Rivers Quotes

“I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
― Langston Hughes

“There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“I like geography best, he said, because your mountains & rivers know the secret. Pay no attention to boundaries.”
― Brian Andreas, Story People

“That's why we live by a river. Occasionally, I forget and pat Lit on the back--'
'I hate that.'
King Midas & Lit”
― Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero

“The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon/ Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage./ Far off from these a slow and silent stream,/ Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls/ Her wat'ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,/ Forthwith his former state and being forgets,/ Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“A single poem, alone
can turn tides
scatter galaxies
and burst forth with rivers
from paradise.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“If the river has a soul, it's a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river's brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren't the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.”
― Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness

“The river itself portrays humanity precisely, with its tortuous windings, its accumulation of driftwood, its unsuspected depths, and its crystalline shallows, singing in the Summer sun. Barriers may be built across its path, but they bring only power, as the conquering of an obstacle is always sure to do. Sometimes when the rocks and stone-clad hills loom large ahead, and eternity itself would be needed to carve a passage, there is an easy way around. The discovery of it makes the river sing with gladness and turns the murmurous deeps to living water, bright with ripples and foam.”
― Myrtle Reed, Old Rose and Silver

“As the river enters into the ocean,
so my heart touches Thee.”
― Kabir, Songs of Kabir

“I come from a place where nobody respects the selflessness
I don't want to take away your happiness,
Give me the tears and I'll turn them into rivers of joy for you,
For all I know is to love.”
― Hareem Ch, Another World

“A person could stop a specific thing, but they couldn’t stop change in general. Rivers can’t run backward. Yet, he felt there must be an alternative, neither willfulness nor resignation. He couldn’t put words to it. All he knew was, neither of them had changed their minds and neither of them could find anything more to say.”
― David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“… the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come.
— Excerpt from the poem “The Mercy”
― Philip Levine

“To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.”
― Aldo Leopold, For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays And Other Writings

“When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.

Jordan...

I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.”
― David James Duncan, River Teeth

“Camomille: Fallible men write books. God writes in sunlight and rivers and planets. Isn't the Universe a good book? I trust it above the printed kind.”
― Mark Siegel, Sailor Twain: Or: The Mermaid in the Hudson

“The baking wind tore at his hat and he held it by the brim with one hand. It relieved him to look at it, for the great river was like a long tale, of both great joy and great woe. And it seemed to be a story road that a person could take, and it would take him to some place where he could free his mind. Men had striven against one another to control the unreeling river-road, battling at New Madrid and Island Number Ten, at Baton Rouge and Vicksburg, in the heat of the summer and the humid choking air of the malarial swamps. But the river carried away men and guns and the garbage of war, covering it over, washing itself clean again as if they had never been. ”
― Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women

“Synthesis my thoughts, rivers have emotions, hills have stories to tell, the sky has the tears to shade, the sun has the secret to burn, the moon has the days to recount and the stars has the incarnations to speak.”
― Tapiwanaishe Pamacheche

“One thing we can predict about rivers is that they are unpredictable.”
― T.J. Burr

“Rivers are the veins that carry life-giving water across the landscape.”
― T.J. Burr

“In the dream,
the fields are green again,
the river is unnamed and runs like rivers
run, connecting with another artery of water, running into
the shore of another village.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“The hurricane Ian disaster was Florida’s 9-11.”
― Steven Magee

“Airboats were in demand during the Florida hurricane Ian flooding disaster.”
― Steven Magee

“Evacuate or possibly die?”
― Steven Magee

“Hurricane Ian, why were you so mean?”
― Steven Magee

“Let go of our fears... go with the flow... for by faith... rivers can... grain by grain... remove mountains!”
― AshRawArt

“Fly fishing is not a braggers game. There’s no glory to win. No competition or comparison between humans. It’s not about growing ego, but removing it. No fish will provide this lesson. It must come from the conscience of the angler. In the most simple explanation, fly fishing is an introspective quest to tame one’s own mind. This can be shared with others, but only discovered alone.”
― Daniel J. Rice, Familiar Waters: A lifetime of fly fishing Montana

“Andrei sometimes wondered how much a river would change Los Angeles.

He pictured a long stream of water that divided the city, much like the River Thames or the Seine. Rivers nourished. The water happily rewrote the aisles of streetlamps and transformed one’s nighttime walk into a feature film. It carried boats filled with a surveying crowd that waved back at any brandishing hand on land that tried. It fostered lunch dates, amusing dares, and a reference for the lost.

Andrei had spent one summer abroad and met these rivers. He was astonished at the difference in conversations the Europeans had with him. They were simple and alive. The pubs helped. The accents, too. Was it the rain that reminded? he speculated. The museums? The red buses? The cheap flights to any neighboring country? So—what was it about the geography of LA that made connection impossible? Just then, the sun glared at him. He glared back.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost