River Dance Quotes

Every dance you make belongs to you. It is part of your collection. When you think of it like that, you'll want to make your next routine the best you've ever made! ~ Torron-Lee Dewar

As Matt walked Rick outside, he whispered, "Don't forget my little secret." He wiggled his eyebrows. "A happy wife. A happy life. Got it?"
Rick nodded. "Got it. ~ Linda Weaver Clarke

I love to dance; it's one of my favorite things to do. ~ Melissa Peterman

Aubade to Langston"

When the light wakes & finds again
the music of brooms in Mexico,
when daylight pulls our hands from grief,
& hearts cleaned raw with sawdust
& saltwater flood their dazzling vessels,
when the catfish in the river
raise their eyelids towards your face,
when sweetgrass bends in waves
across battlefields where sweat
& sugar marry, when we hear our people
wearing tongues fine with plain
greeting: How You Doing, Good Morning
when I pour coffee & remember
my mother's love of buttered grits,
when the trains far away in memory
begin to turn their engines toward
a deep past of knowing,
when all I want to do is burn
my masks, when I see a woman
walking down the street holding her mind
like a leather belt, when I pluck a blues note
for my lazy shadow & cast its soul from my page,
when I see God's eyes looking up at black folks
flying between moonlight & museum,
when I see a good-looking people
who are my truest poetry,
when I pick up this pencil like a flute
& blow myself away from my death,
I listen to you again beneath the mercy
of a blue morning's grammar.

Originally published in the Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 49.3 ~ Rachel Eliza Griffiths

I wasn't a dancer learning to play Baby Houseman. I was Baby Houseman learning to play a dancer. I was someone who'd never done any Latin dance. I'd taken jazz classes and ballet growing up in New York, so I had dance in me, and I knew I loved it, but I'd never done a dance audition. ~ Jennifer Grey

Tis the grand stupidity of our kind, dear Cutter, to see all the errors of our ways, yet find in ourselves the inability to do anything about them. We sit, dumbfounded by despair, and for all our ingenuity, our perceptivity, for all our extraordinary capacity to see the truth of things, we hunker down like snails in a flood, sucked tight to our precious pebble, fearing the moment is is dislodged beneath us. Until that terrible calamity, we do nothing but cling.
"Can you even imagine a world where all crimes are punished? Where justice is truly blind and holds out no hands happy to yield to the weight of coin and influence? Where one takes responsibility for his or her mistakes, acts of negligence, the deadly consequences of indifference or laziness? Nay, instead we slip and duck, dance and dodge, dance the dodge slip duck dance, feet ablur. Ourselves transformed into shadows that flit in chaotic discord. We are indeed masters of evasion--no doubt originally a survival trait, at least in the physical sense, but to have such instincts applied to the soul is perhaps our most egregious crime against morality. What we will do so that we may continue living with ourselves. In this we might assert that a survival trait can ultimately prove its own antithesis, and in the cancelling out thereof, why, we are left with the blank, dull, vacuous expression that Kruppe sees before him."
~Kruppe, ~ Steven Erikson

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

The Return of the Rivers

All the rivers run into the sea;
yet the sea is not full;
unto the place from whence the rivers come,
thither they return again.

It is raining today
in the mountains.

It is a warm green rain
with love
in its pockets
for spring is here,
and does not dream
of death.

Birds happen music
like clocks ticking heaves
in a land
where children love spiders,
and let them sleep
in their hair.

A slow rain sizzles
on the river
like a pan
full of frying flowers,
and with each drop
of rain
the ocean
begins again. ~ Richard Brautigan

IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn. ~ Edna O'Brien

PEOPLE WILL STOP ASKING QUESTIONS IF YOU ANSWER BACK IN INTERPRETIVE DANCE. - T-SHIRT ~ Darynda Jones

But now the giant heads of Plato and Socrates, each with an expression of penetrating wisdom carved on his white features, surveyed the river and the melon beds beyond. ~ J.G. Farrell

Love is the river of life in this world. Think not that ye know it who stand at the little tinkling rill, the first small fountain. Not until you have gone through the rocky gorges, and not lost the stream; not until you nave gone through the meadow, and the stream has widened and deepened until fleets could ride on its bosom; not until beyond the meadow you have come to the unfathomable ocean, and poured your treasures into its depths
not until then can you know what love is. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough, to keep me from getting to you. ~ Marvin Gaye

It pulsed under the lights of the dance floor like a separate, disembodied heart. ~ Cassandra Clare

My girlfriend in eighth grade had been asking her friends when I was going to kiss her. At a dance, my buddy said, 'You better do it now!' I went in for it. I felt like the coolest person on the face of the earth. A week or two later, she broke up with me. ~ Michael Rady

At every moment of life the civilised man is hedged about by restrictions of impulse: if he happens to feel cheerful he must not sing or dance in the street, while if he happens to feel sad he must not sit on the pavement and weep, for fear of obstructing pedestrian traffic. In youth his liberty is restricted at school, in adult life it is restricted throughout his working hours. All this makes zest more difficult to retain, for the co ntinual restraint tends to produce wearin ess and boredom. Nevertheless, a civilised society is impossible without a very considerable degree of restraint upon spontaneous
impulse, since spontaneous impulse will only produce the simplest forms of social c ooperation, not those highly complex forms which modern economic organisation demands ~ Bertrand Russell

In time, the brothers reached a river too deep to wade through and too dangerous to swim across. However, these brothers were learned in the magical arts, and so they simply waved their wands and made a bridge appear across the treacherous water. They were halfway across it when they found their path blocked by a hooded figure. ~ J.K. Rowling

Progress is a river. It cannot be called back once it leaps its banks. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Living a spiritual life may not be easy. It demands total authenticity. It brings you to dance to a unique song that only you can hear fully, and sometimes you dance alone because no others can hear the music. ~ Debra Moffitt

Your inner Belly Dancer ... is your inner sensuality, your highest feminity, your great esteemed self made more apparent. ~ Leandra J. Kalsy

The Virginians of the mountains, and of the broad valley of the Shenandoah River just beyond, were a different breed. ~ James L. Haley

I cannot draw to save my life, and I'm not a big art scholar, but I worked with many designers throughout my career - in theater, in dance, costume designers, set designers, and I have a lot of artist friends and I do photography, and I think it's kind of in my life. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

From Our Narrative:

"Baila…I am going to kiss you now," Reid says. I smile and nod my head in agreement. Because Lord knows I am not able to get any words out of my mouth.
As his lips reach mine and we tenderly kiss. I start to feel a pounding in my head as the blood rushes through my body, signaling more than just a regular kiss. The kiss is sweet, his lips are soft and inviting to mine. My hands instinctively reach for his chest, crumpling his t-shirt in my grasp as the kiss deepens and our tongues happily do a twisting dance. Feeling his well-formed muscles beneath his long sleeved t-shirt. I let out a small satisfied moan when we break apart to catch our breath. ~ S.P. Wilcox

Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the ... jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you. ~ Susan Sontag

As my father always said, 'sexism is a modern concept'. ~ Gillian Dance

In December 2004, I travelled on the road from Uzbekistan across the Oxus River on which the first Soviet convoys had rolled into Afghanistan 25 years before. ~ Pankaj Mishra

I always imagined the walk down the tall, wooden staircase, to be somewhat magical my first date when I was a little girl. Unfortunately, I never imagined my first date to be with someone who despised me, to a dance where I was sure to make a fool of myself, by orders from a Royal Prince who likes me but has been forbidden to talk to me; but I never had much of an imagination. ~ Rachel Higginson

Countess Bezukhova was present among other Russian ladies who had followed the sovereign from Petersburg to Vilna, and eclipsed the refined Polish ladies by her massive, so-called Russian, type of beauty. The Emperor noticed her, and honoured her with a dance. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I used to dance when I was younger - ballet and modern dance. ~ Nastassja Kinski

No one ever said that making love had to be a gently-flowing river which slowly became a flood. Sometimes the raging torrent came first. As it did now, as tempers drove it and the desire to fight each other became as compelling as the desire to drown in each other's surging swell. ~ Michelle Reid

When I was young, and addicted to reading, I had heard about dancing on the points of metaphysical needles; but, by mixing in the world, I found the points of political needles finer and sharper than the metaphysical ones. ~ John Adams

Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say. ~ William Stafford

Have a goal in life. When water is everywhere, it is a flood, but if it is in between banks, it is a river. It is nice to have a goal, so your life force gets channelized! ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

My moves are smooth. Always have been. I'm smart enough to see what's coming, and clever enough to turn it my way. All my skills make me perfect for this. The street dance. The hustle. ~ Kekla Magoon

One of the things that makes you feel good is to get out into nature - go walking, go hiking, go swimming in the ocean, or wherever you live, in a river or a lake, experience the beauty of America, experience how America is such a sacred place. Everywhere you go in this land, our people have been there and they have said, This place is sacred. ~ Charles Alexander Eastman

I swear to God, if you saw me when I am by myself in the woods, I'm a lunatic. I sing, I dance. ~ Chris Evans

You don't tap on the Devil's shoulder unless you're willing to dance to his tune. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Janitorial"

All morning he drifts the spacious lawns
like a gleaner, picking up this and that,
the summer clouds immense and building
toward afternoon, when the heat drives him
under the shade of the oak trees in the quad
and then along cool corridors inside
to pull down last term's flyers

For the chamber recital, the poetry reading,
the lecture on the ethics of cloning,
the dinner with some ambassador,
the debate between Kant and Heidegger,
the frat party, the sorority party, the kegger,
the weekend Bergman festival, the Wednesday
screening of Dumb and Dumber. He says
hello to fine young ladies, and tries
not to dwell on their halter tops,
their tanned thighs, shorts up to here.

At five he climbs into an old, dumpster-colored
olds, lights up and heads home
across the barge-ridden river in its servitude
to East St. Louis, where you know
this poem - glib, well-meaning, trivial--
grows tongue-tied, and cannot follow. ~ George Bilgere

He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by. ~ Salman Rushdie

She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust. ~ Laini Taylor

I cross my fingers that if a demon dunks me in a vat of boiling lava I'll get thrown together naked with River Phoenix, and that he'll say I'm cute and try to kiss me. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness. ~ Wally Lamb

A charity ball is like a dance except it's tax deductible. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

If I am asked, What do you propose to substitute for universal suffrage? Practically, What have you to recommend? I answer at once, Nothing. The whole current of thought and feeling, the whole stream of human affairs, is setting with irresistible force in that direction. The old ways of living, many of which were just as bad in their time as any of our devices can be in ours, are breaking down all over Europe, and are floating this way and that like haycocks in a flood. Nor do I see why any wise man should expend much thought or trouble on trying to save their wrecks. The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god. ~ James Fitzjames Stephen