The Secret Knowledge of Water Quotes

“When you place your hand in moving water, you will feel the curves of power looping your bones, addressing your skin with logarithmic sways. Magnify that ten or twenty thousand times and you will be killed by the force. Then your body will know.... But pay attention in that moment and you will feel the intelligence of water upon you. It will tell stories of itself against your body in boils and surges and vacancies.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“Like any stage of the hydrologic process, we have our own peculiarities, our organs making us nothing more than water pools or springs of bizarre shape, filled with pulsing tubes and chambers.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“Now come the floods. They charge down atavistic canyons drinking furiously out of thunderstorms, coming one after the next with vomited boulders and trees pounding from one side of a canyon to the other, sometimes no more than hours apart. Sometimes a hundred years apart. Sometimes a thousand. The floods always come.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“There seemed to be a pattern to the drips from each seep, a pattern I had heard before, wondering each time if there might be a sort of specific timing.... The sounds were predisposed, unaware of anything more important than their own syncopation.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“I’ve often thought that a planet without water would be a dull, sad place. Most, if not all, water on this planet came from countless small comets thumping against the atmosphere (which continues at about ten thousand comets or pieces of comets per day, enough to add a twenty-five-foot depth of water across the entire globe every half a million years). That it comes from space suggests why it is so peculiar and fascinating here on earth. It is a substance from far beyond our reach.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water : There are Two Easy Ways to Die in the Desert: Thirst and Drowning

“Water in flood means exactly what it says. It has no hypocrisy. Even as it murders, it leaves life behind and carves elegant, intricate passages into raw stone, all the while having no debate about its intention. It is the same water that will sit complacently in a hole for months or years, the same arrangement of atoms that flows gently, singing lullabies, the same that fiercely consumes children and tears the walls from titanic canyons.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“The desire of water is scribed across the desert like graffiti, until all that is left of the desert is water.... In the scream of a flood, consummate carvings are left behind. Careful scallops are taken from the faces of canyons. This is not random work. It is artistry distilled from madness.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“Water becomes filthy with desire as it gains speed into a flood. It cannot move in a straight line.... There is too much craving and energy when water moves. It wants out.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“Dark, closed places like this make me uneasy. It is not the wild beasts or the idea of a lunatic with an ax. It is not facing my dreaded interior self. It is the informality, the thoughtlessness, the brooding wisdom, the endlessness, the closure of darkness. More than that, it is the thing in darkness I cannot name.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“The sound of slapping water, the deep swallows made only by large masses of liquid, was almost too much to bear. I stood at the edge of the waterpocket, where much of the desert dropped off below, showing pockets of even greater size, and lifted my arms straight into the sky. Beads came down my body. This was abundance.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water