Uola River Quotes

The murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banks;many a poet's stream, floating the helms and shields of heroes on its bosom. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Prayers are answered in ways we don't choose. The river of grace bubbles up in unexpected places. ~ Lisa Wingate

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

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught we will realise we cannot eat money. ~ Anonymous

Fresh pitsand, however, in spite of all its excellence in concrete structures, is not equally useful in stucco, the richness of which, when the lime and straw are mixed with such sand, will cause it to crack as it dries on account of the great strength of the mixture. But river sand, though useless in "signinum" on account of its thinness, becomes perfectly solid in stucco when thoroughly worked by means of polishing instruments. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

You ever have the feeling you were in the wrong place? That if you could just get over the next hill, cross the next river, look down into the next valley, it'd all ... fit. Be right."
"All my life, more of less"
"All your life spent getting ready for the next thing. I climbed a lot of hills now. I crossed a lot of rivers. Crossed the sea even, left everything I knew and came to Styria. But there I was, waiting for me at the docks when I got off the boat, same man, same life. Next valley ain't no different from this one. No better anyway. Reckon I've learned ... just to stick in the place I'm at. Just to be the man I am. ~ Joe Abercrombie

One branch after another of chemistry, physics, and cosmology has merged in the majestic river as it approaches the estuary-to be swallowed up by the ocean, lose its identity, and evaporate into the clouds; the final act of the great vanishing process, and the beginning, one hopes, of a new cycle. It has been said that we know more and more about less and less. It seems that the more universal the 'laws' which we discover, the more elusive they become, and that the ultimate consummation of all rivers of knowledge is in the cloud of unknowing. ~ Arthur Koestler

I tell you, truth is, at this moment, here
burning outward through our skins.
Eternity streams through my body:
touch it with your hand and see.
Till the walls of the tunnel cave in
and the black river walks on our faces. ~ Adrienne Rich

When the news of the Scottish find reached Kaniere, forty or fifty miners who had been toiling there for weeks for poor returns decided to cut their losses, buy new licences and make for Kokatahi. In the time that it took them to get to the warden's office at Hokitika and back, the Scottish strike had been talked up into a 'homeward bounder': a discovery so huge that it would change men's lives at a stroke and enable them to return home as rich men. They came up the river in pairs and groups. They ~ Rose Tremain

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.

The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she'd tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, "Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon."

The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn't stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.

The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.

The pharmacist said, "Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax."

The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.

The trauma said, "Don't write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones."

But my bones said, "Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone."

My bones said, "Write the poems. ~ Andrea Gibson

How beautiful the sky looked, how blue and calm and deep! How brilliant and majestic was the setting sun! How tenderly shone the distant waters of the Danube! And fairer still were the purpling mountains stretching far away beyond the river, the convent, the mysterious gorges, the pine forests veiled in mist to their summits.
...There all was peace and happiness. 'I should wish for nothing, wish for nothing, for nothing in the world, if only I were there', thought Rostov. 'In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness'... ~ Leo Tolstoy

When stuck in the river, it is best to dive and swim to the bank yourself before someone drops a large stone on your chest in an attempt to hoosh you there. ~ A.A. Milne

To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass. ~ Jim Harrison

WHEN A MAN WITH A LITTLE POINTED BEARD, robed in a white coat, came out into the waiting room of the renowned psychiatric clinic recently completed on a river bank outside Moscow, it was half-past one in the morning. Three hospital orderlies had their eyes glued to Ivan Nikolayevich, who was sitting on a couch. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

We walked across the bridge and were on our own side of the river.
"Are you hungry again?" I said. "Us. Talking and walking."
"Of course, Tatie. Aren't you?"
"Let's go to a wonderful place and have a truly grand dinner."
"Where?"
"Michaud's?"
"That's perfect and it's so close. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

And so he had begun his adulthood, the last three years spent bobbing from bank to bank in a muck-bottomed pond, the trees above and around him blotting out the light, making it too dark for him to see whether the lake he was in opened up into a river or whether it was contained, its own small universe in which he might spend years, decades - his life - searching bumblingly for a way out that didn't exist, had never existed. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

you do not have to be a fire
for
every mountain blocking you.
you could be a water
and
soft river your way to freedom
too.

- options ~ Nayyirah Waheed

Statement Preliminary to the Invention of Solace

Whether they bend as compliantly as black leaves
Curved and hanging in the heavy dew in the grey dawn,
Or whether they wait as motionless as ice-coated
Insects and spears of roots on a northern cliff;

Whether they tighten once like the last white edge
Of primrose taken suddenly skyward
By a gust of frost, or swallow as hard as stones
Careened and scattered by a current of river;

Whether they mourn by the bright light of grief
Running like a spine of grass straight through the sound
Of their songs, or whether they fall quietly
Through indefinite darkness like a seed of sorrel
Bound alive beneath snow;

whether they mourn in multitudes, blessed
like a congregation of winter forest moaning for the white
drifting children of storms they can never remember,
or whether they grieve separately, divided
even from themselves, parted like golden plovers blown
and calling over a buffeted sea;

something must come to them, something as clear and fair
and continuous as the eye of the bluegill open in calm water,
something as silent as the essential spaces of breath
heard inside the voice naming all of their wishes,

something touching them in the same way the sun deep
in the pit of the pear touches the spring sky by the light
of its own leaf. A comfort understood like that Pattiann Rogers