Rivers Quotes

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“… 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

“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

“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 rivers carry their secrets, but not every river keeps its secret forever.”
― Bernard Jan, January River

“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

“GO EAT POPCORN -Lylac Brant”
― Reese H, The River Of Limbo: How It All Began

“When the river meets the ocean, the memories of the river meet the memories of the ocean. These two different worlds have many stories to tell each other!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Does the man sitting in the valley and belittling the mountain don't know that the water in the valley comes from the mountain?”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“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

“Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?
Here is the river, and here is the box, and here are
the monsters we put in the box to test our strength
against. Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here's
the desire to put it inside us, and then the question
behind every question: What happens next?”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“A river never wants to turn into a lake! And a person who likes to flow like a river never wants to be something stagnant like a lake!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Americans place 'strong subjective value' on the Father of Waters and will block any diminishment of its flow.”
― Charles Bowden, Killing the Hidden Waters

“If the city was dreaming," he told me, "then the city is asleep. And I do not fear cities sleeping, stretched out unconscious around their rivers and estuaries, like cats in the moonlight. Sleeping cities are tame and harmless things."
"What I fear," he said, "is that one day the cities will waken. That one day the cities will rise.”
― Neil Gaiman, Worlds' End

“Not all the rivers want to meet oceans. Some of them just want to stay the way they are. Still and flowing ever so slowly. She's like that.”
― Nitya Prakash

“In reality, a river's basic shape... is not a line but a tree. A river is, in its essence, a thing that branches... Although it flows inward toward its trunk, in geological time it grew, and continues to grow, outward, like an organism, from its ocean outlet to its many headwaters. In the vernacular of a new science, it is fractal, its structure echoing itself on all scales, from river to stream to brook to creek to rivulet, branches too small to name and too many to count.”
― James Gleick, Nature's Chaos

“If you believe in God, from your inner most being, shall flow rivers of living water.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita