River Quotes (page 22)
So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.
Derrick Jensen
But for the man who watches the leaves trembling in the wind’s breath, the rivers meandering through the meadows, life twisting and turning and swirling through things, men living, doing good and evil, the sea rolling its waves and the sky with its expanse of lights, and who asks himself why these leaves are there, why the water flows, why life itself is such a terrible torrent plunging towards the boundless ocean of death in which it will lose itself, why men walk about, labor like ants, why...
Gustave Flaubert
... and we will shade. Ourselves whole summers by a river glade; And I will tell thee stories of the sky, And breathe thee whispers of its minstrelsy, My happy love will overwing all bounds! O let me melt into thee! let the sounds. Of our close voices marry at their birth; Let us entwine hoveringly!
John Keats
Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of...
Bill Bryson
I am a child of the poisonous wind that copulated with the East River on an oil-slick, garbage infested midnight. I turn about on my own parentage. I inoculate against those very biles that brought me to light. I am a serum born of venoms. I am the antibody of all Time. I am the Cure. You do of the City, do you not? Manhattan is your punisher, let me be you shield.
Ray Bradbury
Before the Battle: Music of whispering trees. Hushed by the broad-winged breeze. Where shaken water gleams; And evening radiance falling. With reedy bird-notes calling. O bear me safe through dark, you low-voiced streams. I have no need to pray. That fear may pass away; I scorn the growl and rumble of the fight. That summons me from cool. Silence of marsh and pool, And yellow lilies islanded in light. O river of stars and shadows, lead me through the night.
Siegfried Sassoon