Go as a River Quotes

“Just as a single rainstorm can erode the banks and change the course of a river, so can a single circumstance of a girl’s life erase who she was before.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“Women endure. That’s what we do.”
“That’s nonsense,” she replied more harshly than I expected. “A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“. . .To go as a river . .had taken me a long while to understand. . . meant. . .flowing forward against obstacle . . .like the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here, with two fists of forest soil in my palms and a heart still learning to be unafraid of itself. I had been shaped by my kindred— my lost family and lost love; my found friendships, though few; my trees that kept on living and every tree that gave me shelter; every creature I met along the way, every raindrop and snowflake choosing my shoulder, and every breeze that shifted the air; every winding path beneath my feet, every place I laid my hands and head, and every creek like the one before me, rolling off the hillside, gaining strength in gravity, spinning through the next eddy, pushing around the next bend, taking and giving in quiet agreement with every living thing.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moments of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“The landscapes of our youths create us, and we carry them within us, storied by all they gave and stole, in who we become.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“Strength, I had learned, was like this littered forest floor, built of small triumphs and infinite blunders, sunny hours followed by sudden storms that tore it all down. We are one and all alike if for no other reason than the excruciating and beautiful way we grow piece by unpredictable piece, falling, pushing from the debris, rising again, and hoping for the best.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“There is a kind of sadness that transcends sadness, that runs like hot syrup into every crevice of your being, beginning in the heart then oozing into your very cells and bloodstream, so that nothing-not earth or sky or even your own palm ever looks the same. This is the sadness that changes everything.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“Flowing forward against obstacle was not my whole story. For, like the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here,”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“We are one and all alike if for no other reason than the excruciating and beautiful way we grow piece by unpredictable piece, falling, pushing from the debris, rising again, and hoping for the best.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“I’ll go as a river,” said Wil. “My grandfather always told me that it’s the only way.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“My days had not felt so expansive since that early summer in the mountain hut when I first learned to trust the hours instead of fill them.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“I learned from their subtle relations... that love is a private matter, to be nurtured, and even mourned, between two beings alone. It belongs to them, and no one else, like a secret treasure, like a private poem.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“But I’ve come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“God will take a life, God will give a life, and God will make a life unrecognizable. God won’t warn you what’s coming next.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“Loss has nothing to do with what you do deserve and don’t deserve.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“carrying your sorrows all alone isn’t strength, V. It’s punishment, plain and simple. Whatever happened to you, you’ve got to stop blaming yourself.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“I came to understand that she, like I, like women throughout the ages, knew the value of employing silence as a guard dog to her truth.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“I looked around me at the birth and growth and death piled atop one another, at the open bellies of downed trees feeding new sprouts, all the life pushing through every crook and crevice and possibility for light. It was an ancient intelligence far too rich and complex to fully grasp but exactly what I needed to remind myself that it is in these layers of time that everything becomes itself… Strength, I had learned, was like this littered forest floor, built of small triumphs and infinite blunders, sunny hours followed by sudden storms that tore it all down. We are one and all alike if for no other reason than the excruciating and beautiful way we grow piece by unpredictable piece, falling, pushing from the debris, rising again, and hoping for the best”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“I would leave my past behind and try to build my life again, hoping not for miracles but simply for strength in new soil.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“If this makes you wonder whether the joys and pain of a place wash away as the floodwaters rise and swallow, I can tell you they do not. The landscapes of our youths create us, and we carry them within us, storied by all they gave and stole, in who we become.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“Each day, I was building a life of my choosing, and it was a good life. I knew what was missing, but I was also appreciative of what was there.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“I was a girl alone in a house of men, quickly becoming a woman. It was like blossoming in a bank of snow.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“when no place will receive you, everywhere becomes a kind of nowhere, all ground as uncertain as in my frightening dream.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“I kissed her forehead and felt glad for her life—so odd and singular, so strangely overlapped with my own—and glad for her death, the only one I had ever known to be correct. “Go as a river,” I whispered to her, as Wil might have done, and, I swear, I felt her spirit rise.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“He would teach me how true a life emptied of all but its essentials could feel and that, when you got down to it, not much mattered outside the determination to go on living.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“Worry and fear would not change the outcome of my situation or my fate.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“Strength, I had learned was built of small triumphs and infinite blunders, sunny hours followed by sudden storms that tore it all down. We are one and all alike if not for no other reason than the excruciating and beautiful way we grow piece by unpredictable piece, falling, pushing from the debris, rising again, and hoping for the best.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“I had lived my life willing to face what came to me, and that I’d always tried to do the next right thing.”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River

“had been shaped by my kindred—my lost family and lost love; my found friendships, though few; my trees that kept on living and every tree that gave me shelter; every creature I met along the way, every raindrop and snowflake choosing my shoulder, and every breeze that shifted the air; every winding path beneath my feet, every place I laid my hands and head, and every creek like the one before me, rolling off the hillside, gaining strength in gravity, spinning through the next eddy, pushing around the next bend, taking and giving in”
― Shelley Read, Go as a River