Colorado River Quotes

He then offered one of the most infamous pronouncements that has ever been made about the Grand Canyon: Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed. . . . Excepting when the melting snows send their annual torrents through the avenues to the Colorado, conveying with them sound and motion, these dismal abysses, and the arid table-lands that enclose them, are left as they have been for ages, in unbroken solitude and silence. That ~ Kevin Fedarko

What's happening on the Colorado River is happening all over the world. The water is overused, overdammed, and it's polluted in some places. ~ Greg MacGillivray

Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one's life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie ... Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics ... ~ Barry Lopez

I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity. ~ Ann Zwinger

Unkar Delta at Mile 73
The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke's description of "raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet." Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified. ~ Ann Zwinger

The question haunted me, and the real answer came, as answers often do, not in the canyon but at an unlikely time and in an unexpected place, flying over the canyon at thirty thousand feet on my way to be a grandmother. My mind on other things, intending only to glance out, the exquisite smallness and delicacy of the river took me completely by surprise. In the hazy light of early morning, the canyon lay shrouded, the river flecked with glints of silver, reduced to a thin line of memory, blurred by a sudden realization that clouded my vision. The astonishing sense of connection with that river and canyon caught me completely unaware, and in a breath I understood the intense, protective loyalty so many people feel for the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. It has to do with truth and beauty and love of this earth, the artifacts of a lifetime and the descant of a canyon wren at dawn. ~ Ann Zwinger

Is it possible to make a living by simply watching light? Monet did. Vermeer did. I believe Vincent did too. They painted light in order to witness the dance between revelation and concealment, exposure and darkness. Perhaps this is what I desire most, to sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone or simply to walk parallel with a path of liquid light called the Colorado River. In the canyon country of southern Utah, these acts of attention are not merely the pastimes of artists, but daily work, work that matters to the whole community.
This living would include becoming a caretaker of silence, a connoisseur of stillness, a listener of wind where each dialect is not only heard but understood. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

I can only tell where I feel most at home, which is in the erosional landscape of the red rock desert of southern Utah, where the Colorado River cuts through sandstone and the geologic history of the Earth is exposed: our home in Castle Valley. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them. ~ Marc Reisner

Nothing so challenges the American spirit as tackling the biggest job on earth ... Americans are stimulated by the big job; the Panama Canal, Boulder Dam, Grand Coulee, Lower Colorado River developments, the tallest building in the world, the mightiest battleship. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

I had come to the canyon with expectations. I wanted to see snowy egrets flying against the black schist at dusk; I saw blue-winged teal against the green waters at dawn. I had wanted to hear thunder rolling in the thousand-foot depths; I heard the guttural caw of four ravens ... what any of us had come to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined. ~ Barry Lopez

The Colorado River was at a record low and the towers in Lake Mead stood high out of the water. But the Angelenos committed communal suicide by watering lawns as usual. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Anyone who has been around Washington politics long enough can't avoid this truism: Election-year money is like a rushing river that invariably finds cracks in any dam the reformers erect. ~ Nina Easton

Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. AND THE BOYS. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. EVEN THEIR FOOTSTEPS LEFT A SMELL OF SMOKE BEHIND! ~ Toni Morrison

Though it is 2500 feet high, the glacier flowed over its ground as a river flows over a boulder; and since it emerged from the icy sea as from a sepulcher it has been sorely beaten with storms; but from all those deadly, crushing, bitter experiences comes this delicate life and beauty, to teach us that what we in our faithless ignorance and fear call destruction is creation. ~ John Muir

Grandma Natasha was sitting in the tent watching public service announcements on TV. They were showing a blond model in a bikini doing the backstroke in a river of blood flowing along Arlozorov Street. "She's not a real blonde," Grandma Natasha grumbled, pointing at the model. "She has it bleached. ~ Etgar Keret

The Waterfall and the Sea
Her love and passion are a waterfall, fed from the wellspring of her heart,
gently tumbling into a pool, preparing herself to share her gifts.
His passion and love are like the sea, deep and wide, waiting mysteriously,
Patiently he awaits her calling out through time and space
She hears his call, her pool overflowing.
Her love and passion gushing over her banks she rushes toward him
Winding and twisting she finds her way, destined to reach his shores
He awaits her arrival and she opens her delta as his tide comes in
Their waters mingle every molecule of her river with his sea
Forever mixing and sharing their passion and love in that place between
The Waterfall and the Sea ~ Christopher Earle

It was the moths that first revealed the change. Grey-tipped whispers in the moonlit night. Two or three here, a single one there. White ones slipping through the darkness, silent and seemingly harmless, but present. Growing in numbers until they erupted the quiet like flutters of falling ash. There was a music in their silence. The kind of music that attached itself to hums and vibrations in the waters of the earth.

The hums, the vibrations, all but imperceptible. With the dawn the moths vanished, leaving a broken land in their wake. The Elian River leaked out into fissures of streams and brooks that first appeared as watery cracks throughout the Faeran Valley. So small at first, we didn't recognize the difference.

But as the months and years passed, the Elian slipped further and deeper into the growing fractures of earth the moths had left. Trails of watery branches and veins that broke the ground until it couldn't sustain life any longer.

This is what we have against the Bremistans. The land is delicate now, brittle like old bones. And I fear it is aging beyond our ability to heal it.... ~ Debi Cimo

The mind is like a river. The thoughts are like the various droplets of water. We are submerged in that water. Stay on the bank and watch your mind. ~ A. G. Mohan

Everyone thinks that the old days were better, or that they were harder, and the modern times are chaotic and complex, or easier all around, but I think people's hearts have always been the same, happy and sad, and that hasn't changed at all. It's just the shapes of lives that change, not the lives themselves. ~ Brian Doyle

The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn't quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they'd made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a lifetime, now trying to leave her body. As they rose to her lips, and in response to the question: Do you want to go home? she leaned over a patch of yellow grass near her elbow and threw up.
All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion.
Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid... Soon, exhausted, she was done.
No, she had said weakly, I don't want to go home. I'll be all right now. ~ Alice Walker

May the countryside and the gliding valley streams content me. Lost to fame, let me love river and woodland. ~ Virgil

The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.
Life, if well spent, is long. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

It was a golden evening in August when my mother came untethered. And the river must have shimmered as she walked into it, under it. And the water must have soothed and washed away her pain. And as her life ebbed, before her heart stopped and the high tide carried her upstream, she must have thought of me, surely? For it was the same golden evening I was born. ~ Judith Kinghorn

For arousing compassion, the nineteenth-century yogi Patrul Rinpoche suggested imagining beings in torment - an animal about to be slaughtered, a person awaiting execution. To make it more immediate, he recommended imagining ourselves in their place. Particularly painful is his image of a mother with no arms watching as a raging river sweeps her child away. To contact the suffering of another being fully and directly is as painful as being in the woman's shoes. ~ Pema Chodron

Do you know the moment I laid my eyes on you, I felt the wind knock out of me, like someone just gut-punched me. I ~ River Savage

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Carter pulled out several lengths of brown twine, a small ebony cat statue, and a thick roll of paper. No, not paper. Papyrus. I remember Dad explaining how the Egyptians made it from a river plant because they never invented paper. The stuff was so thick and rough, it made me wonder if the poor Egyptians had had to use toilet papyrus. If so, no wonder they walked sideways. ~ Rick Riordan

River Tam (Summer Glau): No power in the 'verse can stop me. ~ Joss Whedon

It should not be physically possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. ~ Alexandra Fuller

And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!" "By it and with it and on it and in it," said the Rat. . . . "It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing." - KENNETH GRAHAME, The Wind in the Willows ~ Kevin Fedarko

So you're an environmentalist; why are you killing a distant river with every bite? "Energy-intensive US factory farms generated 1.4 billion tons of animal waste in 1996, which ... pollutes American waterways more than all other industrial sources combined. ~ Anonymous

She had a brief affair with a novelist, W. L. River, whose Death of a Young Man had been published several years earlier. He called her Motsie and pledged himself to her in letters composed of stupendously long run-on sentences, in one case seventy-four lines of single-spaced typewriting. At the time this passed for experimental prose.
"I want nothing from life except you," he wrote. "I want to be with you forever, to work and write for you, to live wherever you want to live, to love nothing, nobody but you, to love you with the passion of earth but also with the above earthly elements of more eternal, spiritual love. ... "
He did not, however, get his wish. ~ Erik Larson

One day, I was running to the river. Along the way there was the most exquisite butterfly, a tiny little thing, on the pavement. I kind of jumped over it. And then two days later I woke up in the middle of the night with a character running, jumping over butterflies on the streets of Nairobi. After that, I followed the story. The story wrote itself. ~ Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Edges
I am a child throwing rocks into the stream.
Challenging the rushing water.
Raising my fist and daring fate to do it worst.
I am a dancer in the waves of the ocean.
Swaying in time with the tide.
Pirouetting, the current my only friend.
I am the sun, rising across the canyon
Ascending, and shinning down.
Giving the illusion of perception and motion.
I am thoughts like a rolling river.
Water cascading over the rocks of my soul.
Shaping, forming, conforming.
I am the peace of the rain forest.
Basking in solitude
Tranquil, serene, transfixing angles.
Reflecting from within.
Dripping and dropping. Shaking it off.
I am the dust of the galaxy.
Yearning to know itself.
I am the wind.
Wandering. Searching.
A storm brewing from within. ~ Tosha Michelle

As I let go of the rope, a familar shot of pure joy surged through me at being part of the river, of this wild place. ~ Tricia Mills

"Nature" is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind 'in the sails'. As the 'environment' is discovered, the 'Nature' thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this 'Nature' itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which 'stirs and strives', which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist's plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the 'source' which the geographer establishes for a river is not the 'springhead in the dale'. ~ Martin Heidegger

Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature steaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries. ~ John Banville

I've been drunk while swimming in the river, at noon the temperature of water, air, and body all the same, so that I can't tell where body ends and water begins and it's a melding of the universe, with the river curling round our bodies, cool and warm rushes intermingling in lost patterns, filling all times and all depths. ~ Samuel Shem

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above. ~ Cyril Connolly

We all swim deep in the river of our ancestry. ~ Richard Paul Evans

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer ~ Leonard Cohen

Dear Bill (O'Reilly) ... I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?
That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection! ~ Roger Ebert

Alchemy, however, began in the first century BC, most probably in Egypt. Indeed, scholars believe that the "chem" in alchemy (and hence in chemistry) is from a Coptic word "khem" which means the Black Land, that is, Egypt, for after the Nile River rises and floods the land each year, it looks black. That alchemy probably began in Egypt makes sense. The Egyptians were some of the best metal workers of the ancient world. From ~ Benjamin Wiker

I don't know about the time those songs were written. But he was jamming with someone in Colorado or San Francisco, and I'm sure he was working on the lyrics right up to the show because they were really relevant for the situation. ~ Krist Novoselic

The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces. ~ Wendell Berry

I am of this place. Family is a place, and my family s located here, those who are living and those who have passed. I am am settled in the scent of sage, Mount Moran's reflection at Oxbow Bend is more than a mirror of memories; it is the joy found in river otters, a reminder that there are places in the world we can return for peace unchanged. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

He found that he had this sudden desperate longing for the fuming, smoky streets of Ankh-Morpork, which was always at its best in the spring, when the gummy sheen on the turbid waters of the Ankh River had a special iridescence and the eaves were full of birdsong, or at least birds coughing rhythmically ~ Terry Pratchett

I look down at the city again. From here the city resembles a severed head, incinerated and discarded by the side of the river; its cavernous eye sockets are empty, bundles of dead nerves dangle from its neck, its shattered mouth gapes, a few desolate wires hang from its stark, scorched skull and, suddenly and incomprehensibly and so foreign to my body I could weep, I feel my heart expand with what I can only describe as a sensation of hope. Is there a word for that? Hope in the face of grand calamity. ~ Nick Cave

In the river. With James. Swimming ~ Suzanne Young

Run to the rescue with love/and peace will follow ~ River Phoenix

June Afternoon"

Didn't I tell you everything is possible in this deja vu?
Try the river boat, the carousel, feed the pigeons, Bar-B-Q.
Look at all the people, happy faces all around.
Smiling, throwing kisses, busy making lazy sounds

It's a bright June afternoon, it never gets dark.
Wah-wah! Here comes the sun.
Get your green, green tambourine, let's play in the park.
Wah-wah! Here comes the sun

Some folks are on blankets, slowly daydreaming
and reaching for their food.
Let's go buy an ice-cream and a magazine with an attitude
and put on a cassette, we can pretend that you're a star
cos life's so very simple just like la-la-la

It's a bright June afternoon...

There's a painter painting his masterpiece.
There are some squirrels jumping in the trees,
There's a wide-eyed boy with a red balloon.
All my life I've longed for this afternoon. ~ Roxette

Meth is a major problem not only in our urban areas, but in most of the rural areas of Colorado. No region has been immune from this scourge and it is getting larger. ~ Ken Salazar

The higher that the monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail.
Call no man happy till he dies, there's
no milk at the bottom of the pail.
God builds a church and the devil builds a chapel, like the thistles that are growing 'round the trunk of a tree.
All the good in the world you could put inside a thimble, and still have room for you and me.
If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man.
You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it always coming roaring back again.
Misery's the river of the world, misery's the river of the world.
Everybody row, everybody row;
misery's the river of the world. ~ Tom Waits

As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless"; it "force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying. ~ Milan Kundera

Most of the Amazon basin is as flat as a pancake and laced with extravagantly meandering waterways. One school of thought holds that more than 145 million years ago, when Africa and South America were joined, the Amazon's main stem was connected to the Niger River and actually flowed in the opposite direction, toward the Pacific Ocean. ~ Alex Shoumatoff

Their voices rose and fell, like the murmuring of two fountains answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said: 'Love, why should we linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river'. ~ Edith Wharton

Bind up thy words that they run not riot, and grow wanton, and gather up sins for themselves in too much talking. Let them be rather confined, and held back within their own banks. An overflowing river quickly gathers mud. ~ Saint Ambrose