Sertima River Quotes

His warm tickling fingers stroked against her like the idle sway of river reeds... cunning fingertips that quickly discovered where she most wanted them. He toyed with her, parting her, slowly investigating the cambered softness and the sensitive places within. Blindly she reached down to grip his stronger wrist, feeling the intricate movements of bone and tendon. He slid two fingers inside her, his thumb gliding over her sex in tender circles.
The water sloshed in the tub as she began to push up rhythmically, urging herself into his hand. A third finger worked inside, and she tightened and gasped out a protest- it was too much, she couldn't- but he whispered that she could, she must, and he stretched her carefully and took her groans into his mouth.
Splayed and floating, Win felt herself loosening, opening to the sensuality of the fingers reaching inside her. She felt greedy and wild, undulating to capture more of the obliterating pleasure. She actually clawed him a little, her hands scrabbling against his hard, bare skin, and he growled as if it pleased him. An abbreviated cry left her lips at the first shock of release. She tried to stifle it, but another was torn from her, and another, and the bathwater rippled as she shuddered, the climax lengthened by the delicately emphatic thrusting that continued until she was limp and panting. ~ Lisa Kleypas

This is the river. Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself. ~ Nan Shepherd

Whenever I am back in the neighborhood, I sometimes pass my apartment from the street. I like to believe, stupidly, that if I were to open the front door again, in the back I would find my roses, huge from their seaweed tea and the many days of six hours' sunlight, perhaps growing legs, ready to push down the building and walk out to the street, striking cars out of the way and slicing the blacktop to ribbons. I want to think that they would miss me, their erstwhile tormentor, the one who pushed them so hard to grow, cutting and soaking them in the blazing sun from spring to winter. From the street, from across the river, where I live now without them, I can feel them still, the sap pulsing in their veins, pushing their way to the sky.

But the creature that grew legs and walked away from the garden was me. I was not their gardener. They were mine. ~ Alexander Chee

At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the windwaves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild. ~ Wendell Berry

Spending time in nature assists a person reconnect with his or her inner state. A wounded person undoubtedly benefits by bowing down and taking communion beside the healing waters of a river. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

It's the swirling river of time that makes our identities, not the monochromatic simplicity of skin colour or the definitive lines of international borders. ~ Giles Foden

Big secrets were catastrophic. However hard you try to hide them, they bob to the surface and you must go over them again and again. They are taken out so often they become worn smooth as a river stone. You have to carry them around you like a baby. The secret grows until you feel like you are a skin that covers it, a thin skin, easily split, ripe ~ Karen Foxlee

When I was young, I believed that life might unfold in an orderly way, according to my hopes and expectations. But now I understand that the Way winds like a river, always changing, ever onward.. My journeys revealed that the Way itself creates the warrior; that every path leads to peace, every choice to wisdom. And that life has always been, and will always be, arising in Mystery. ~ Socrates

What a beautiful world it was once. At least a river of it was. ~ Norman Maclean

In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God. ~ John Of The Cross

I would say to her, in that mixed river language we used, 'One day, Beth, somebody will snatch your case. It isn't safe to travel about with money like that.' 'The day that happens, Mis' Salim, I will know the time has come to stay home.' It was a strange way of thinking. But she was a strange woman. ~ V.S. Naipaul

When I stepped onto the bridge over the Iowa River and stood looking out across the water, I knew I was home. I was wrong about that, as it turns out. And I know now that my certainty was based on a series of troubling misconceptions, but it would be years before I would lose the comfort that certainty gave me. ~ Eula Biss

you can't untie this knot by listening to
fairy tales
you have to do something inside yourself
the smallest fountain inside of you
is better than a raging river outside ~ Rumi

All of us live in history, whether we are aware of it or not, and die in drama. The sense of history and of drama comes to a man not because of who he is or what he does but flickeringly, as he is caught up in events, as his personality reacts, as he sees for a moment his place in the great flowing river of humanity. ~ Carl Mydans

Usually when people hear my parents are scientists, they assume they're awkward, unathletic nerds whose idea of fun is doing long division. That drives me nuts. My parents are the least nerdy people you've ever met. Mom swam competitively in college and competed in triathlons up until we left earth. Dad is a rugged outdoorsman; he's summited dozens of mountains and once free-climbed El Capitan in Yosemite in a day. They met on a Class 5 rafting trip down the Snake River. But more importantly, my parents aren't unusual. I've met hundreds of scientists, and most are almost as athletic and adventurous as my parents. I'm not sure how the whole idea that scientists are nerds ever got started. ~ Stuart Gibbs

Or have you simply been enjoying that North African river cruise?"
"You what?"
"In de-Nile? ~ J.L. Merrow

The lesson in running brooks is that motion is a great purifier and health-producer. When the brook ceases to run, it soon stagnates. It keeps in touch with the great vital currents when it is in motion, and unites with other brooks to help make the river. In motion it soon leaves all mud and sediment behind. Do not proper work and the exercise of will power have the same effect upon our lives? ~ John Burroughs

A field which feeds you, a river which gives you water are much holier than all other so-called holy places! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

And loving a new person might even eventually dull the pain of having lost the people you have loved before, even if it didn't happen as quickly as you wanted it to. (p 99) ~ Bonnie Jo Campbell

With so much sky and so much river, you couldn't help seeing the big picture. It was what you already knew, but crowding into the subway or rushing to a movie, you only saw it for a second, and close up. Now I took a good long look. I'd always heard you couldn't see stars in Manhattan because of all the lights. But here they all were. Here was my night in shining armor. ~ Melissa Bank

It's not a question anymore of fishing," Sam spoke up. "It's a question of what's right, Cork. We've bent like reeds in a river for generations, bent so far over we've just about forgot how to stand up straight. Look at us now. None of us has ever been so proud of being a Shinnob. ~ William Kent Krueger

We were destined to collide but the river of misunderstanding left us at the opposite banks. ~ Neetesh Dixit

In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean. ~ Alan W. Watts

Underground, in the dark wet hole that was home to the spiders and the rats, something moved. It had no right to be down there but it belonged nowhere else. Half drowned half alive it pushed the water ahead of it into the culverts and drains as it passed.
Right under the city and out into the suburbs and fields these tunnels fed into the river and the network of canals that had fed the industrial revolution. A thousand eyes, some blinded, that had never seen the sun strained in the soiled darkness. It struggled on and it listened with a thousand ears not its own and it cried. ~ Karl P.T. Walsh

I have felt something in the garden I discovered. I have felt the presence of something other. And now, standing in the dark, with a salt wind blowing up from the invisible sea, from the remembered beloved river ... ~ Helen Humphreys

The living do not see eternity, just as they don't see Everlost, but they sense both in ways that they don't even know. They don't feel the Everlost barrier set across the Mississippi River, and yet no one had ever dared to draw city boundaries that straddle both sides of its waters. The living do not see Afterlights, and yet everyone has had times when they've felt a presence near them - sometimes comforting, sometimes not - but always strong enough to make one turn around and look over one's shoulder. ~ Neal Shusterman

He felt his face grow smooth with thinking of her. ~ Kate Grenville The Secret River

On the morning of what should have been Amelia Ashley's birthday, the river valley that had once housed High Bridge changed for Joshua Mayhew. For the first time in many years, it seemed beautiful to him. For the first time in many years, it was beautiful. ~ Tara Hudson

If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line - starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King's Highway past the appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will. ~ Wendell Berry

The thing that bothers me the most is the recklessness and greed of the local ranchers, who run too many cattle back here, choking with waste the creek that runs through my property. There's certain times of day that the cowboys like to send them turds down the river. Them f**kers piss me off. if you gotta mess up the ecology of the world in order to raise a bunch of cows, well eat somethin else. I'm not a fan of the cowboys. ~ Merle Haggard

He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question ~ Octavio Paz

Maybe he was what Lucian would have turned out to be if the old sheriff hadn't have lived in such interesting times. A couple of years in a Japanese prison camp might be just what Turk needed. But I didn't have a bridge over the river Kwai for him to build so we had to settle for Powder Junction. ~ Craig Johnson

I sat wondering: Why is there always this deep shade of melancholy over the fields arid river banks, the sky and the sunshine of our country? And I came to the conclusion that it is because with us Nature is obviously the more important thing. The sky is free, the fields limitless; and the sun merges them into one blazing whole. In the midst of this, man seems so trivial. He comes and goes, like the ferry-boat, from this shore to the other; the babbling hum of his talk, the fitful echo of his song, is heard; the slight movement of his pursuit of his own petty desires is seen in the world's market-places: but how feeble, how temporary, how tragically meaningless it all seems amidst the immense aloofness of the Universe!



The contrast between the beautiful, broad, unalloyed peace of Nature - calm, passive, silent, unfathomable, - and our own everyday worries - paltry, sorrow-laden, strife-tormented, puts me beside myself as I keep staring at the hazy, distant, blue line of trees which fringe the fields across the river.



Where Nature is ever hidden, and cowers under mist and cloud, snow and darkness, there man feels himself master; he regards his desires, his works, as permanent; he wants to perpetuate them, he looks towards posterity, he raises monuments, he writes biographies; he even goes the length of erecting tombstones over the dead. So busy is he that he has not time to consider how many monuments crumble, how often names a ~ Rabindranath Tagore

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

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

THE GHOST OF THE AUTHOR'S MOTHER HAS A CONVERSATION WITH HIS FIANCÉE ABOUT HIGHWAYS

...and down south, honey. When the side of the road began to swell with dead and dying things, that's when us black children knew it was summer. Daddy didn't keep clocks in the house. Ain't no use when the sky round those parts always had some flames runnin' to horizon, lookin' like the sun was always out. back when I was a little girl, I swear, them white folk down south would do anything to stop another dark thing from touching the land, even the nighttime. We ain't have streetlights, or some grandmotherly voice riding through the fields on horseback tellin' us when to come inside. What we had was the stomach of a deer, split open on route 59. What we had was flies resting on the exposed insides of animals with their tongues touching the pavement. What we had was the smell of gunpowder and the promise of more to come, and, child, that'll get you home before the old folks would break out the moonshine and celebrate another day they didn't have to pull the body of someone they loved from the river. I say 'river' because I want you to always be able to look at the trees without crying. When we moved east, I learned how a night sky can cup a black girl in its hands and ask for forgiveness. My daddy sold the pistol he kept in the sock drawer and took me to the park. Those days, I used to ask him what he feared, and he always said "the bottom of a good glass." And then he stopped answer ~ Hanif Abdurraqib

They've made it so poor," she said. "It wasn't always like this. The waters once flowed wild, and they weren't hemmed in by cement, and they roared with the fierceness of America. Before they came. But when they came, they came with armor and rage. They came with their Jesus and their crosses and we have never been wild again - neither us nor the river. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

Camped somewhere deep in an impenetrable crag of the immense Powder River Country during the late autumn of 1856, more than likely in the shadow of the sacred Black Hills, one imagines the thirty-five-year-old Red Cloud stepping from his tepee to listen to the bugle of a bull elk in its seasonal rut. Around him women haul water from a crystalline stream as cottonwood smoke rises from scores of cook fires and coils toward a sky the color of brushed aluminum. The wind sighs, and a smile creases his face as he observes a pack of mounted teenagers collect wagers in preparation for the Moccasin Game, or perhaps a rough round of Shinny. His gaze follows the grace and dexterity of one boy in particular, a slender sixteen-year-old with lupine eyes. The boy is Crazy Horse, and the war leader of the Bad Faces makes a mental not to keep tabs on this one. ~ Bob Drury

Wind, light and time ever revolve; Let us then enjoy life as best we can." from "The Winding River ~ Du Fu

Oh, why fill the heart with yesterday and tomorrow when this moment is all the heart needs? Let the heart be present, let the mind be here, let the eyes see, let the ears hear, let the soul witness, let the words flow ... down this gentle river, you know the way.

Why must the eyes know exactly where and why must the mind know exactly how and why must the heart know exactly what and why must the soul know exactly when? It doesn't matter.

In the same way that the headlights do not need to show from here all the way to your home before you get there, the headlights just need to show the next few feet. And if the car continues to move, with the headlights showing just the next few feet, you can make it home from anywhere.

So in the same way, let the heart, let the eyes, let the mind, let the ears, let the soul, let the touch of this moment feel what is here ... without focusing on what will be there. Allow the essence of this, and this, and this, and this to enrich your life. Be with this now. Witness the tree as you pass by and watch the birds fly to it, drawn to it in the same way that bugs are drawn to lights. Let your heart be drawn to this moment, let your soul be guided by what is here, now. ~ Israel S. Dudley

If mind belongs to humans alone, then stones, trees, and streams become mere objects of human tinkering. We can plunder the earth's resources with impunity, treating creeks and mountaintops in Kentucky or rivers in India or forests in northwest America as if they existed only for economic development. Systems of land and river become inert chunks of lifeless mud or mechanical runs of H2O rather than the living, breathing bodies upon which we and all other creatures depend for our very lives.

Not to mention what 'nature as machine' has done to our emotional and spiritual well-being. When we regard nature as churning its way forward mindlessly through time, we turn our backs on mystery, shunning the complexity as well as the delights of relationship. We isolate ourselves from the rest of the creatures with whom we share this world. We imagine ourselves the apex of creation -- a lonely spot indeed. Human minds become the measure of creation and human thoughts become the only ones that count. The result is a concept of mind shorn of its wild connections, in which feelings become irrelevant, daydreams are mere distractions, and nighttime dreams -- if we attend to them at all -- are but the cast-offs of yesterday's overactive brain. Mind is cut off from matter, untouched by exingencies of mud or leaf, shaped by whispers or gales of wind, as if we were not, like rocks, made of soil.

And then we wonder at our sadness and depression, not realizing that our own vi ~ Priscilla Stuckey

River, I love you."
He hugs me tighter than I ever remember being hugged, and after a few moments of just embracing each other, he whispers into my ear, "I love you, too. So much. Please let me take care of this for you." Pulling away, he crosses his finger over his heart. "I promise to pick up all the rest of the pearls off the floor. ~ Kim Karr

You are a Chosen Man. You are Parmenion, the Death of Nations. A hundred thousand souls will you
send to the dark river, screaming and wailing, lamenting their fate. It is right and just that you
should know your choices. ~ David Gemmell

Im a girl who has been tamping down her emotions and keeping them tightly guarded her whole life. And that works really well for me ... And now I felt like my shell had a dangerous crack in it. Without much more effort on his part, it would split wide open and my enormous river of emotions would gush out - the bad and the good. It was pretty much the scariest thing I'd ever thought of. - Maximum Ride. ~ James Patterson

You cannot step twice into the same river, said Herakleitos. People in the past were not just like us; to pretend so is an evasion and a betrayal, turning our back on them so as to be easy among familiar things. ~ Mary Renault