River Of Grass Quotes

The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass. ~ Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into drag-lined canals that give him 'waterfront' lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness. ~ John D. MacDonald

The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slowly moving, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades. It is a river of grass. ~ Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Narrow road, wide road, all of us on it, unhappy,
Unsettled, seven yards short of immortality
And a yard short of not long to live.
Better to sit down in the tall grass
and watch the clouds,
To lift our faces up to the sky,
Considering - for most of us - our lives have been a constant mistake. ~ Charles Wright

Everyone sees the violence of the swollen river.

Few see the violence of the embankments that constrain it. ~ Ancient Chinese Proverb

The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No colour at all, save for the neighbouring trees and grass of the surrounding fields. Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colourless world. Even what little ground is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick. ~ Erin Morgenstern

If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by. ~ Sun Tzu

Traffic lurched forward. I crawled slowly past a flatbed truck that was pulled off onto the grass beside the road. The hood of the truck was up. Seven or eight men in dingy clothes sat on the bed of the truck. They were waiting, too, but they seemed a little happier about it than I was. Maybe they weren't being pursued by an insane homicidal artist. ~ Jeff Lindsay

It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work.
This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for - or maybe even see - an old man in a rowboat raising his lines...
I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. ~ Wendell Berry

Almost 70 percent of U.S. ag exports travel the upper Mississippi River and the Illinois waterway system. ~ Jerry Costello

Human life is a passage - it's simply a crossing to somewhere else. Most people stay on the highway, but some choose to go off-road.

Don't ever be afraid to drive off the road and into the grass. You never know what you might find there. And don't regret your choices. We all make mistakes, and sometimes they'll be huge ones. But don't despair. In the long run you'll travel so far down the road that you won't be able to see those mistakes behind you. Just put one foot in front of the other, and you'll do just fine. ~ Marie Simas

Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest. ~ Victor Hugo

As I ran a few blades of grass between my fingers, enjoying the breeze as it caressed my face, I contemplated the cycle of life. As this year would host the long anticipated arrival of the Mayan Doomsday, marking the end of their long count calendar, I wasn't alone in my ponderings. The whole world was focused on the potential that we would be the last generation; the witnesses of the world's end. ~ J.M. Northup

Began to tear at it - not as a creature that eats earth and grass, but as if it were eating a curtain or a piece of scenery with the world painted on it. ~ Neil Gaiman

The Fever Bird

The fever bird sand out last night.
I could not sleep, try as I might.

My brain was split, my spirit raw.
I looked into the garden, saw

The shadow of the amaltas
Shake slightly on the moonlit grass

Unseen, the bird cried out its grief,
Its lunacy, without relief:

Three notes repeated closer, higher,
Soaring, then sinking down like fire

Only to breathe the night and soar,
As crazed, as desperate, as before.

I shivered in the midnight heat
And smelt the sweat that soaked my sheet.

And now tonight I hear again
The call that skewers though my brain,

The call, the brain-sick triple note--
A cone of pain stuck inits throat.

I am so tired I could weep.
Mad bird, for God's sake let me sleep

Why do you cry like one possessed?
When will you rest? When will you rest?

Why wait each night till all but I
Lie sleeping in the house, then cry?

Why do you scream into my ear
What no one else but I can hear? ~ Vikram Seth

Can I make you happier with powder on my chest? Do you need a thousand movie shows? Sixteen million people to ride the bus with, hit the stop - I shoulda never let you go away from home - " Rich lips brooded in my deaf ear. "The fog'll fall all over you, Jacky, you'll wait in fields - You'll let me die - you wont come save me - I wont even know where your grave is - remember what you were like, where your house, what your life - you'll die without knowing what happened to my face - my love - my youth - You'll burn yourself out like a moth jumping in a locomotive boiler looking for light - Jacky - and you'll be dead - and lose yourself from yourself - and forget - and sink - and me too - and what is all this then?"
"I dont know - "
"Then come back to our porch of the river the night time the trees and you love stars - I hear the bus on the corner - where you're getting off - no more, boy, no more - I saw, had visions and idees of you handsome my husband walking across the top of the America with your lantern...
Out of her eyes I saw smoldering I'd like to rip this damn dress off and never see it again! ~ Jack Kerouac

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

Always go with the river of life. Never try to go against the current, and never try to go faster than the river. Just move in absolute relaxation, so that each moment you are at home, at ease, at peace with existence. ~ Rajneesh

After Nicholas hung up the phone, he watched his mother carry buckets and garden tools across the couch grass toward a bed that would, come spring, be brightly ablaze as tropical coral with colorful arctotis, impatiens, and petunias. Katherine dug with hard chopping strokes, pulling out wandering jew and oxalis, tossing the uprooted weeds into a black pot beside her.
The garden will be beautiful, he thought. But how do the weeds feel about it? Sacrifices must be made. ~ Stephen M. Irwin

All of a sudden my arms were full of the most fantastic life, frenetic, impossible to hold on to even if I'd wanted to, and I wanted to. But then all I was holding was the blanket, because my father had jumped into the river. And that's when I discovered my father hadn't been dying after all. He was changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward. ~ Daniel Wallace

We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003.

Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make. ~ Bill Lambrecht

Tints were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank overhead. The river was leaden; all distances the same; and even the far-reaching ranks of combing white-caps were dully shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions marched. The thunder-peals were constant and deafening; explosion followed explosion with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew steadily sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the ear; the lightning was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession. ~ Mark Twain

To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving's to Truman Capote's, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation's literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan's salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge. ~ Jacob M. Appel

She plucked a raspberry. Sweet juice, sweet pleasure. Within the tangle of tendrils, inside a blossom, a tiny bead was kisses and blessed by the sun, from which it took in light and warmth and heaven's rain imbued with the richness of the soil of France. All of the elements of the river world helped that bead to expand and multiply into sheer casings for sweet pulp, wedge together in a knobby globe until it released its juice in her mouth ~ Susan Vreeland

If you want to know what makes you happy, imagine your very last day on this earth. Think about who you would wish to spend it with, where you might be and what you might be doing. For me, I would wish to spend it with the ones I love, somewhere not far from Nature, by the ocean, or maybe in a vibrant city, in a street with sights and sounds of people. Perhaps there's a vista of a fountain or a river... and watching the world go by, I'd be writing, completing the last chapter to a final book ... ~ Suzy Davies

I knew the whistle of each of the river boats on the Tennessee. ~ William Christopher Handy

Mere life is a luxury, and the color of the grass, of the flowers, of the sky, the wind in the trees, the outlines of the horizon, the forms of clouds, all give a pleasure as exquisite as the sweetest music to the ear famishing for it. The ~ Mark Twain

Catching fish is low on my agenda when I go fishing. I'm much more interested in savouring the day and exploring the wildlife of the river. ~ Fennel Hudson

Pigs eat grass if they are very hungry, but they can't use it as a regular source of food. ~ Marvin Harris

I dreamed my lips would drift down your back like a skiff on a river. I'd follow a vein with the point of my finger, hold your bare feet in my naked hands. ~ William H. Gass

In my land, they tell legends of range-wars between the ranchers and the sheep-farmers," he said. "Because, it was told, the sheep ate the grass too close. Took even the roots, you ken, so it wouldn't grow back again." "That's plain silly, beg your pardon," Overholser said. "Sheep do crop grass close, aye, but then we send the cows over it to water. The manure they drop is full of seed." "Ah," Eddie said. He couldn't think of anything else. Put that way, the whole idea of range-wars seemed exquisitely stupid. ~ Stephen King

Anne's lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets sewn with diamonds. The moon sees them , peering from her hood of bone, and Thames water reflects them, glimmering like fish, like pearls. ~ Hilary Mantel

At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time - between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M. - by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn't even begin to identify them. ~ John Green

I liked the way that repetition wears things smooth, and there was something of the river stone to Iggie's stories. ~ Edmund De Waal

The forestland thickened at one point, and without warning it opened onto a road. Fading back behind a screen of ferns, I watched the traffic. It appeared I'd reached a major crossroads. A stone marker at the intersection indicated the Akaeriki road downhill, and to the north lay the town of Thoresk.
A town. Surely one anonymous female could lose herself in a town? And while she was at it, find some shelter?
Big raindrops started plopping in the leaves around me. The coming storm wouldn't be warded by tree branches and leaves, that was for certain. Clutching my half-empty basket to my side, I started up the road, careful not to limp if anyone came into view from the opposite direction.
I saw a line of slow wagons up ahead, with a group of small children gamboling around them. I hurried my pace slightly so I would look like I belonged with them; I had nearly caught up when a deep thundering noise seemed to vibrate up from the ground.
"Cavalcade! Cavalcade!" a high childish voice shrieked.
The farmers clucked at their oxen and the wagons hulked and swung, metal frames creaking, over to one side. The children ran up the grassy bank beside the road, hopping and shrieking with excitement.
Feeling my knees go suddenly watery, I scrambled up the bank as well, then sat in the grass with my basket on my lap. I checked my kerchief surreptitiously and snatched my hand down as two banner-carrying outriders galloped into view around the bend I'd walked so sh ~ Sherwood Smith

I had a huge advantage with Edward Norton because he's directed a movie before, so one thing he appreciates is how hard my job is, he's very sensitive to that. We actually ended up finishing "Leaves of Grass" a day early. ~ Edward Norton

God hides the fires of hell within paradise. ~ Paulo Coelho