Rainwater Quotes

Let us go somewhere and talk," Kopano said to Kaidan.
"We can talk here. She never uses her senses."
Whoops. I was officially eavesdropping, but I didn't feel guilty. I was too desperate for insight into Kaidan's mind. They spoke in low tones, hard to hear with the rush of rainwater.
"Do not be upset, Kai. I feel only concern for her."
"I'll bet you do."
Kaidan's clipped, harsh response was in direct contrast to Kopano's tranquil words.
"Even you are willing to risk yourself for her, brother."
"That's because I actually know her. What's your reason? I suppose you'd like to get to know her, too?"
"You have made it very clear that she is not available in that way. Be reasonable. There is plainly more at stake here. I only wished to help."
"There's nothing you can do, Kope!"
They got quiet and I could hear Kaidan's ragged breaths through his nose.
"Please trust me, brother," Kopano said. "There is no stronger weapon for Pharzuph to use than your concern for each other. If he learns that you were here to console her, you will lose all leverage with him. Do not fool yourself into thinking he will not discard you."
"Yes, some of us have to worry about such things. Thank you for the reminder."
The sounds that came next iced my blood: heavy footfalls crashing into puddles, and the metallic zing of a switchblade. I stood up with a hand to my heart. Then there was a deep, gruff chuckle. My father's.
"Put it away, boy ~ Wendy Higgins

I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind ... ~ W.G. Sebald

To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one's fellow man even a fellow man striving to do the same to you creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

Vivian's first impression of Solidago was that she had travelled back in time, but not to a time where architecture had been invented. All houses were twisted out of shape, to say the least. Windows either too large to open or too small to make a difference peppered the city in places one would never dream of having one.

The walls were mostly cast in brickwork by the kind of stonemason whose day job was financial advising. Skewed walls with more bricks than mortar, knotted chimneys keeping the smoke inside and cupping rooftops whose main purpose was to gather rainwater – Solidago had it all and more.

As the oldest civilization of the cosmos, Alarians might have been excellent at healing, philosophizing and weaving into the fabric of reality, but they were very poor city builders. ~ Louise Blackwick

Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rocking back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all. ~ Stephen King

She had something Adam didn't. Curiosity. First step to growth
and if it wasn't for Eve's Adam would still be sitting by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of Eden, Eve hadn't bothered naming the animals. On the other hand she'd discovered how to milk some of them and how best to eat the eggs of others. She'd decided she wasn't overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from bamboo and banana leaves, into which she'd retire when the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won't be surprised to hear about is that she'd already domesticated a cat and called it Misty. ~ Glen Duncan

There's always something happening in the world that creates an opportunity to try to fix a business and build a business. ~ Richard Rainwater

That night Lance wants to rub his penis as he thinks of Lexi but he refrains. He doesn't want Lexi to be a masturbatory fantasy in the tradition of Cindy Crawford, Heather Locklear, Kate Hudson and Whoopi Goldberg. No. Hell no! As a matter of fact, hellll no with marshmallows on top. Lance wants Lexi to be his special lady, everything he needs and more. Lance has a gut feeling, an irritable bowel syndrome sensation, that Lexi is his Soul Mate, the one woman God made especially for him to enjoy. Lance wonders if Lexi is allergic to hyacinths. Roses are so common. ~ Misti Rainwater-Lites

If you happen to be in the right place at the right time, the capitalist system is a beautiful thing. ~ Richard Rainwater

I don't understand the theory that nonprofit hospitals that run at forty percent capacity and do not pay taxes should be granted some special privilege. I like level playing fields. ~ Richard Rainwater

The Maria Mayer shell model suggestion in 1949 was a great triumph and fitted my belief that a nuclear shell model should represent a proper approach to understanding nuclear structure. ~ James Rainwater

Close your eyes.
Hear the cries.
Oh, the screams as another one dies.
All this pain
For what gain?
And the devil is telling you lies. ~ K.B. Rainwater

If nature is left to itself, fertility increases. Organic remains of plants and animals accumulate and are decomposed on the surface by bacteria and fungi. With the movement of rainwater, the nutrients are taken deep into the soil to become food for microorganisms, earthworms, and other small animals. Plant roots reach to the lower soil strata and draw the nutrients back up to the surface. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka

When he'd made it thirty strides or so Logen turned around and looked back. The pot was sitting forlorn by the lake, already filling up with rainwater. They'd been through a lot together, him and that pot. "Fare you well, old friend." The pot did not reply. ~ Joe Abercrombie

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater ... ~ Bill Mollison

Avoid Calcutta's un- healthy monsoon. From June until the end of September over a meter and a half of rain bombards the city. Outhouses overflow and contaminate water used for drinking, bathing, and washing cooking utensils. Many of the eight thousand annual deaths caused by cholera and gastrointestinal diseases occur during the rains. Antiquated, silt-clogged sewage pipes drain only a quarter inch of rainwater per hour. Manhole covers are removed to facilitate drainage, and in nonstop rains (more than thirty centimeters, or a foot, in twenty-four hours), open sewers, hidden under water, become booby traps as pedestrians inadvertently plunge into them and drown. ~ James O'Reilly

Rainwater purls from cloud to roof to eave. ~ Anthony Doerr

I FLEW over the rooftops of the city, listened to some jazz at Preservation Hall, drank rainwater down in Pirate's Alley, ducked into a kitchen on Dauphine and Orleans and was fed by an old couple who was sure I was both tame and owned by a neighbor. It was the great thing about the city: nothing really surprised anyone. They expected to see things out of the ordinary. A black panther eating gumbo was normal. ~ Mary Calmes

I dreamed Kim Kardashian was sobbing but her makeup was still flawless. She stood on stage in a tight little cleavage squishing dress holding her award in her arms. Her out of focus, uninspired photograph of sunflowers and bluebonnets won Photograph of the Year in her church's photography contest. I was kind of bitter about it but I didn't attend her church and I didn't enter the contest. ~ Misti Rainwater-Lites

The parched know --

real thirst
draws rainwater
from an empty sky. ~ Ivan M. Granger

The essence of good business is knowing when to step on a train and when to step off. ~ Richard Rainwater

As I took off the rumpled sheets, the smell of the people who had slept in them would lift up into the air. There was the round, almost sweet sweat smell of a child who had spent a day happily exploring, or the sharper-edged odor of one who'd gone to bed unhappy. With the bigger beds, I came to understand the way the scents of two people could mingle as effortlessly as rainwater, and to recognize the times they stayed apart, the smells resolutely separate. Sometimes there were those unreal perfumes, jumbling and talking too loudly- but underneath them I could always find the person. Sadness, like the dark purple juice of a blackberry. Fear, like the metallic taste of an oncoming storm. Love, which smelled like nothing so much as fresh bread. In an odd way, the game wasn't that different from reading the smells of our island. Scents were always about what was growing and what was dying. What would last through the next season. This was just with people instead of trees or flowers or dirt. ~ Erica Bauermeister

We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being along in the cool black room with Joey. Let's go smoke, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman. I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible. With everything. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around with this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never b ~ Michelle Tea

[Once Ummon asked a lesser light Are you a gardener> Yes it replied Why have turnips no roots> Ummon asked the gardener who could not reply Because said Ummon rainwater is plentiful] I think about this for a moment. Ummon's koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon's way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to. ~ Dan Simmons

I view real estate as the most intriguing opportunity that I've seen in my business lifetime. ~ Richard Rainwater

Yesterday I just felt like eating my ass off so I did. I ate two Chef Boyardee pizzas, a Fifth Avenue candy bar, an entire package of fun size Snickers (that was fun!), several cherry sours (not the entire package, there are still a few left), an apple (apples don't taste as good as they used to), several Slim Jims, a slice of burnt garlic toast, white cheddar popcorn and microwave popcorn. Today I will drink black coffee, eat a bowl of oatmeal (old school, boiled on the stove but no butter but lots of cinnamon and brown sugar) and dance to various YouTubes. I need to buy a pair of gloves, get my ass to the boxing gym and learn to love protein shakes. Also, I want to run a marathon. Then I want to get a backpack, stuff it with trail mix and the like and take to the road like the chick in that Wild book. ~ Misti Rainwater-Lites

My car rides smooth like I'm driving a cloud. If I park it at your house, I may get rainwater on your living room carpet. ~ Jarod Kintz

In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics. ~ James Rainwater

A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater. ~ Pat Conroy

Outside the window, one lone car passed and threw a violent blast of rainwater over the sidewalk. It was a storm, by now. Looking at that rain, I was falling deeply in love with our warm bar. What could you do, with a world like that? I was in love with every minute of being alive even as I floundered. ~ Monica Drake

Summer died under the weight of fallen leaves and autumn filled up the ruts in the road with rainwater like blood filling fresh clawmarks. ~ Geraldine McCaughrean

The research included neutron resonance spectroscopy, the angular distribution of pion elastic and inelastic scattering on nuclei with optical model fitting. ~ James Rainwater

You might think my chosen career would lend me insight…. But while I can tell you about the brain as a physical object…, beyond that I am a glorified techie. I know the nuts and bolts and can diagnose flaws within the mainframe. While I can identify and sometimes fix structural maladies within that organ, I do not remotely understand it. That is an impossible task, like trying to guess the path rainwater will take down a windowpane. There is simply no way to know with any accuracy what is happening inside someone else's head. I only faintly comprehend what is going on inside my own. ~ Craig Davidson

Many American women over forty are not worried about their wrinkles and don't give a rat's ass about enhancing them. There's this scientific fact called gravity. Gravity happens to us all, men and women. Some women and men over forty spend money fighting gravity with cosmetics and cosmetic surgery. That's their ball game. That's their parade. More power to them. There was once this woman named Gertrude Stein. She was the aesthetic opposite of Marilyn Monroe. I never knew Ms. Stein but from what I've read about her life I would venture to say that she was approximately (there's no way of measuring such things…well, there are a couple of ways) a million times happier than Marilyn Monroe. Sexy on the outside doesn't do much for ugly on the inside. This isn't to say that Marilyn Monroe was ugly on the inside. I'm sure she was really fucking gorgeous on the inside, too. Bottom line: sparkle on the INSIDE can enhance ANYTHING on the outside. ~ Misti Rainwater-Lites

As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater. ~ Charles Duhigg

When she looked at him again she had raised windows for eyes, with curtains blowing out of them, framing a yellow-lit room. Below them, her face declined in wet shingles, flowing with little rivulets of rainwater. ~ Nathan Ballingrud

The universe gives what the universe gives, yes. Cheap thrills, plenty of those, enough to get you through until Halloween when the Catholic school girls come out in full force and wink as they ask you to spank them (they've been very naughty). I'm going to sleep now and dream of deeper waters with treasure at the bottom. This junk has rendered me catatonic. I'm a mermaid, goddamn it, not the tooth fairy existing solely to place silver dollars beneath your crybaby pillow. ~ Misti Rainwater-Lites

Already, China's world-leading solar industry provides water heating for 35 million buildings, and India's pioneering use of rainwater harvesting brings clean water to tens of thousands of homes. ~ Christopher Flavin

The gods preferring their libations diluted with rainwater and mixed with freshly cut grass. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

I'm just not the type who wants to draw attention to himself. ~ Richard Rainwater

We take a word, such as freedom, and dress it up to mean the ability to bear firearms, display flags, collect rainwater or grow clean food, but absolute freedom is not a relative construct. It is not there one minute or outlawed the next. It can never be seized or given. It is ever-lasting and omnipresent. ~ Anita B. Sulser PhD

Corporations continue to do their dirty work in poor countries. At the turn of the 21st century, the World Bank put pressure on Bolivia to privatize water services. Bechtel, the engineering giant, took control of this vital resource in Cochabamba. Bechtel's executives immediately raised the price of water so high that most people could not afford it. Its contract, made in collusion with the Bolivian government, gave Bechtel the right to charge people for water they took from their own wells. Bechtel even sent collectors into people's homes to demand payment for rainwater that people gathered in pots and pans on their roofs. ~ David Zindell

Take rainwater kept for several years, and mix a sextarius of this water with a pound of honey The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days, and then left on a shelf near the fire. If you have no rain water, then boil spring water. ~ Columella

My father, who had previously been a civil engineer, died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. ~ James Rainwater

By the light of the hominy fire Sixo straightens. He is through with his song. He laughs. A rippling sound like Sethe's sons
make when they tumble in hay or splash in rainwater. His feet are cooking; the cloth of his trousers smokes. He laughs.
Something is funny. Paul D guesses what it is when Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out, Seven-O! Seven-O! ~ Toni Morrison

In the murky puddle of rainwater collected at the entrance of the tomb, I spied my own reflection,a dark, hatted figure against a pewter sky. ~ Linda Lappin

After I completed the tree climb in the damp mist, my hands were covered with a muddy residue of bark and rainwater, and I was exhausted. But I was very happy. ~ Ned Hayes

Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe. ~ Toni Morrison

Green roofs, roadside plantings, porous pavement, and sidewalk gardens have been proven to reduce flooding. They absorb rainwater before it swamps the streets and sewage systems. ~ Frances Beinecke

A strange breeze rustled through the clearing, temporarily overpowering the stink of trash and murk. It brought the smell of berries and wildflowers and clean rainwater, things that might've once been in these woods. Suddenly I was nostalgic for something I'd never knew. ~ Rick Riordan

All summer the smells of nettles and daisies and rainwater purl through the gardens. ~ Anthony Doerr

A bride had been violated on that most sacred of nights. But what about ordinary women on ordinary nights? Or indecent women, perhaps, like sex workers? Or hijras? What happened when less-than-ordinary souls got violated? Why not create a furor then? Why let their pain slide away like rainwater into a gutter? ~ Anosh Irani

The logical extension of a burgeoning population and urbanization is the conversion of open spaces into paved ground. This has resulted in flooding of cities as well as water scarcity due to groundwater depletion and the lack of rainwater harvesting. ~ Anonymous

She rolled the mysterious plunkin across in front of the hearth and stared at it. It still looked disconcertingly like a severed head. "What do we do with this?"
Dag sat cross-legged and smiled
not much of a smile, but a start. "Lots of choices. They all come down to plunkin. You can eat it raw in slices, peel it and cut it up and cook it alone or in a stew, boil it whole, wrap it in leaves and cook it in campfire coals, stick a sword through it and turn it on a spit, or, very popular, feed it to the pigs and eat the pigs. It's very sustaining. Some say you could live forever on plunkin and rainwater. Others say it would just seem like forever. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge, and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the grass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the Earth, to grow it again with the roots toward heaven. ~ Michael Shaara

The Praesidium stood on four pillars and for most of its height was square in cross-section. Not far above the dials, however, the corners of the square floor-plan were cleaved off, making it into an octagon, and not far above that, the octagon became a sixteen-sided polygon, and above that it became round. The roof of the Praesidium was a disk, or rather a lens, as it bulged up slightly in the middle to shed rainwater. It supported the megaliths, domes, penthouses, and turrets of the starhenge, which drove, and was driven by, the same clock-works that ran the dials. ~ Neal Stephenson