passed away
On Halloween”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

Halloween by Grant Lee Buffalo

“Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick pile on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which had accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at the turn of the first bend above. The salt, acrid flavour is gone out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited space opening free beyond the threshold of sandbanks below the Nore. The waters of the sea rush on past Gravesend, tumbling the big mooring buoys laid along the face of the town; but the sea-freedom stops short there, surrendering the salt tide to the needs, the artifices, the contrivances of toiling men. Wharves, landing-places, dock-gates, waterside stairs, follow each other continuously right up to London Bridge, and the hum of men’s work fills the river with a menacing, muttering note as of a breathless, ever-driving gale. The water-way, so fair above and wide below, flows oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed glass and rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke and dust.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Tilbury / Gravesend to London Bridge
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Men, Hope, Way, Soul

“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe—
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.”

Eugene Field (1850–1895) American writer

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod http://www.amherst.edu/~rjyanco94/literature/eugenefield/poems/poemsofchildhood/wynkenblynkenandnod.html, st. 1 Love Songs of Childhood (1894)

Shoe, Light, Sea, Night

“A pretext presented itself; some insult needed to be avenged, or some debt to be collected. Six battleships, fourteen cruisers, and eighteen transports sailed up the mouth of the river Hippopotamus. Six hundred canoes vainly opposed the landing of the troops. Admiral Vivier des Murenes' cannons produced an appalling effect upon the blacks, who replied to them with flights of arrows, but in spite of their fanatical courage they were entirely defeated. Popular enthusiasm was kindled by the newspapers which the financiers subsidised, and burst into a blaze. Some Socialists alone protested against this barbarous, doubtful, and dangerous enterprise. They were at once arrested.”

Anatole France book Penguin Island

Book VII : Modern Times, Ch. IX : The Final Consequences
Penguin Island (1908)

Courage

“On the fourth voyage, Columbus sailed along the coast of Central America trying to find the mouth of the Ganges River. It wasn't there, somehow.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part VI: Now We're Getting Somewhere, Christopher Columbus

“The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains — mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

July 1890, pages 315-316
John of the Mountains, 1938

Men, World, Mountain, Nature

“When we can get beyond that smoky world, there, out in the country we may still see the works of our fathers yet alive amidst the very nature they were wrought into, and of which they are so completely a part: for there indeed if anywhere, in the English country, in the days when people cared about such things, was there a full sympathy between the works of man, and the land they were made for: — the land is a little land; too much shut up within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much space for swelling into hugeness: there are no great wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden mountain-walls: all is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily one thing into another: little rivers, little plains, swelling, speedily- changing uplands, all beset with handsome orderly trees; little hills, little mountains, netted over with the walls of sheep- walks: all is little; yet not foolish and blank, but serious rather, and abundant of meaning for such as choose to seek it: it is neither prison nor palace, but a decent home.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

The Decorative Arts (1877)

People, World, Home, Mountain

“The countryside meant grain and herds, and a river meant fish. And if the sky meant anything, it meant a cruel God who took no notice of their pains and chastised them if they sinned.”

Tanith Lee book The Castle of Dark

Source: The Castle of Dark (1978), Chapter 12 “Lir: The Walled Town” (p. 102)

God, Pain, Fish

“The White man never guessed at what the Red man saw and heard and felt. The White man brought death and emptiness to this place. The White man cut down wise old trees with much to tell; young saplings with many lifetimes of life ahead; and the White man never asked, Will you be glad to make a lodgehouse for me and my tribe? Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man’s way. Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The White man killed animals he didn’t need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge. He never felt the balance of the land at all.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 2.

Life, Death, Way, Revenge

“Lonely by the moonlit waters
Does the conqueror stand,
Yet unredden'd by the slaughters
Of his mighty band.
Yet his laurel wants a leaf.
There he stands, sad, silent, lonely;
For his hope is vain :
He has reached that river only
To return again.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Sadness, Hope, Water

“The result is a horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose — a one joke movie, if it had one joke. The two characters wander witlessly past the bizarre backdrops of Las Vegas (some real, some hallucinated, all interchangeable) while zonked out of their minds. Humor depends on attitude. Beyond a certain point, you don't have an attitude, you simply inhabit a state. I've heard a lot of funny jokes about drunks and druggies, but these guys are stoned beyond comprehension, to the point where most of their dialog could be paraphrased as "eh?"… As for Depp, what was he thinking he made this movie? He was once in trouble for trashing a New York hotel room, just like the heroes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. What was that? Research? After River Phoenix died of an overdose outside Depp's club, you wouldn't think Depp would see much humor in this story — but then, of course, there *isn't* much humor in this story.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fear-and-loathing-in-las-vegas-1998 of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (22 May 1998) Reviews, One-star reviews

Fear, Guy, Thinking, Past

“Defiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy giins and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves on to the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam on to the uncircumcized, they wheeled and swung towards their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for. action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Men, War, Faith, Way

“Standing on the bridge that crosses
The river that goes out to the sea
The wind is full of a thousand voices
They pass by the bridge and me.”

Loreena McKennitt (1957) Canadian musician and composer

The Visit (1991), All Souls Night

Sea

“Then our Musalman brothers, the Pathans, would come out as a swarm of locusts from their mountain valleys, and make rivers of blood to flow from their frontier in the north to the extreme end of Bengal”

Syed Ahmed Khan (1820–1898) Indian educator and politician

Source: Quoted from After a Century it is time to revisit Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s legacy https://www.myind.net/Home/viewArticle/after-a-century-it-is-time-to-revisit-sir-syed-ahmad-khans-legacy Avatans Kumar Jan 27, 2018

Mountain

“Never in my life have I seen two villages on opposite banks of a river that weren't connected by a ford.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Major General Arthur Wellesley, p. 196
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Triumph (1997)

Life

“How shall I tell what I saw? The towers are not all broken — here and there one still stands, like a great tree in a forest, and the birds nest high. But the towers themselves look blind, for the gods are gone. I saw a fishhawk, catching fish in the river. I saw a little dance of white butterflies over a great heap of broken stones and columns. I went there and looked about me — there was a carved stone with cut — letters, broken in half. I can read letters but I could not understand these. They said UBTREAS. There was also the shattered image of a man or a god. It had been made of white stone and he wore his hair tied back like a woman's. His name was ASHING, as I read on the cracked half of a stone. I thought it wise to pray to ASHING, though I do not know that god.”

Stephen Vincent Benét book By the Waters of Babylon

Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)

God, Understanding, Bird, Fish

“To grow may require that we be shaken right to our core. While kneeling on that roadside in Herat, something died within me, giving birth to a realization necessary for me to move forward on my path. With each step, a camel lifts its hoof from a stable place on earth in order to move forward. And to reach the sea, each ripple of the river must let go of its present state to surrender to the current.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Birth, Sea

“This railway is the most absurd scheme that ever entered into the head of a man to conceive. Mr. Stephenson never had a plan — I do not believe he is capable of making one. He is either ignorant or something else which I will not mention. His is a mind perpetually fluctuating between opposite difficulties; he neither knows whether he is to make bridges over roads or rivers, or of one size or another; or to make embankments, or cuttings, or inclined planes, or in what way the thing is to be carried into effect. When you put a question to him upon a difficult point, he resorts to two or three hypothesis, and never comes to a decided conclusion. Is Mr. Stephenson to be the person upon whose faith this Committee is to pass this Bill involving property to the extent of £400,000/£500,000 when he is so ignorant of his profession as to propose to build a bridge not sufficient to carry off the flood water of the river or to permit any of the vessels to pass which of necessity must pass under it.”

Edward Hall Alderson (1787–1857) Lawyer and jurist

Edward Hall Alderson, counsel employed in opposition to the proposed Liverpool & Manchester Railway. On 25th April, 1825, George Stephenson gave evidence to the House of Commons committee looking into the proposed railway.

Faith, Way, Question, Water

“Waterways. Meantime our internal development should go on. Provision should be made for flood control of such rivers as the Mississippi and the Colorado, and for the opening up of our inland waterways to commerce. Consideration is due to the project of better navigation from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. Every effort is being made to promote an agreement with Canada to build the, St. Lawrence waterway. There are pending before the Congress bills for further development of the Mississippi Basin, for the taking over of the Cape Cod Canal in accordance with a moral obligation which seems to have been incurred during the war, and for the improvement of harbors on both the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts. While this last should be divested of some of its projects and we must proceed slowly, these bills in general have my approval. Such works are productive of wealth and in the long run tend to a reduction of the tax burden.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

War, Effort, Wealth

“These contributions [federal taxes on consumption of foreign goods] enable us to support the current expenses of the Government, to fulfill contracts with foreign nations, to extinguish the native right of soil within our limits, to extend those limits, and to apply such a surplus to our public debts as places at a short day their final redemption, and that redemption [of debt] once effected," he said, "the revenue thereby liberated may, by a just repartition among the States and a corresponding amendment of the Constitution, be applied, in time of peace, to rivers, canals, roads, arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects within each State. In time of war,—if injustice, by ourselves or others, must sometimes produce war,— increased as the same revenue will be increased by population and consumption, and aided by other resources reserved for that crisis, it may meet within the year all the expenses of the year without encroaching on the rights of future generations by burdening them with the debts of the past. War will then be but a suspension of useful works, and a return to a state of peace a return to the progress of improvement.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Advising the origination of an annual fund from surplus revenue.
1800s, Second Inaugural Address (1805)

War, Education, Peace, Art

“Calmer than midnight's deepest bush
Is the sun-bright Summer nooning,
With its cloudy shadows seeking rest,
That fall on the hillside swooning.
Great Night with its solemn starry eyes,
Over Day's gate asks us whither We go,
what our password is,
To the camp beyond the river. …”

Ethel Lynn Beers (1827–1879) American writer

"Noonday Rest" (1869; published in All Quiet Along the Potomac and Other Poems, 1879).

Sun, Summer, Night

“To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;—that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Beauty, Mountain, Fashion, Nature

“O my love my dear lady
The world is not very big
There is only room for our wonder
And the light leaning winds of heaven
Are not more sweet or pure
Than your mouth on my throat
O my love there are larks in our morning
And the finding flame of your hands
And the moss on the bank of the river
And the butterflies
And the whirling-mad
Butterflies!”

Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972) American writer and poet

"'O My Love the Pretty Towns'"

Love, World, Light, Madness

“Where does your responsibility begin here? Wiping away the nebula from your sight, you struggle to find where you really are. You're trying to find the direction of the flow, struggling to hold on to the axis of time. But you can't locate the borderline separating dream and reality. Or even the boundary between what's real and what's possible. All you're sure of is that you're in a delicate position. Delicate-and dangerous. You're pulled along, a part of it, unable to pin down the principles of prophecy, or of logic. Like when a river overflows, washing over a town, all road signs have sunk beneath the waves. And all you can see are the anonymous roofs of the sunken houses.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 29, A Boy Named Crow

Dreams, Reality, Time, Parting

“I was borne on an eagle's wing,
Till with the noon-sun perishing;
Then I stood in a world alone,
From which all other life was gone,
Whence warmth, and breath, and light were fled,
A world o'er which a curse was said:
The trees stood leafless all, and bare,
The sky spread, but no sun was there:
Night came, no stars were on her way,
Morn came without a look of day,—
As night and day shared one pale shroud,
Without a colour or a cloud.
And there were rivers, but they stood
Without a murmur on the flood,
Waveless and dark, their task was o'er,—
The sea lay silent on the shore,
Without a sign upon its breast
Save of interminable rest:
And there were palaces and halls,
But silence reign'd amid their walls,
Though crowds yet fill'd them; for no sound
Rose from the thousands gather'd round;
All wore the same white, bloodless hue,
All the same eyes of glassy blue,
Meaningless, cold, corpse-like as those
No gentle hand was near to close.
And all seem'd, as they look'd on me,
In wonder that I yet could be
A moving shape of warmth and breath
Alone amid a world of death.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto III
The Troubadour (1825)

Life, Death, World, Way

“Manhattan is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city, not the capital of America so much as the iconic capital of this century. It is grand and grandiose with its two rivers acting as a border to contain the restless. Its skyscrapers and bleak, rotting tenements are a gift for photographic consumption, but for the fictional imagination the city's inchoate density is a special challenge.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

"Locations: An Introduction" (p. xvi)
American Fictions (1999)

Family, Imagination, Memory

“When you see the name 'River Phoenix' everywhere; you gotta, like, joke about it.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

Rolling Stone (1993)

“The sun beyond the mountains glows;
The Yellow River seawards flows.
You can enjoy a grander sight
By climbing to a greater height.”

Xu Yuanchong (1921) Translator of Chinese poetry

Wang Zhi-huan, "On the Heron Tower"
Song of the Immortals: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (1994)

Mountain, Sun

“The Treaty [of Rome] does not touch any of the matters which concern solely England and the people in it. These are still governed by English law. They are not affected by the Treaty. But when we come to matters with a European element, the Treaty is like an incoming tide. It flows into the estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back, Parliament has decreed that the Treaty is henceforward to be part of our law. It is equal in force to any statute.”

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (1899–1999) British judge

H.P. Bulmer Ltd v J. Bollinger SA [1974] Ch 401 at 418.
Judgments

People, Law, Parting

“I'le delight in Vales, near pleasant Floods,
And unrenown'd, haunt Rivers, Hills and Woods.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Georgicks

“In a brahmin house
where they feed the fire as a god
when the fire goes wild and burns the house
they splash on it
the water of the gutter and the dust of the street,
beat their breasts
and call the crowd.
These men then forget their worship
and scold their fire,
O lord of the meeting rivers!”

Basava (1134–1196) a 12th-century Hindu philosopher, statesman, Kannada Bhakti poet of Lingayatism

Basava’s saying in his “The Lord of the Meeting Rivers: Devotional Poems of Basavanna” quoted in The Lord of the Meeting Rivers Quotes, 23 November 2013, Goodreads.com http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3772282-the-lord-of-the-meeting-rivers-devotional-poems-of-basavanna,

Men, God, Water, Housing

“If you, weary of the dim, harassing life decide to spend some of your miserable time at the river, it will surely bring along your corpse. But where are you going to be then? Still on the bank or will the Soul River drift you away?”

Miho Mosulishvili (1962) Georgian writer

The River of the Soul (2012)

Life, Soul, Time

“Lamech's sons were heroes of their race:
Jubal, the eldest, bore upon his face
The look of that calm river-god, the Nile,
Mildly secure in power that needs not guile.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

God

“The bright cloud shone on the river's face,
But the death-black waters had not a trace
Of the crimson blaze that over them play'd :
It seem'd as if a curse were laid
On the grass, on the river, the tree, and the flower,
And shut them out from the sunbeam's power;”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Golden Violet - The Broken Spell
The Golden Violet (1827)

Death, Flowers, Tree, Grass

“Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.”

Karen Blixen book Anecdotes of Destiny

"The Diver"
Anecdotes of Destiny (1953)

God, Hope, Way, Home

“It was like being quite alone on the roof of the world. I felt that if I were to go to the edge and look over … I would see below all that I had ever known; all the crowded cities and seas covered with ships, and the clamor of harbors and traffic of rivers, and farmlands being worked, and herds of cattle driven in dust across interminable plains. All the clamor and clatter, confusion of voices, tumults, and conflicts, must still be going on, down there—over the edge, and below—but here there was only the sky, and a stillness made audible by the brittle grass. Emptiness was so perfect all around me that I felt a part of it, empty myself.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Letter to the Clarence Day (June 10, 1926)
Describing her stop on a remote Russian plateau while with the Red Cross after WWI.

World, Grass, Parting, Perfection

“Life is like an aimless river
The time is now again
-- Ceiling Unlimited (2002)”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

Rush Lyrics

Life, Time

“Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Look, Stranger, on This Island Now (1936), first published in book form in Look, Stranger! (1936; US title On this Island)

Light, Sea

“Tend to your flock or they will stray.
We’ll be called for our service come judgment day.
Before we cross that river wide,
The blood on our hands will come back on us twice.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Rocky Ground"
Song lyrics, Wrecking Ball (2012)

“When I was born 20.6. [18]87, I was influenced by Picasso to cry. When I could walk and speak I still stood under Picasso's influence and said to my mother: 'Tom' or 'Happening', meaning the entrances of the canal under the street. My lyrical time was when I lived in the Violet Street. I never saw a violet. That was my influence by Matisse because when he painted rose I did not paint violet. As a boy of ten I stood under Mondrian's influence and built little houses with little bricks. Afterwards I stood under the influence of the Surrealists... I never stood under the influence of Dadaism because whereas the Dadaist created Spiegel-dadaismus (Mirror-Dada) on the Zurich Lake, I created MERZ on the Leine-river, under the influence of Rembrandt. Time went on, and when Hans Arp made concrete Art, I stayed Abstract. Now I do concrete Art, and Marcel Duchamp went over to the Surrealists.... and at all I have much fun about Art.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

Source: 1940s, I is Style (2000), p. 100 : in 'My art and My live' (1940 – 1946), Kurt Schwitters.

Art, Boy, Time, Painting

“Quite often, when actors have such a strong charisma in real life, eventually it has to affect the characters they play. For myself I'm not charismatic in that way. I'm not a "performer". Ideally I would stay mute as River. That's the reason why, for a long time, I've said the opposite of what I really thought. In interviews, I've also played characters that I wasn't. I've lied and often contradicted myself to dumbfound people. It's all over now, because I have nothing left to hide. Eventually, I'm quite an ordinary person.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

Last interview, Premier, (October 1993)

Life, People, Way, Strong

“He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull.
Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story.
Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened.
Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you.
Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck.
A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

pages 232-233.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love, Women, God, Secret

“Tell me now in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman?
Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais,
Neither of them the fairer woman?
Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
Only heard on river and mere—
She whose beauty was more than human?—
But where are the snows of yester-year?”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) English poet, illustrator, painter and translator

The Ballad of Dead Ladies http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/roset03.html#13, st. 1 (1870).

Love, Beauty, Way

“My art is going well. I have a feeling of satisfaction about it. Afternoons I stroll around the city [Paris] taking a good look at everything and trying to absorb it all... I went back to the Notre Dame again. Such wonderful Gothic detailing, those monstrous gargoyles, each one with its own character and face... Directly behind Notre Dame, almost encircled by the Seine, lies the morgue. Day after day they fish corpses from the river here, people who don't want to get on living.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her sister Milly, from Paris, 29 February 1900; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 200
1900 - 1905

People, Art, Feeling, Fish

“By definition, if prose is a river, poetry is a fountain.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

'Poetry Ireland Review' Summer 1999

“Farewell, false love, I took you for
The woman that I lost last year
Forever as I think:
I loved her but I will not see
Her any more in Germany.
O Milky Way, sister in whiteness
To Canaan's rivers and the bright
Bodies of lovers drowned,
Can we follow toilsomely
Your path to other nebulae?”

Guillaume Apollinaire book Alcools

Adieu faux amour confondu
Avec la femme qui s'éloigne
Avec celle que j'ai perdue
L'année dernière en Allemagne
Et que je ne reverrai plus
Voie lactée ô sœur lumineuse
Des blancs ruisseaux de Chanaan
Et des corps blancs des amoureuses
Nageurs morts suivrons-nous d’ahan
Ton cours vers d'autres nébuleuses
"La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" (Song of the Poorly Loved), line 56; translation by William Meredith, from Francis Steegmuller Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 95.
Alcools (1912)

Love, Way, Lovers, Thinking

“And then, all of a sudden, it was as though through those dark eyes an electrical circuit had been struck. She sat fascinated. Snake-and-bird fascinated. Afterwards she could not recall the details of what he had said. She remembered only that she had been absorbed, rapt, lost, for over ten minutes by the clock. She had perceived images conjured up from the dead past: a hand trailed in clear river water, deliciously cool, while the sun smiled and a shoal of tiny fishes darted between her fingers; the crisp flesh of a ripe apple straight from the tree, so juicy it ran down her chin; grass between her bare toes, the turf like springs so that she seemed not to bear the whole of her weight on her soles but to be floating, dreamlike, in slow motion, instantly transported to the moon; the western sky painted with vast heart-tearing slapdash streaks of red below the bright steel-blue of clouds, and stars coming snap-snap into view against the eastern dark; wind gentle in her hair and on her cheeks, bearing flower perfumes, dusting her with petals; snow cold to the palm as it was shaped into a ball; laughter echoing from a dark lane where only lovers walked, not thieves and muggers; butter like an ingot of soft gold; ocean spray sharp and clean as the edge of an axe; with the same sense of safe, provided rightly used; round pebbles polychrome beside a pool; rain to which a thirsty mouth could open, distilling the taste of a continent of air... And under, and through, and in, and around all this, a conviction: “Something can be done to get that back!”
She was crying. Small tears like ants had itched their paths down her cheeks. She said, when she realized he had fallen silent, “But I never knew that! None of it! I was born and raised right here in New York!””

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

”But don’t you think you should have known it?” Austin Train inquired gently.
September “MINE ENEMIES ARE DELIVERED INTO MY HAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Smile, Star, Spring, Flowers