The River and I Quotes

“When I started for the head of navigation a friend asked me what I expected to find on the trip. "Some more of myself," I answered. And, after all, that is the Great Discovery.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“A goal, in itself, is an empty thing; all the virtue lies in the moving toward the goal.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“I felt the sense of time and self drop away from me. No now, no to-morrow, no yesterday, no I! Only eternity, one vast whole—sun-shot, star-sprent, love-filled, changeless. And in it all, one spot of consciousness more acute than other spots; and that was the something that had eaten hugely, and that now felt the inward-flung glory of it all; the swooning, half-voluptuous sense of awe and wonder, the rippling, shimmering, universal joy. And then suddenly and without shock—like the shifting of the wood smoke—the mood veered, and there was nothing but I. Space and eternity were I—vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift; through immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day; through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. The slowly revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me; the great woman-star jeweling the summit of a cliff, was only an ecstasy within me; the murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart; and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color of my soul.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“I think Job and I understand each other better now. It was not the boils, but the free advice!”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“Many-colored mosses, sickly green, pale, feverish red, yellow like fear, black like despair, purple like the lips of a strangled man, clung there.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“Scotland, say, and in Montana?" I did not. "Well," he proceeded, "over in Scotland when a feller sees a sheepman coming down the road with his sheep, he says: 'Behold the gentle shepherd with his fleecy flock!' That's poetry. Now in Montana, that same feller says, when he sees the same feller coming over a ridge with the same sheep: 'Look at that crazy blankety-blank with his woolies!' That's fact. You mind what I say, or you'll get spurred.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“Flung down a preliminary mile of steep descent, choked in between soaring walls of rock four hundred yards apart, innumerable crystal tons rushed down ninety feet in one magnificent plunge. You saw the long bent crest—shimmering with the changing colors of a peacock's back—smooth as a lake when all winds sleep; and then the mighty river was snuffed out in gulfs of angry gray. Capricious river draughts, sucking up the damp defile, whipped upward into the blistering sunlight gray spiral towers that leaped into opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond and pearl and amethyst.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“Capricious river draughts, sucking up the damp defile, whipped upward into the blistering sunlight gray spiral towers that leaped into opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond and pearl and amethyst.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“But the Missouri—my brother—is the eternal Fighting Man!”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I