Rapids Quotes

2009 saw the eighth 'ten-year flood' of Fargo, North Dakota, since 1989. In Iowa, Cedar Rapids was hit last year by a flood that exceeded the 500-year flood plain. All-time flood records are being broken in areas throughout the world. ~ Al Gore

Choose to chance the rapids and dare to dance the skies. ~ Garth Brooks

If only [love] could be turned off. It's not a faucet. Love's a bloody river with level-five rapids. Only a catastrophic act of nature or a dam has any chance of stopping it- and then only succeeds in diverting it. Both measures are extreme and change the terrain so much you end up wondering why you bothered. No landmarks to gauge your position when it's done. Only way to survive is to devise new ways to map out life. ~ Karen Marie Moning

The union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of the higher faculties of men. Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization whence light and heat radiated out into the dark cold world. ~ Theodore Parker

Driving home to Iowa from Marion, Indiana, I went through Chicago, sure, but it was far easier to find a field than a town. Far easier to find empty spaces than people. Even in my town, Cedar Rapids, the second-largest city in Iowa, you are never more than minutes from a cornfield. It's a bigness that can feel limiting if you are the only one of you that you see. But the internet is an equalizer - bringing together voices that once felt alone, realigning boundaries, creating spaces where there were none before.

There is a danger too of creating ideological bubbles. Of filtering out dissent. It's a criticism that was leveled heavily against blue states after the 2016 election. But when you are in the minority - the voice that is silenced - you are never in a bubble, even if you try. And finding a place where you don't have to fight for acceptance, where you can just be accepted, even if that is online is the difference between pain and hope. ~ Lyz Lenz

The FDA has formed a rapid response team. ~ Andrew Von Eschenbach

I'm an investor in MakerBot, which is a good example of the 'thingiverse'. The idea of applying collaboration and rapid iteration to things that we interact with and hold in our hands every day is super revolutionary. ~ Matt Mullenweg

The rapids beat below the boat Deep in the heart of the land Feel the pulse of the river in the pulse at your throat Deep in the heart of the land. ~ Lynn Culbreath Noel

To what end do we sit together under the moon? Why circle in together?
We sit to be heard. To speak without being judged. To share our stories without having to make an articulate point.
We sit to listen. To rekindle the ancient art of listening with open hearts. To know other women on a heart to heart level.
We sit to spill tears and laughter, and to hold on to a strong thread of silent solidarity.
We sit to see truth. To have parts of ourselves revealed to us. To have the stories of others laid bare. To hear words spoken that shoot into the heart like a lightning strike. To come to understand a wisdom unveiled in silence.
We sit to dig our toes into the cosmos. To be pulled into the expansive river of consciousness that we didn't know existed. To experience a oneness with humankind and the universe that feels like floating along on gentle rapids. We meet together to have our cynical minds opened by a shooting star's approving appearance, or to watch the clouds pass over the face of the moon and be flushed with the deep sense of belonging. ~ Lucy AitkenRead

A good story, you'd have said, is like our river Drina: never calm, it doesn't trickle along, it is rough and broad, tributaries flow in to enrich it, it rises above its banks, it bubbles and roars, here and there it flows into shallows but then it comes to rapids again, preludes to the depths where there's no splashing. But one thing neither the Drina nor the stories can do: there's no going back for any of them. The water can't turn back and choose another bed, just as promises now can't be kept. No drowned man comes up again asking for a towel, no love is found again, no tobacconist fails to be born in the first place, no bullet shoots out of a neck and back into the gun, the dam will hold or will not hold. The Drina has no delta. ~ Sasa Stanisic

We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Powell wasn't overstating their ignorance. At this point, they had no clear idea how far they had come or how much canyon lay ahead of them. They did not know how many turns the river would make, how many rapids there might be, or whether their supplies would sustain them through the time it would take to negotiate these obstacles. And they had no way of knowing that their most serious challenges lay ahead. Just ~ Kevin Fedarko

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Emotions have their own movement. They move like waves: huge tsunami waves, choppy rapids, or long slow tides. The best way I know to work with emotion, especially strong and difficult emotion is to let it move like a wave, allow it to complete its movement and, eventually, to leave. If the movement gets held back, if it gets trapped and stagnates, or an inner turbulence stirs, the unexpressed emotion and grief can turn into physical illness, fatigue, depression, anxiety, or other displaced emotion. ~ Sharon Weil

And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly - well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands. Violence ~ John Steinbeck

I remember how beautiful the Merrimac looked to me in childhood, the first true river I ever knew; it opened upon my sight and wound its way through my heart like a dream realized; its harebells, its rocks, and its rapids, are far more fixed in my memory than anything about the sea. ~ Lucy Larcom

Things in this world are very roughly averaged; and although averaging is a useful, rapid way of dispatching business, it does undoubtedly waste a great deal which is too good for wasting. ~ Vernon Lee

For the first time in history we can track the evolution of a pandemic in real time. Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour. ~ Margaret Chan

If we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The Expositor's Bible Commentary. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976. Bruce, F. F. The Epistle to the Galatians. Grand ~ Paul D. Weaver

I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help. ~ Paul Engle

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

Probably people always feel that they are living in a time of transition, but we can hardly be mistaken perhaps in thinking that this is an era of particularly momentous change, rapid and proceeding at an ever quickening rate. ~ Emily Greene Balch

I never have a thematic intention at the outset. The story informs the theme for me rather than the other way around. But as it happens, this is, at least to a degree, about getting old and the rapid passage of our lives. ~ Stephen King

The unprecedented development of science and technology ... so rapid that it is said that 90 per cent of the scientists which this country has ever produced are still living today. ~ Robert Platt

beg him: take me quick, farther, i: plunge in your
rapids and you then: release me - pure - as foam
as air, air -
and fleeing i ripple your face in thanks … ~ Anja Utler

Once a new paradigm takes hold, its acceptance is extraordinarily rapid and one finds few who claim to have adhered to a discarded method. ~ Bernard Lown

The more recently power has originated, the less it can remain stationary - first because those who created it have become accustomed to rapid further movement and because they are and will be innovators per se; secondly, because the forces aroused or subdued by them can be employed only through further acts ... ~ Jacob Burckhardt

Through the process of specifically writing this memoir, there was so much reckoning that I had to do. It was very difficult. It doesn't erase anything that happened, but I think that it was healthy for me to do it. The teenage self-loathing that I suffered from all of a sudden found itself turned into rapids with my grief after my brother died. I turned it inwards. In the same way that my mom processes her grief and her problems. This project, as a memoir, has helped me funnel it outwards. ~ Jesmyn Ward

[The Internet] is by far the most important innovation in the media in my lifetime. It's like having a huge encyclopedia permanently available. There's a tremendous amount of rubbish on the world wide web, but retrieval of what you want to so rapid that it doesn't really matter ~ Richard Dawkins

Obey, obey, obey
-obey what?
My body catching this wind is obeying
the pulse of the breathtaking Divine.
You, canoeing those rapids, are breaking
into the spray of larger, unseen Waves. ~ Mohja Kahf

She reshelved the sixpack and wrenched herself away to less compelling parts of the store, but it was hard to plan dinner when you felt like throwing up. She returned to the beer shelves like a bird repeating its song. The various beer cans had different decorations but all contained the identical weak low-end brew. It occurred to her to drive to Grand Rapids and buy some actual wine. It occurred to her to drive back to the house without buying anything at all. But then where would she be? A weariness set in as she stood and vacillated: a premonition that none of the possible impending outcomes would bring enough relief or pleasure to justify her current heart-racing wretchedness. She saw, in other words, what it meant to have become a deeply unhappy person. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Cats are like oysters, in that no one is neutral about them; everyone is, explicitly or implicitly, friendly or hostile to them. And they are like children in their power of discovering, by a rapid and sure instinct, who likes them and who does not. It is difficult to win their affection; and it is easy to forfeit what is hard to win. But when given, their love, although less demonstrative, is more delicate and beautiful than that of a dog. ~ Henry Parry Liddon

They leave to test the waters but fail to realize the waters are full of rapids. ~ Dominic Riccitello

It's either feast or famine, and that's the way it's been for as long as I can remember. I've spent my whole career thinking I'll never work again. Every actor lives with that insecurity. You just have to negotiate the rapids as they come. ~ Amanda Donohoe

Music is a means of rapid transportation. ~ John Cage

We're [Clinton Foundation] trying to get rapid tests that give you results when you're right there on site at an affordable price. Ninety percent of the HIV-positive people in the world don't know they have the infection. An enormous amount of infections are being perpetrated by people who don't know they themselves are HIV positive. ~ William J. Clinton

It would be nice, after this was over, to take a long raft trip. Maybe Jen and I could paddle through Westwater and its ass-clenching rapids, then lounge on the banks in Moab for a week or two. That would be heaven: a raft trip with a beer in my hand instead of a rifle. I ~ Erik Storey

Too much faith in personality has a tendency to produce weakness and idolatry, but intense love for the Guru makes rapid growth possible. ~ Swami Vivekananda

We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can't adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn't a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are. ~ Robert Neelly Bellah

The smoke! The golden smoke!
His robe whipped upward, turning him until his face was directed downward into the abyss. With his gaze on the depths, he recognized a maelstrom of boiling rapids there, the mirror of his life-precipitous currents and plunges, all movement gathering up all substance. Leto's words wound through his mind on a path of golden smoke: "Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve." Moneo fell freely then in the ecstasy of awareness. The universe opened for him like clear glass, everything flowing in a no Time. ~ Frank Herbert

How horribly rapid everything has been, from the days when men were not ashamed to talk of souls and of suffering and of hope to these low days of smiles that will never again be sly enough to hide the knowledge of betrayal and deceit. ~ Ayi Kwei Armah

I don't think people would climb mountains or jump off bridges with parachutes or kayak Class V rapids if those things didn't offer the brief and horrible illusion of imminent death. They would just be complicated, time-consuming endeavors that we'd steer well clear of because they got in the way of real life. ~ Sebastian Junger

My tides were fluctuating, too - back and forth, back and forth - sometimes so fast they seemed to be spinning. They call this 'rapid cycling.' It's a marvel that a person can appear to be standing still when the mood tides are sloshing back and forth, sometimes sweeping in both directions at once. They call that a 'mixed state.' ~ Jane Pauley

Siddhartha saw it hurrying, the river, which consisted of him and his loved ones and of all people, he had ever seen, all of these waves and waters were hurrying, suffering, towards goals, many goals, the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all goals were reached, and every goal was followed by a new one, and the water turned into vapour and rose to the sky, turned into rain and poured down from the sky, turned into a source, a stream, a river, headed forward once again, flowed on once again. ~ Hermann Hesse

I have a type of bipolar that swings up and down all day long. There are significant mood swings within a day, within a week, within a month. I go through at least four major episodes a year. That's really the definition of bipolar rapid cycle. But I have ultra-rapid, so I have tiny little episodes all day long. ~ Marya Hornbacher

I love him. So much. To the point where you won't understand. You don't get it because I don't get it. It's there. It exists. It flows. It moves like rapids through my veins. Comes with bursts and occasionally fades with the day, but it's always there. And when you find love like that, you don't want to give it up. But sometimes you have to and sometimes you have to give it to someone else. That's the hard part. ~ Dominic Riccitello

I mean, in the last few months alone, I've been pinned in a big set of white-water rapids, been bitten by an angry snake in a jungle, had a close escapewith a big mountain rockfall, narrowly avoided being eaten by a huge croc in the Australian swamps, and had to cut away from my main parachute and come down on my reserve, some five thousand feet above the Arctic plateau.
When did all this craziness become my world?
It's as if - almost accidentally - this madness had become my life. And don't get me wrong - I love it all.
The game, though, now, is to hang on to that life.
Every day is the most wonderful of blessings, and a gift that I never, ever take for granted.
Oh, and as for the scars, broken bones, aching limbs and sore back?
I consider them just gentle reminders that life is precious - and that maybe, just maybe, I am more fragile than I dare to admit. ~ Bear Grylls

The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool. ~ Scott Turow

So I learned that the people who make the most of the process of encountering reality, especially the painful obstacles, learn the most and get what they want faster than people who do not ... In short, I learned that being totally truthful, especially about mistakes and weaknesses, led to a rapid rate of improvement and movement toward what I wanted. ~ Ray Dalio

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe. ~ Tim O'Brien

IGNORANCE

I didn't know love would make me this
crazy, with my eyes
like the river Ceyhun
carrying me in its rapids
out to sea,where every bit
of shattered boat
sinks to the bottom.

An alligator lifts its head and swallows
the ocean, then the ocean
floor becomes
a desert covering
the alligator in
sand drifts.

Changes do
happen. I do not know how,
or what remains of what
has disappeared
into the absolute.

I hear so many stories
and explanations, but I keep quiet,
because I don't know anything,
and because something I swallowed
in the ocean
has made me completely content
with ignorance. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands. ~ John Steinbeck

In all ages, through all the varied experience of individuals and nations, knowledge has been the power which has civilized, elevated and dignified humanity. In those countries where progress has been most rapid, the thirst for knowledge has been most intense. ~ Sarah Moore Grimke

Corruption of morals is rapid enough in any country without a bounty from government. And ... the Chief Magistrate of the United States should be the last man to accelerate its progress. ~ Daniel Webster

Most kids who grow up in Alaska and spend a fair degree of time in the wilderness, grow up being pretty self-reliant. You have to be, in order to survive all the animals and cliffs and crevasses and rapids - at some point, your brain has to kick [out of] that childish daydream world and start making I-want-to-live decisions. ~ Leigh Newman

Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance. ~ Mark Helprin

Most recently, terrorist forces have captured Israeli soldiers and fired rockets into Israeli cities - both unprovoked. These acts of aggression deserve the rapid and decisive response they received. ~ John Boehner

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense. ~ Josiah Wedgwood

I am only here to share my knowledge with others and to help them make rapid progress on the path of yoga. ~ Dharma Mittra

As soon as she was close, she whispered, "you've got to get out of here."
"No, you've got to get out of here," he told her. "Go downstairs. Go now."
"No," she countered. "You go."
"Why?" he asked.
"You tell me first."
But before they could say another word, the last elevator slid slowly open and two men in masks rushed out. From the opposite side of the of the ballroom, shots rang out, rapid fire, piercing the ceiling, plaster falling onto the dance floor like snow.
And then Hale and Macey whispered in unison, "Because of that. ~ Ally Carter

Learning how to respond to and master the process of change - and even to excel at it - is a critical leadership skill for the twenty-first century. Constant, rapid change will be a fact of life for all of us. ~ Jennifer James

At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can't find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world. ~ Timothy Egan

Craig Bellamy's got pace, but he's also rapid as well ~ David Platt

I'm extremely optimistic about rapid transformation and change of things in Africa in general. ~ Binyavanga Wainaina

After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark
now glittering
now reflecting gloom
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Solar bursts typically last from half a minute to a couple of minutes and often sound like a rapid hissing noise followed by a gradual decrease back to the original audio level. ~ Honor Harger

We live in a time of such rapid change and growth of knowledge that only he who is in a fundamental sense a scholar-that is, a person who continues to learn and inquire-can hope to keep pace, let alone play the role of guide. ~ Nathan M. Pusey

In one century, we've added 28 years to our average life span - a change so rapid that our brains couldn't possibly have evolved to accommodate it. ~ Martha Beck

My life has always been rapid and crazy. It has just gotten a little faster. ~ Brandon Jacobs

And what does God ask of you?"
"To fly without wings. To do what seems impossible. To cling to our loves through the rapids of our hates. To know that God charges us with the task of making these miracles. They exist between person and person, as flame goes from candle to candle. To know that all we can know of right or wrong is through the way our acts are revealed in the lives of other people. There is no other way to see God. It is not given to us. ~ Patricia Storace

Rapid-collage prevents any elevating movement toward a fixed goal. To 'be nowhere' is to let oneself be. ~ Joshua L. Goldberg

An insuperable obstacle to rapid transit in Africa is the want of carriers, and as speed was the main object of the Expedition under my command, my duty was to lessen this difficulty as much as possible. ~ Henry Morton Stanley

Dieting is long-haul. Many rapid weight loss programs actually only squeeze the water out of you. Just like a wet sponge. But a good dieter maintains his or her grip on that sponge, not letting it soak up water again. ~ Owen Jones

Your body is a sanctuary, a place where love
and grief flow like crashing rapids against
your spine. Its time to take your hands off of
your thighs, and your gaze off of the marks
that adorn your hips like ornaments.

The universe gave up celestial pieces of
itself to sculpt you.
It is time to honor that. ~ Bianca Sparacino

I wasn't in a position that some other memoirists are, dealing with families who fed them meth, or kidnapped them, or did something that would make the writer not want to see that family again. I wanted to see my family. I wanted to celebrate them. I was proud of who we were, in the wilderness, floating down rapids or hiking over glaciers, and everywhere else. ~ Leigh Newman

Nor must Uncle Sam's Web-feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broadbay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been, and made their tracks. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Your man with a thin skin, a vehement ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for rapid improvement is never a happy, and seldom a fortunate politician. ~ Anthony Trollope

I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't have put you through all this, if I wasn't all in, if I didn't still love you. You said you still loved me too. So we have that. We hold on to it. And we ride these rapids until I can get us to safety. You with me?"
"I'm with you. ~ Kristen Ashley

The human brain is still undergoing rapid adaptive evolution,. ~ Howard Hughes

By enlivening this most basic level of life, Transcendental Meditation is that one simple procedure which can raise the life of every individual and every society to its full dignity, in which problems are absent and perfect health, happiness, and a rapid pace of progress are the natural features of life. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Even though nobody knew that you were in my life, you were the person who brought a raft at every rapid current and helped me cross that water safely. I was happy that you were there. I came to tell you I was able to travel through my life because I could come to you when I was anxious, not when I was happy. ~ Shin Kyung-sook

Artists who believe they control everything control what they know. Artists who allow outside forces to intervene are like canoes going down rapids. The rocks are there. If you fight them, you fly off the bow. If you allow the current to take you, you can pass through swimmingly. It is a rare gift at every bend. ~ Arno Hintjens

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind. ~ Ali Shaw

Growing up in the 1950s, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, boys were supposed to be athletic. ~ Chris Van Allsburg

Millions of human vermin swarm sweating along the night-arched cavernous roads. (Happily rapid chemical processes will disintegrate them all. ~ Richard Aldington

Missionaries, whether of philosophy or religion, rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall in with the prepossessions ofthe multitude of shallow thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the still larger multitude, who do not profess to think much, but are quite certain they want a great deal. ~ Thomas Huxley

The delivery room is cold and it has a view of the city. A view of smokestacks and snow-kissed rooftops. An industrial grid of squares that seem to go on for miles. And the snowflakes have wings. Big white butterflies suspended in air. The kind kids like to catch on their tongues. ~ Daniel Abbott

What won't work - what can't work - is to act like the last years never happened, and that the survival of the [mass media] industry will be found by hiding content behind walled gardens. Instead of sticking their finger in the dike, trying to hold back the flow of innovation, companies need to ride the rapids of progress and seize the opportunities it provides. ~ Arianna Huffington

On the seventh day, Howard turned off the trail and sat by the river and smoked a pipeful of tobacco that he had packed for the hermit. As he smoked, he listened to the voices in the rapids. They murmured about a place somewhere deep in the woods where a set of bones lay on a bed of moss, above which a troop of mournful flies had kept vigil the previous autumn until the frosts came, and they, too, had succumbed. ~ Paul Harding

This party is a bit like an old stagecoach. If you drive along at a rapid rate everyone aboard is either so exhilarated or so seasick that you don't have a lot of difficulty. ~ Harold Wilson

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It's always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.
Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there's too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I st ~ Aidan Chambers

You should often amuse yourself when you take a walk for recreation, in watching and taking note of the attitudes and actions of men as they talk and dispute, or laugh or come to blows with one another ... noting these down with rapid strokes, in a little pocket-book which you ought always to carry with you. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

O Canada I have not forgotten you,
as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision
of a bookcase.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on
the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.
But not only that,
you are the two boys with pails walking along that road. ~ Billy Collins

There is the mind itself. It is like a smooth lake which when struck, say by a stone, vibrates. The vibrations gather together and react on the stone, and all through the lake they will spread and be felt. The mind is like the lake; it is constantly being set in vibrations, which leave an impression on the mind; and the idea of the Ego, or personal self, the "I", is the result of these impressions. This "I" therefore is only the very rapid transmission of force and is in itself no reality. ~ Swami Vivekananda

I really think that the planet is growing a new nervous system. I mean, when you think of Facebook as the third largest nation in the world, that's so unprecedented, so amazing. Think of how many people are texting and twittering. The planet has created a nervous system for massive, rapid connectivity. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

As long as there are young men with the light of adventure in their eyes or a touch of wilderness in their souls, rapids will be run. ~ Sigurd F. Olson

Britain won its wars on the playing fields of Eton. America developed its mettle at the muddy gaps of the Cumberlands, in the swift rapids of its rivers, on the limitless reaches of its western plains, in the silent vastness of primeval forests, and in the blizzard-ridden passes of the Rockies and Coast ranges. ~ Harvey Broome

Choose to chance the rapids; dare to dance the tide ~ Garth Brooks

We are coming into a new era of flight, an ear in which all past conception of time and distance is changing and changing at a very, very rapid rate. ~ Allan Haines Loughead