This River Is Wild Quotes

or should I just get along with myself/ I never did get along with everybody else ~ Brandon Flowers

When I came to myself again, I said - 'When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead, and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want to retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush; I'm only fit for a roustabout. I haven't got brains enough to be a pilot; and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around, unless I went on crutches.' 'Now drop that! When I say I'll learn {footnote ['Teach' is not in the river vocabulary.]} a man the river, I mean it. And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him. ~ Mark Twain

I have now traveled so far south that I find myself come to a place where our common expression "white as snow" has no useful meaning. Here, one who wishes his words to make plain sense had better say "white as cotton." I will not say that I find the landscape lovely. We go on through Nature to God, and my Northern eye misses the grandeur that eases that ascent. I yearn for mountains, or at least for the gentle ridges of Massachusetts; the sweet folds and furrows that offer the refreshment of a new vista as each gap or summit is obtained. Here all is obvious, a song upon a single note. One wakes and falls asleep to a green sameness, the sun like a pale egg yolk, peering down from a white sky.
And the river! Water as unlike our clear fast-flowing freshets as a fat broody hen to a hummingbird. Brown as treacle, wider than a harbor, this is water sans sparkle or shimmer. In places, it roils as if heated below by a hidden furnace. In others, it sucks the light down and gives back naught but an inscrutable sheen that conceals both depth and shallows. It is a mountebank, this river. It feigns a gentle lassitude, yet coiled beneath are currents that have crushed the trunks of mighty trees, and swept men to swift drownings… ~ Geraldine Brooks

Tatiana fretted over him before he left as if he were a five-year-old on his first day of school.
Shura, don't forget to wear your helmet wherever you go, even if it's just down the trail to the river.
Don't forget to bring extra magazines. Look at this combat vest. You can fit more than five hundred rounds. It's unbelievable. Load yourself up with ammo. Bring a few extra cartridges. You don't want to run out.
Don't forget to clean your M-16 every day. You don't want your rifle to jam."
Tatia, this is the third generation of the M-16. It doesn't jam anymore. The gunpowder doesn't burn as much. The rifle is self-cleaning."
When you attach the rocket bandolier, don't tighten it too close to your belt, the friction from bending will chafe you, and then irritation follows, and then infection...
...Bring at least two warning flares for the helicopters. Maybe a smoke bomb, too?"
Gee, I hadn't thought of that."
Bring your Colt - that's your lucky weapon - bring it, as well as the standard -issue Ruger. Oh, and I have personally organized your medical supplies: lots of bandages, four complete emergency kits, two QuickClots - no I decided three. They're light. I got Helena at PMH to write a prescription for morphine, for penicillin, for -"
Alexander put his hand over her mouth. "Tania," he said, "do you want to just go yourself?"
When he took the hand away, she said, "Yes."
He kissed her.
She said, "Spam. Three cans. And kee ~ Paullina Simons

In 1498, Vasco da Gama the Portuguese navigator explored this eastern coast of Africa flanking the Indian Ocean. This led him to open a trade route to Asia and occupy Mozambique to the Portuguese colony. In 1840, it came under the control of the Sultan of Zanzibar and became a British protectorate in 1895, with Mombasa as its capital.

Nairobi, lying 300 miles to the northwest of Mombasa is the largest city in Kenya. It became the capital in 1907 and is the fastest growing urban area in the Republic having become independent of the United Kingdom on December 12, 1963 and declared a republic the following year on December 12, 1964.


Kenya is divided by the 38th meridian of longitude into two very different halves. The eastern half of Kenya slopes towards the coral-backed seashore of the Indian Ocean while the western side rises through a series of hills to the African Shear Zone or Central Rift. West of the Rift, the lowest part of a westward-sloping plateau contains Lake Victoria. This, the largest lake in Africa, receives most of its water from rain, the Kagera River and countless small streams. Its only outlet is the White Nile River which is part of the longest river on Earth. Combined, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, stretches 4,160 miles before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea. ~ Captain Hank, "Seawater Three"

To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found to be swarming with numberless allusions to the popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happeend to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romances of the hippopotami are affected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy. ~ G.K. Chesterton

What I mean, King, is this. We are the true Renouncers, because change is our very secret. We lose, in order to find. We have no faith in the never-changing.

What do you mean?

Haven't you noticed the detachment of the rushing river, as it runs splashing from its mountain cave? It gives itself away so swiftly, and only thus it finds itself. What is never changing, for the river, is the desert sand, where it loses its course. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Ars Poetica

To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.

To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind's days and of his years,
To transform the outrage of the years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,

To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the afternoons a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Though it is 2500 feet high, the glacier flowed over its ground as a river flows over a boulder; and since it emerged from the icy sea as from a sepulcher it has been sorely beaten with storms; but from all those deadly, crushing, bitter experiences comes this delicate life and beauty, to teach us that what we in our faithless ignorance and fear call destruction is creation. ~ John Muir

Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine. ~ Edmund De Waal

The problem with water, though, is that the shortfalls don't show up until the very end. You can go on pumping unsustainably until the day you run out. Then all you have is the recharge flow, which comes from precipitation. This is not decades away, this is years away. We're already seeing huge shortages in China, where the Yellow River runs dry for part of each year. The Yellow River is the cradle of Chinese civilization. It first failed to reach the sea in 1972, and since 1985 it's run dry for part of each year. For 1997 it was dry for 226 days. ~ Lester R. Brown

Oh my gosh, he smells good, like some exotic but comforting spice, nutmeg or cardamom. Slowly Damian lowers his head to mine and I think my chest might explode, my heart is tap-dancing so quickly.
He's going to kiss me.
I've imagined this and now it's really happening, I am like a block of wood. I can't move. I can't breathe. I close my eyes as the lightest feather of a breath , then lips, brushing over my lips. His breath is sweet and the taste of coffee barely lingers in his mouth. I feel as though my whole body has turned to liquid, into a river of millions of droplets, rushing apart and then back together.
"You have the softest lips," he whispers as he pulls back to look at me.
"So do you," I murmur. Oh, was that a stupid thing to say? I turn my face into his jacket and breathe in his scent. ~ Lisa Ann Sandell

Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The flow of the river is ceaseless; and its water is never the same.
The foam that floats in the pools
Now gathering, now vanishing
Never lasts long. So it is with man
and all his dwelling places on this earth. ~ Kamo No Chomei

When the ships had lifted, they returned across the river to the silence of death. Then his grandfather told him, "Many fine things your father had planned for you: learning and useful work and a life of satisfaction and peace. Do you recall this?"
"Yes, Grandfather."
"The learning you shall have. You will learn patience and resource, the ability of your hands and your mind. You will have useful work: the destruction of evil men. What work could be more useful? This is Beyond; you will find that your work is never done - so therefore you may never know life of peace. However, I guarantee you ample satisfaction, for I will teach you to crave the blood of these men more than the flesh of woman."
The old man had been as good as his word. ~ Jack Vance

Far away Tongariro! Green - white thundering Athabasca river of New Zealand! I vowed I would come again down across the Pacific to fish in the swift cold waters of this most beautiful and famous of trout streams. It is something to have striven. It is much to have kept your word. ~ Zane Grey

Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a
local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous
thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over
the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a
revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body
heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the
unseen something that haunts the day - men in fedoras and sailors on
shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game. ~ Don DeLillo

A central principle underlying Mrs Quinty's Rules for Writing is that you have to have a Beginning Middle and End. If you don't have these your Reader is lost. But what if Lost is exactly where the writer is? I asked her. Ruth, the writer can't be lost, she said, and then knew she'd said it too quickly and bit her lip knowing I was going to say something about Dad. She pressed her knees together and diverted into a fit of dry coughing. This, Dear Reader, is a river narrative. My chosen style is The Meander. I know that in The Brothers Karamazov (Book 1,777, Penguin Classics, London) Ippolit Kirillovich chose the historical form of narration because Dostoevsky says it checked his own exuberant rhetoric. Beginnings middles and ends force you into that place where you have to Stick to the Story as Maeve Mulvey said the night the Junior Certs were supposed to be going to the cinema in Ennis but were buying cans in Dunnes and drinking ~ Niall Williams

Tell me something true about you."
"Okay …" She mentally rifled through birthplace (Portland, Oregon), college major (sociology), astrological sign (Virgo), favorite movie (The Apple Dumpling Gang - don't judge), until she hit a fact that wasn't completely mundane. "One of my favorite things in the world are those charity events where everyone buys a rubber ducky with a number and the first person's duck to get down the river wins."
"Why?"
"I like seeing the river teeming with all those outrageously yellow and orange ducks. It's so friendly. And I love the hope of it. Even though it doesn't matter if you win, because all that wonderful, candy-colored money is going to something really important like a free clinic downtown or cleft palate operations for children in India, you still have that playful hope that you will win. You run alongside the stream, not knowing which is your duck but imagining the lead one is yours."
"And this is the essence of your soul - the ducky race?"
"Well, you didn't ask for the essence of my soul. You asked for something true about me, and so I went for something slightly embarrassing and secret but true nonetheless. Next time you want the essence of my soul, I'll oblige you with sunsets and baby's laughter and greeting cards with watercolor flowers."
He squinted at her thoughtfully. "No, so far as I'm concerned, the yellow duckies are the essence of your soul. ~ Shannon Hale

The ceremonies that persist - birthdays, weddings, funerals - focus only on ourselves, marking rites of personal transition. […]
We know how to carry out this rite for each other and we do it well. But imagine standing by the river, flooded with those same feelings as the Salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Rise in their honor, thank them for all the ways they have enriched our lives, sing to honor their hard work and accomplishments against all odds, tell them they are our hope for the future, encourage them to go off into the world to grow, and pray that they will come home. Then the feasting begins. Can we extend our bonds of celebration and support from our own species to the others who need us?
Many indigenous traditions still recognize the place of ceremony and often focus their celebrations on other species and events in the cycle of the seasons. In a colonist society the ceremonies that endure are not about land; they're about family and culture, values that are transportable from the old country. Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed there, but it seems they did not survive emigration in any substantial way. I think there is wisdom in regenerating them here, as a means to form bonds with this land. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before him. A fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue.

What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant she is remembering the man who picked her up on the roadside in Africa and spent the night with her?

Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness. ~ J.M. Coetzee

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

And now, dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, you surely have rivers of your own to attend to? ~ Diane Setterfield

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

It should not be possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips ... p 72 ~ Alexandra Fuller

If you've ever wondered what we're missing by sitting at computers in cubicles all day, follow Jessica DuLong when she loses her desk job and embarks on this unlikely but fantastic voyage. Deeply original, riveting to read, and soul-bearingly honest, "My River Chronicles" is a surprisingly infectious romance about a young woman falling in love with a muscle-y old boat. As DuLong learns to navigate her way through a man's world of tools and engines, and across the swirling currents of a temperamental river, her book also becomes a love letter to a nation. In tune with the challenges of our times, DuLong reminds us of the skills and dedication that built America, and inspires us to renew ourselves once again. ~ Trevor Corson

There was a time with his wife on this river or a river just like it, it can't be this river, but in his memory it is this one. A time on a wash just like this where he lay shirtless with her shivering in the August night, jeans pasted dark and wet to his knocking legs, his torso white to glowing in the moonlight. Her hair tendriled and framed about her face like an outlandish black tattoo. Her wet dress like a sleeve of molting skin, which of a sort it had been that whole night in their dancing. Her heart in its red and white cage knocking just inches from his own, like two young prisoners tapping out simpleton Morse I am here I am here I am here. Here I am for your pleasure for you forever. On a river like this where he impregnated her. A river promise too, he said I love you I love you. Seventeen years old. A pleasure so total that even then he knew he had mortgaged years to her and he did not care. ~ Smith Henderson

Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats. ~ J.B. Priestley

There is a river running through this city and every time my best friend laughs I want to grab him by the shoulders and shout Grow old with me and never kiss me on the mouth! I want to spend the next eighty years together, eating Doritos and riding bikes. ~ Clementine Von Radics

You did this on purpose," I said to Justin as the man continued to strap me in.
"Maybe," he said.
"What is it you're playing at? Your girlfriend is down there at the river."
"Let's jump together."
"Come on Lenah!" Tony called from below.
"If you jump with me, Tracy will know."
Justin stood up. "Know what?"
"I mean , she'll think you did it on purpose."
"I did do it on purpose," he said.
"You two," the bungee man said. "Keep you eyes open if you're jumping together. Don't bash heads or anything. I hate cleaning up blood."
"If you jump with me-" I started to say.
"I don't care anymore. ~ Rebecca Maizel

When a capitalist looks at the river, all they can think about is, "How can I pollute this river and destroy it and make money from it?" ~ Ian Svenonius

Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn't easily moved. This human inability to foresee
or to watch out for
long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer. (109) ~ Ronald Wright

I have seen," he said, "the most beautiful scenes of my own country; I have visited the lakes of Lucerne and Uri, where the snowy mountains descend almost perpendicularly to the water, casting black and impenetrable shades, which would cause a gloomy and mournful appearance, were it not for the most verdant islands that relieve the eye by their gay appearance; I have seen this lake agitated by a tempest, when the wind tore up whirlwinds of water, and gave you an idea of what the waterspout must be on the great ocean; and the waves dash with fury the base of the mountain, where the priest and his mistress were overwhelmed by an avalanche, and where their dying voices are still said to be heard amid the pauses of the nightly wind; I have seen the mountains of La Valais, and the Pays de Vaud: but this country, Victor, pleases me more than all those wonders. The mountains of Switzerland are more majestic and strange; but there is a charm in the banks of this divine river, that I never before saw equalled. Look at that castle which overhangs yon precipice; and that also on the island, almost concealed amongst the foliage of those lovely trees; and now that group of labourers coming from among their vines; and that village half hid in the recess of the mountain. Oh, surely, the spirit that inhabits and guards this place has a soul more in harmony with man than those who pile the glacier, or retire to the inaccessible peaks of the mountains of our own country. "Clerval! beloved frie ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The river where you set your foot just now is gone-those waters give way to this, now this. ~ Heraclitus

Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being - not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses - but a human being, we call it poetry. ~ Ted Hughes

Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and noted orator, tried to unite the Indians against the white invasion: The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the Redmen to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. That no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers - those who want all and will not do with less. Angered when fellow Indians were induced to cede a great tract of land to the United States government, Tecumseh organized in 1811 an Indian gathering of five thousand, on the bank of the Tallapoosa River in Alabama, and told them: Let the white race perish. They seize your land; they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven. ~ Howard Zinn

After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. "Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe"
and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Power may justly be compared to a great river which, while kept within its due bounds is both beautiful and useful; but when it overflows its banks, it is then too impetuous to be stemmed, it bears down on all before it and brings destruction and desolation wherever it comes. If this then is the nature of power, let us at least do our duty and like wise men use our utmost care to support liberty, the only bulwark against lawless power...and I make no doubt but your upright conduct, this day will not only entitle you to the love and esteem of your fellow-citizens, but every man, who prefers freedom to a life of slavery, will bless and honor you, as men who have baffled the attempt of tyranny; and, by an impartial verdict, have laid a notable foundation for securing to ourselves, our posterity, and our neighbors, that to which nature and the laws of our country have given us a right--the liberty--both of exposing and opposing arbitrary power in these parts of the world at least, by speaking and writing the truth." - - Andrew Hamilton ~ Andrew Hamilton

If you have ever fucked up in your life, or if the great river of sadness that runs through us all has touched you, then this book is for you. So thank you for the collective energy it takes to write in the face of culture. I can feel you. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

It will do us little good to wire the world if we short circut our souls. There is no delete button for racism, poverty, or sectarian violence. No key stroke can ever clean the air, save a river, preserve a forest. This transformational new technology must be an extension of our hearts as well as of our mind. ~ Tom Brokaw

I am struck by what a tawdry magician's trick Time is after all. I am sixty-six years old. Viewed from your coign of vantage - facing toward the future - sixty-six years is a great deal of time. It is all of the experience of your life more than three times over. But, viewed from my coign of vantage - facing toward the past - this sixty-six years was the fluttering down of a cherry petal. I feel that my life was a picture hastily sketched but never filled in . . . for lack of time. Only yesterday - but more than fifty years ago - I walked along this river with my father. I can remember how big and strong his hand felt to my small fingers. Fifty years. But all the insignificant, busy things - the terribly important, now forgotten things that cluttered the intervening time collapse and fall away from my memory. And I remember another yesterday when my daughter was a little girl. We walked along here. At this very moment, the nerves in my hand remember the feeling of her chubby fingers clinging to one of mine. ~ Trevanian