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: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

“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

“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

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

“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

“… 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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“All human beings experience a life framed by the sky, wind, sun, stars, the earth, the great waters, and small streams. We possess nothing in life other than the landscape of our own minds. We cannot take anything from life. The universe is not something that we possess.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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

“All journeys meet crossroads. Where the river ends, the ocean begins. We must have the courage to embark on these journeys, to choose our paths, and to let go of the boat once we are across the river.”
― Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Painted Oxen

“Wolf Speaks:
I wander mountains high
and river pathways
I seek cover in deep forests
from hunters’ cruel knives
Yet my cousins warm your
hearts with love and loyalty
Love me also even though
you do not command my freedom path”
― Ramon Ravenswood, Icons Speak

“One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey to sources is not to be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable. There are awakened also in oneself by the contact elementals that are as unpredictable as wind or snow”
― Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland

“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

“Few sounds were to be heard at that early hour, only the drone of the airship’s engines and the mournful mournful moans of the foghorns, which seemed almost to be searching for one another, somewhere along the silvered and twisted ribbon of river.”
― Ian Beck, Pastworld

“If I could talk and teach, I might be a sage, but I am only a ferryman, and my task is to ferry people across this river. I have ferried many across, thousands, and for all of them my river has been nothing but a hindrance in their travels. They traveled for money and business, to weddings and on pilgrimages, and the river was in their way, and the ferryman was there to get them swiftly across that hindrance. But for a few among the thousands, a very few, four or five, the river was no hindrance, They heard its voice, they listened to it, and the river became sacred for them, as it is for me. Let us now retire for the night, Siddhartha.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“There is such a romance and history in rivers that a journey round the world may as well be marked by the rivers crossed as in any other way.”
― John Charles Walsham Reith, Into the Wind

“There was this thin meandering creek that wound past the old summer cottage. And sliding down the slight bank, I would gently pull aside the scattering of stalky weeds and elegant wildflowers that edged the flowing rivulet of crystalline water. And there, in that oh so tiny and forgotten place, a whole world of living things danced in the waters, frolicked on the scattering of assorted pebbles, and gingerly crawled on the emerald moss that generously lined both banks. And staring at the wonder of that tiny, forgotten place, I thought that life is not about grand destinations. Rather, it’s about realizing that we are already in a destination.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“My love for you is like the vast ocean,
And my poems are merely rivers adding love to it.”
― Jaskaran Chahal

“The river teaches us many things, but its most important teaching is this: Whatever is happening around you, you keep flowing to your own destination following your own way!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Their story is our story, as well. We are the begotten ones. Our flesh is made of clay. Rivers run through our veins. Our lineage stretches from the ocean floor to the mountain crest. This is the beginning of knowledge.”
― Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Painted Oxen

“But the delight of wading that clear mountain water, scrambling over rocks, or sitting on a boulder in the sunshine and gazing with dreaming eyes into the brown pebbled pools below, was enough joy without feeling the tug of a trout on the end of the line. Often we could see them in the sun-flecked depths below, quiet as shadows except for the occasional waving of a fin.”
― Carol Ryrie Brink, Four Girls on a Homestead