Sing me the legends of the river.
Tell me a story of the sky.

Chorus: Because I want to grow.
Because I want to know.
Because I want to understand.

In the river is the model of creation.
Our lives like the river to the sea.

Paint me a picture of the landscape.
Dance me the dance of the waves.
Sing me of the legends of the river.
Tell me the story of the sky.
Author Unknown

If the river leaves a lot of trash, it will come back some time soon to get it.
Author Unknown

Throughout the history of literature, the guy who poisons the well
has been the worst of all villains...
Author Unknown

What runs but never gets tired?
Water
Author Unknown

Oh, drink again this river that is the taker away of pain,
the giver back of beauty.
In these cool waves, what can be lost?
Only the sorry cost of the thing, not the thing itself.
The level flood laves the hot brow;
The stiff-shouldered at our temples now.
Gone is the fever, but not into the river.
Melted, the frozen pride.
But the tranquil tide runs never the warmer for this,
Never the colder.
Immerse the dream.
Drench the kiss.
Dip the song into the stream.
Author Unknown

Throughout the history of literature, the guy who poisons the well has been the worst of all villains..."
Author Unknown

Only dead fish swim with the stream.
Author Unknown

Author Unknown

Sit by a river.
Find peace and meaning
In the rhythm
Of the lifeblood of the Earth
Author Unknown

What runs but never gets tired?
Water
Author Unknown

And a few others . . .
Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am -- a reluctant enthusiast . . . a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic.
Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is
even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess
around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the
rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the
lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly
attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory
over those desk-bound men with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators.
I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire 

Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come,
they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy
ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy.
Edward Abbey, The Hidden Canyon -- A River Journey

Benedicto:
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing.
May your rivers flow without end,
meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets'
towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
Through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone,
and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,
where deer walk across the white sand beaches,
where storms come and go
as lightning clangs upon the high crags,
where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams
waits for you--
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
Edward Abbey, Earth Prayers from Around the World

Water, water, water…There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock. Of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.
Edward Abbey, Wilderness Reader

[Charles] Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing
them; it contains nothing but itself.
Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907

The great and amorous sky curved over the earth, and lay upon her as a pure lover.
The rain, the humid flux descending from heaven for both man and animal, for both
thick and strong, germinated the wheat, swelled the furrows with fecund mud and
brought forth the buds in the orchards. And it is I who empowered these moist espousals,
I the great Aphrodite ....
Aeschylus, The Danaides, c 500 B.C.

No one tests the depth of the river with both feet.
African Proverb

Rain does not fall on one roof alone.
African Proverb from Cameroon

A little rain each day will fill the rivers to overflowing.
African Proverb, Liberia

Filthy water cannot be washed.
African Proverb, West African

Water.
Lakes and rivers.
Oceans and streams.
Springs, pools and gullies.
Arroyos, creeks, watersheds.
Pacific. Atlantic. Mediterranean.
Indian. Caribbean. China Sea.
(Lying. Dreaming on shallow shores.)
Arctic, Antarctic. Baltic
Mississippi. Amazon. Columbia. Nile.
Thames. Sacramento. Snake. (Undulant woman river.)
Seine. Rio Grande. Willamette. McKenzie. Ohio.
Hudson. Po. Rhine. Rhone.
Rain. After a lifetime of drought.
That finally cleanses the air.
The soot from our eyes.
The dingy windows of our western home.
The rooftops and branches. The wings of birds.
The new light on a slant. Pouring. Making everything new.
Paula Gunn Allen, Earth Prayers from Around the World, 1991

You don’t drown by falling into water. You drown by staying there.
Robert Allen

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall.
If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do.
The same happens in the absense of prayers.
Steve Allen

To have some parts flowing free again...with deer grazing on its banks...
ducks and geese raising their young in the backwaters...
eddies and twists and turns for canoeists...
and fishing opportunities such as Lewis and Clark enjoyed...
would be the finest possible tribute to the men of  the Expedition, and a priceless gift for our children.
Historian Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage

The frog does not
Drink up
The pond in which
He lives.
American Indian Proverb, quoted in David Zwick, Water Wasteland, 1971

"We call upon the waters that rim the earth, horizon to horizon,
that flow in our rivers and streams, that fall upon our gardens
and fields, and we ask that they:
Teach us, and show us the way."
American Indian, Chinook Blessing Litany, Earth Prayers from Around the World, 1991

Anishinaabekwe, the Daughter,
You are the keepers of the water.
I am Nibi…water…the sacred source,
The blood of Aki, Mother Earth,
The force filling dry seeds to great bursting.
I am the wombs cradle.
I purify.

Nibi, the life giver…
Forever the Circle’s charge
I have coursed through our Mother’s Veins.
Now hear my sorrow and my pain
In the river’s rush, the rain…

I am your grandchildren’s drink.
Listen, Daughters, always.
You are the keepers of the water.
Hear my cry,
For the springs flow darkly now
Through the heart of Aki
American Indian, Ojibwa, Minnesota

WHO OWNS THE MISSISSIPPI?
The river belongs to the nation,
The levee, they say, to the state;
The government runs navigation,
The commonwealth, though, pays the freight.
Now, here is the problem that’s heavy-
Please, which is the right or the wrong?
When the water runs over the levee,
To whom does the river belong?
It’s the government’s river in summer
When the stage of the water is low,
But in spring when it gets suddenly dippy
The state must dig down in its till
And push back the old Mississippi
Away from the farm and the mill.
I know very little of the lawing,
I’ve made little study of courts,
I’ve done little geeing and hawing
Through verdicts, opinions, reports;
Why need there be anything more said
When the river starts levees to climb?
If the government owns the aforesaid
It must own it all of the time
If the bull you are leading should bellow
And jump over somebody’s fence,
There isn’t much doubt you’re the fellow
Expected to bear the expense;
If it follows a Sunday school teacher
And chases the maid up a tree,
You’re the owner the same of the creature
Undoubtedly all will agree.
If some time should somebody’s chickens
Get into your garden and dig
And pull up the plants like the dickens,
Or somebody’s bull pup or pig,
The owner thereof cannot blame it
On you or some party remote;
The owner thereof can’t disclaim it
The chick or the pup or the shoat.
If it’s your Mississippi in dry time,
It’s yours, Uncle Sam, when it’s wet;
If it’s your Mississippi in fly time,
In flood time it’s your river yet.
There’s no other way you can make it,
And so, when I give the alarm,
Come and get your darned river and take it
Away from my timber and farm
American Lumberman, Oct 12, 1912

Boundaries don't protect rivers, people do.
Aristotle

The majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight.
Matthew Arnold: Sohrab and Rustum, 1853

Where the river drops the willows, that was my flute you heard, calling, ‘Come to the river’.
Brad Arrowsmith, landowner along the Niobrara National Scenic River, Nebraska

Into the Dusk-Charged Air
Far from the Rappahannock, the silent Danube moves along toward the sea.
The brown and green Nile rolls slowly like the Niagara’s welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire near where it joined the Cher
The St. Lawrence prods among black stones and mud.
But the Arno is all stones.
Wind ruffles the Hudson’s surface.
The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray Tiber is contained within steep banks.
The Isar flows too fast to swim in, the Jordan’s water courses over the flat land.
The Allegheny and its boats were dark blue.
The Moskowa is gray boats.
The Amstel flows slowly.
Leaves fall into the Connecticut as it passes underneath.
The Liffey is full of sewage, like the Seine, but unlike the brownish-yellow Dordogne.
Mountains hem in the Colorado and the Oder is very deep, almost as deep as the Congo is wide.
The plain banks of the Neva are gray.
The dark Saone flows silently.
And the Volga is long and wide as it flows across the brownish land.
The Ebro is blue and slow.
The Shannon flows swiftly between its banks.
The Mississippi is one of the world’s longest rivers, like the Amazon.
It has the Missouri for a tributary.
The Harlem flows amid factories and buildings.
The Nelson is in Canada, flowing.
Through hard banks the Dubawnt forces its way.
People walk near the Trent.
The landscape around the Mohawk stretches away; the Rubicon is merely a brook.
In winter the Main surges; the Rhine sings its eternal song.
The Rhone slogs along through whitish banks and the Rio Grande spins tales of the past.
The Loire bursts its frozen shackles but the Moldau’s wet mud ensnares it.
The East catches the light.
Near the Escaut the noises of factories echoes and the sinuous Humboldt gurgles wildly.
The Po too flows, and the many-colored Thames.
Into the Atlantic Ocean pours the Garonne.
Few ships navigate on the Housatonic, but quite a few can be seen on the Elbe.
For centuries the Afton has flowed.

If the Rio Negro could abandon it song, and the Magdalena.
The jungle flowers, the Tagus would still flow serenely, and the Ohio abrade it slate banks.
The tan Euphrates would sidle silently across the world.
The Yukon was choked with ice, but the Susquehanna still pushed bravely along.
The Dee caught the day’s last flares like the Pilcomayo’s carrion rose.
The Peace offered eternal fragrance perhaps, but the Mackenzie churned livid mud like tan chalk-marks.
Near where the Brahmaputra slapped swollen dikes was an opening through which the Limmat could have trickled.
A young man strode the Churchill’s banks, thinking of night.
The Vistula seized the shadows.
The Theiss, stark mad, bubbled in the windy evening.
And the Ob shuffled crazily along.
Fat billows encrusted the Dniester’s pallid flood, and the Fraser’s porous surface.
Fish gasped amid the Spree’s reeds.
A boat descended the bobbing Orinoco. When the Marne flowed by the plants nodded.
And above the glistering Gila a sunset as beautiful as the Athabaska stammered.
The Zambezi chimed.
The Oxus flowed somewhere.
The Parnahyba is flowing, like the wind-washed Cumberland.
The Araguayo flows in the rain.
And, through overlying rocks the Isere cascades gently.
The Guadalquivir sputtered.
Someday time will confound the Indre, making a rill of the Hwang.
And the Potomac rumbles softly.
Crested birds watch the Ucalyali go through dreaming night.
You cannot stop the Yenisei.
And afterwards the White flows strongly to its goal.
If the Tyne’s shores hold you, and the Albany arrest your development,
can you resist the Red’s musk, the Muese’s situation?
A particle of mud in the Neckar does not turn it black.
You cannot like the Saskatchewan, nor refuse the meandering Yangtze, unleash the Genesee.
Does the Scamander still irrigate crimson plains?
And the Durance and the Pechora?
The Sao Francisco skulks amid gray, rubbery nettles.
The Liard’s reflexes are slow and the Arkansas erodes Anthracite hummocks.
The Paranya stinks.
The Ottawa is light emerald green among grays.
Better that the Indus fade in steaming sands!
Let the Brazos freeze solid!
And the Wabash turn to a leaden cinder of ice!
The Maranon is too tepid, we must find a way to freeze it hard.
The Ural is freezing slowly in the blasts.
The Black Yonne congeals nicely.
And the Petit-Morin curls up on the sold earth.
The Inn does not remember better times, and the Merrimack’s galvanized.
The Ganges is liquid snow by now; the Vyatka’s ice-gray.
The once-molten Tennessee’s curdled.
The Yapura is a pack of ice.
Glide the Columbia’s gray loam banks.
The Don’s merely a giant icicle.
The Niger freezes, slowly.
The interminable Lena plods on but the Purus’ mercurial waters are icy, grim with cold.
The Loing is choked with the fragments of ice.
And so is the Kama.
And the beige, thickly flowing Tocantins.
The rivers bask in the cold.
The stern Uruguay chafes its banks, a mass of ice.
The Hong-Chu is solid ice.
The Adour is silent, motionless.
The lovely Tigris is nothing but scratchy ice like the Yellowstone, with its osier-clustered banks.
The Mekong is beginning to thaw out a little and the Donets gurgles beneath the huge block of ice.
The Manzanares gushes free.
The Illinois darts through the sunny air again.
But the Dnieper is still ice-bound.
Somewhere the Salado propels its floes, but the Roosevelt’s frozen.
The Oka is frozen solider than the Somme.
The Minho slumbers in winter, nor does the Snake remember August.
Hilarious, the Canadian is solid ice.
The Madeira slavers across the thawing fields, and the Plata laughs.
The Dvina soaks up the snow.
The Sava’s temperature is above freezing.
The Avon carols noiselessly.
The Drome presses grass banks; the Adige’s frozen surface is like gray pebbles.

Birds circle the Ticino. In winter the Var was dark blue, unfrozen.
The Thwaite, cold, is choked with sandy ice; the Ardeche glistens feebly through the freezing rain.
John Ashberry, Rivers and Mountains

Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment,
we have never really learned how important water is to us.
We understand it, but we do not respect it.
William Ashworth, Nor Any Drop to Drink, 1982

One major, overwhelming reason why we are running out of water is that we are killing the water we have.
William Ashworth, Nor Any Drop to Drink, 1982

Water has become a highly precious resource. There are some places where a barrel of water costs more than a
barrel of oil.
Lloyd Axworthy, Foreign Minister of Canada (1999 - News Conference)

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. iv. 43.

Of the first philosophers, then, most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things. That of which all things that are consist, the first from which they come to be, the last into which they are resolved….this they say is the element and this is the principle of things….yet they do not all agree as to the number and the nature of these principle is water….
Some think that even the ancients who lived long before the present generation, and first framed accounts of the Gods, had a similar view of nature; for they made the Oceanus and Tethys the parents of creation, and described the oath of the Gods as being by water, to which they give the name of Styx; for what is oldest is most honourable, and the most honourable thing is that by which one swears
Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain, 1976

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The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare to let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.
Richard Bach

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and
drowns things weighty and solid.
Sir Francis Bacon, (1561-1626) 

For fountains, they are a Great Beauty and Refreshment,
but Pools mar all, and make the Garden unwholesome,
and full of Flies and Frogs."
Sir Francis Bacon, Of Gardens, 1625
 
Enrich them with the bounty of God, the Almighty, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise. With the hands
of renunciation draw forth from its life-giving waters, and sprinkle therewith all created things, that
they may be cleansed from all man-made limitations and may approach the mighty seat of God,
this hallowed and resplendent Spot.
O wayfarer in the path of God! Take thou thy portion of the ocean of God's grace, and deprive
not thyself of the things that lie hidden in its depths. Be thou of them that have partaken of its
treasures. A dewdrop out of this ocean would, if shed upon all that are in the heavens and on the
earth, suffice to
Baha'u'llah and 'Abdu'l-Baha 

Sitting on the lap of Mother Bhagirathi with the inspiring sight of her murmuring flow, gives me unique pleasure. I
have the desire to enjoy it until the last breath... A few steps below me is the Sacred River flowing for the
well-being of all and a few meters away is the dreadful sound of dynamites and bulldozers. The River, when it flows
in its natural course, benefits all irrespective of caste, creed, and colour, wealth or poverty; but as soon as it is
dammed she loses her socialist character.
Shri Sunderlal Bahuguna 

All your better deeds Shall be in water writ, but this is marble.
Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster. Act v. Sc. 3.

Wild rivers are earth's renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the
authority of humans, always chipping away, and eventually always winning.
Richard Bangs, River Gods 

Of all our planet's activities--geological movements, the reproduction and decay of biota, and even the disruptive propensities of certain species (elephants and humans come to mind)--no force is greater than the hydrologic cycle.
Richard Bangs and Christian Kallen, Rivergods, 1985

What is the earth but a lump of clay surrounded by water?
Bharthari (c.570-c.651), Vairagya-sataka

Collecting all
The rains of May
The swift Mogami River.
Basho 

The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation,
melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man.
Charles William Beebe, Log of the Sun, 1906               

Truths are first clouds; then rain, then harvest and food.
Henry Ward Beecher 

All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
No sound save the rush of the river,
While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead,--
The picket's off duty forever.
Ethel Lynn Beers, The Picket Guard, Harper's Weekly, September 30, 1861

Let us cross the river," he said, "and rest under the shade of the trees.
Stephen Vincent Benet,  General Stonewall Jackson's last words, May 10, 1863

Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its
nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its
way; the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents.
Wendell Berry 

Within the circles of our lives
We dance the circles of the years,
The circles of the seasons
Within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
The circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.
Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join,unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,
each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.
And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone
into the darker circles of return.
Wendell Berry, Earth prayers from Around the World, 1991

The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what may life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry, Openings: The Peace of Wild Things

We labor long and earnestly for peace, because war threatens the survival of man.  It is time we labored with equal passion to defend our environment.  A polluted stream can be as lethal as a bullet.
Senator Alan Bible (Nevada)

MEANDER, n. To proceed sinuously and aimlessly. The word is the ancient name of a river
about one hundred and fifty miles south of Troy, which turned and twisted in the effort to get out
of hearing when the Greeks and Trojans boasted of their prowess.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 

THE RIVER
Not a loligagin’ river,
not meandering aimlesly,…
Mississppi got a lot
o’ water and a long
ways to go.

All business.
Ol’ Man river
taxes activities
and levies
of men.

An awesome view, this river,
from its’ banks, bridges, or
blufftops, or lazy clouds above.
Mark Twain’s domain.
“Entre-Vu!”

Here the steamboats’ whistles blew,
and calliopes
I used to listen to; I tell you stories
captains and deckhands knew.
Read my scribbled second-hand
lies if you care to.
M. T. Bins

There I stood, and humbly scanned
The miracle that sense appals,
And I watched the tourists stand
Spitting in Niagara Falls
Morris Bishop, Public Aid for Niagara Falls, Stanza 4      

"The wise man of Miletus thus declared the first of things is water"
J.S. Blackie, 1877 

Expect poison from the standing water.
William Blake 

Song
Memory, hither come,
And tune your merry notes:
And, while upon the wind
Your music floats,
I’ll pore upon the stream
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as the pass
Within the watery glass.
William Blake

Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to
ignore the greater part.
Hal Borland, This Hill, This Valley 

We all drink somebody else's sewage.
Kenneth E. Boulding, in Anne Chisholm, ed., Philosophers of the Earth: Conversations with Ecologists, 1972

What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt -- it is sure to get where
 it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.
Hal Boyle 

Let the mountains talk, let the rivers run. Once more, and forever.
David Brower 

We cannot make rivers whole unless we wholly understand them.
Rob Brown, Wheeler School, Providence, R. I.

When breezes are soft and skies are fair,
I steal an hour from study and care,
And hide me away to the woodland scene,
Where wanders the stream with waters of green,
As it the bright fringe of herbs on its brink
Had given their stain to the waves they drink;
And they, whose meadows it murmurs through,
Have named the stream from its own fair hue.
       Yet pure its waters--its shallows are bright
With colored pebbles and sparkles of light,
And clear the depths where its eddies play,
And dimples deepen and whirl away,
And the plane-tree's speckled arms o'ershoot
The swifter current that mines its root,
Through whose shifting leaves, as you walk the hill,
The quivering glimmer of sun and rill
With a sudden flash on the eye is thrown,
Like the ray that streams from the diamond-stone.
Oh, loveliest there the spring days come,
With blossoms, and birds, and wild-bees' hum;
The flowers of summer are fairest there,
And the freshest the breath of the summer air;
And sweetest the golden autumn day
In silence and sunshine glides away.
       Yet, fair as thou art, thou shunnest to glide,
Beautiful stream! By the village side;
But windest away from haunts of men,
To quiet valley and shaded glen;
And forest, and meadow, and slope of hill,
Around thee, are lonely, lovely, and still,
Lonely--save when, by thy rippling tides,
From thicket to thicket the angler glides,
Or the Simpler comes, with basket and book,
For herbs of power on thy banks to look;
Or haply, some idle dreamer, like me,
To wander, and muse, and gaze on thee,
Still--save the chirp of birds that feed
On the river cherry and seedy reed,
And thy own wild music gushing out
With mellow murmur of fairy shout,
From dawn to the blush of another day,
Like traveler singing along his way.
       That fairy music I never hear,
Nor gaze on those waters so green and clear,
And mark them winding away from sight,
Darkened with shade or flashing with light,
While o'er them the vine to its thicket clings,
And the zephyr stoops to freshen his wings,
But I wish that fate had left me free
To wander these quiet haunts with thee,
Till the eating cares of earth should depart,
And the peace of the scene pass into my heart;
And I envy thy stream, as it glides along
Through its beautiful banks in a trance of song.
        Though forced to drudge for the dregs of men,
And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen,
And mingle among the jostling crowd,
Where the sons of strife are subtle and loud--
I often come to this quiet place,
To breathe the airs that ruffle thy face,
And gaze upon thee in silent dream,
For in thy lonely and lovely stream
An Image of that clam life appears
That won my heart in my greener years.
William Cullen Bryant, Poems of Nature

I loved the rain as a child. I loved the sound of it on the leaves of trees and roofs and
windowpanes and umbrellas and the feel of it on my face and bare legs. I loved the hiss of rubber
 tires on rainy streets and the flip-flop of windshield wipers. I loved the smell of wet grass and
raincoats and shaggy coats of dogs. A rainy day was a special day for me in a sense that no other
 kind of day was–a day when the ordinariness of things was suspended with ragged skies drifting
to the color of pearl and dark streets turning to dark rivers of reflected light and even people
 transformed somehow as the rain drew them closer by giving them something to think about
together, to take common shelter from, to complain of and joke about in ways that made them
more like friends than it seemed to me they were on ordinary sunny days. But more than anything, I think, I loved
rain for the power it had to make indoors seem snugger and safer and a place to find
refuge in from everything outdoors that was un-home, unsafe. I loved rain for making home seem
home more deeply...
Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey

The song of the river ends not at her banks but in the hearts of those who have loved her.
Buffalo Joe

Water is a good servant, but it is a cruel master.
John Bullein, 1562 

Water is a very good servant, but it is a cruell maister.
William Bullein, Bulwarke of Defense against all Sickness, 1562

Water is insipid, inodorous, colorless, and smooth.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797), On the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757

Or like the snow-fall in a river, a moment white - then melts forever.
Robert Burns 

See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.
Robert Burton , Anatomy of Melancholy. Part i. Sect. 2, Memb. 4, Subsect. 7.

The miller sees not all the water that goes by his mill.
Robert Burton , Anatomy of Melancholy. Part iii. Sect. 3, Memb. 4, Subsect. 1.

In the spring rain,
The pond and the river
Have become one.
Buson, Weather Lore and Cliches 

It is difficult to find in life any event which so effectually condenses intense nervous sensation into
the shortest possible space of time as does the work of shooting, or running an immense rapid.
There is no toil, no heart breaking labour about it, but as much coolness, dexterity, and skill as
man can throw into the work of hand, eye, and head; knowledge of when to strike and how to
do it; knowledge of water and rock, and of the one hundred combinations which rock and water
can assume -- for these two things, rock and water, taken in the abstract, fail as completely to
convey any idea of their fierce embracings in the throes of a rapid as the fire burning quietly in a
drawing-room fireplace fails to convey the idea of a house wrapped and sheeted in flames.
Sir William Francis Butler (1872) 

When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either
the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.
Samuel Butler, Samuel Butler’s Notebooks (1951, p. 255)

O star on the breast of the river!
O marvel of bloom and grace!
Did you fall right down from heaven,
Out of the sweetest place?
You are white as the thoughts of an angel,
Your heart is steeped in the sun;
Did you grow in the Golden City,
My pure and radiant one?”
“Nay, nay, I fell not out of heaven;
None gave me my saintly white;
It slowly grew from the darkness,
Down in the dreary night.
From the ooze of the silent river,
I win my glory and grace,
White souls fall not, O my poet,
They rise to the sweetest place.
Mary Frances Butts, The Water Lily.

She was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all.
George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron,The Dream. Stanza 2.
 

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For me, this realization took concrete form, as I stood two decades and an ecological education later, on the banks of the Mississippi River where I had roamed as a boy. As I gazed at the brown silt-choked waters absorbing a black plume of industrial and municipal sewage from Memphis, and followed bits of some unknown beige froth floating continually down from Cincinnati, Louisville, or St. Louis, I experienced a palpable pain. It was not distinctly locatable in any of my extremities, nor was it like a headache or nausea. Still, it was very real. I had no plans to swim in the river, no need to drink from it, no intention of buying real estate on its shore. My narrowly personal interests were not affected, and yet, somehow, I was personally injured. It occurred to me then, in a flash of self-discovery, that the river was a part of me. I recalled a line from Leopold’s Sand County Almanac – “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
J. Baird Callicott, Metaphysical Implication of Ecology, from Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought
 

In 1847, two years before the greedy rush for gold began in California,
the Mormons quietly began irrigating Utah's Salt Lake Valley. In a
sense, they were the first American irrigators of any significance.
And their knowledge about the art of applying water to land
has spread throughout the world.
Stu Campbell, The Home Water Supply, 1983 

O Lord,
grant that in some way it may rain every day,
say from about midnight until three o'clock in the morning,
but, you see, it must be gentle and warm so that it can soak in;
grant that at the same time it would not rain on campion, alyssum, heliaanthemum, lavender,
and the others which you in your infinite wisdom know are drought
loving plants –
I will write their names on a paper if you like –
and grant that the sun may shine the whole day long,
but not everywhere (not for instance, on spiraea, or on gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron),
and not to much;
that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms,
no plant-lice and snails, no mildew, and
that once a week thin liquid manure and guano may fall from heaven.
Amen.
Karel Capek, The Gardener's Year, 1929 

Ever wonder about those people who spend $2.00 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backwards. NAÏVE
George Carlin

Isn't making a smoking section in a restaurant like making a peeing section in a swimming pool?
George Carlin

The real question is whether the (Hudson) river's national importance shall be sacrificed to these enterprises which would change the shoreline, lower high peaks, destroy groves of trees….The Hudson answers a spiritual need more necessary to the nation's health than all the commercial products it can provide, than all the money it can earn.
Carl Carmer, quoted in Harper's, December 1977

Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land.
So the little minutes, humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages of eternity.
Julia A. Fletcher Carney, Little Things, 1845.

There's no striving against the stream; and the weakest still goes to the wall.
Miguel de Cervantes, from Don Quoxite, Ibid. Chapter 20, page 40

Pity! The southerly trees have shed their leaves.
Nobody comes to appreciate the mountain's beauty.
Tomorrow I too will float away.
My reflection gone from cool streams.
Cheng Man-ch'ing, 1933 

The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without
feeling guilty about it.
Chinese Philosopher 

If you are thinking a year ahead, sow a seed.If you are thinking 10 years ahead, plant a tree.If you are thinking 100 years ahead, educate the people."
Chinese poet, 500 B.C.

Though living near a river, do not waste water; though living near mountains, do not waste firewood.
Chinese Proverb, cited in 1875 collection

When you drink the water, remember the spring.
Chinese Proverb 

Flowing water never goes bad;
our doorways never gather termites.
Chinese Proverbs

Do not bathe if there is no water.
Chinese, Shan proverb

No one can see their reflection in running water.
It is only in still water that we can see.
Chinese, Taoist proverb

When you drink the water, remember the spring
Chinese Proverb

The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration; so in the world are man and his dwellings…. (People) die in the morning, they are born in the evening, like foam on the water.
Kamo Chomei (1153-1216), Hojo-ki (An account of my hut), 1212

There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.
Kate Chopin

Just a brief stop
I said when stepping of the road
Into a willow’s shade
Where a bubbling stream flows by…
As has time since my brief stop began.
Chujin

In a country where nature has been so lavish and where we have been so spendthrift of
indigenous beauty, to set aside a few rivers in their natural state should be considered an
obligation.
Senator Frank Church from Idaho 

The affluent society has built well in terms of economic progress, but has neglected the protection
of the very water we drink as well as the values of fish and wildlife, scenic, and outdoor
recreation resources. Although often measureless in commercial terms, these values must be
preserved by a program that will guarantee America some semblance of her great heritage of beautiful rivers.
Senator Frank Church from Idaho

If you could tomorrow morning make water clean in the world, you would have done, in one fell
swoop, the best thing you could have done for improving human health by improving
environmental quality. 
William C. Clark, speech, Racine, Wisconsin, April 1988

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
Arthur C. Clarke

Oh, don't say anymore, please!  Have I got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways?  If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered."
No you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes."
Very well, I'll try it; but, after I have learned it, can I depend on it?  Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?
Samuel L. Clemens, Life on the Mississippi

Swift Things are Beautiful
Swift things are beautiful:
Swallows and deer,
And lightning that falls
Bright-veined and clear,
Rivers and meteors,
Wind in the wheat,
The strong-withered horse,
The runners sure feet.

And slow things are beautiful:
The closing of a day,
The pause of the wave
That curves downward to spray,
The ember that crumbles,
The opening flower,
And the ox that moves on
In the quiet of power.
Elizabeth Coatsworth
 

The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs! what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
Samuel T. Coleridge, 1772-1834, Cologne 

Water, water every where,
And all the boards do shrink,
Water, water every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout,
The death-fires danced at night;
The water like a witch’s oils
Burnt green, and blue and white.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner

The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs! what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
Samuel T. Coleridge, 1772-1834, Cologne

Ye nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks,
The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs, what power divine,
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), "The City of Cologne", 1800

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery (1900-1944), Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939

Water is the Driver of Nature
Leonardo De Vince

People always ask us, 'Are things better or worse today?' Well, some things are better and some things are worse…. But there are a lot of problems in the world today that no one dreamed of when we were young. For instance, this business about the environment. Why, clean water was just something you took for granted.
Sarah Delany and Elizabeth Delany, U.S. author.(1890) The Delany Sisters’ Book of Everyday Knowledge,
with Amy Hill Hearth

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes
cracking down.
Don DeLillo, James Axton, in The Names, 1982

Water has no taste, no color, no odor; it cannot be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to
life, but rather life itself. It fills us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939 

Put on the river like a fleeing coat, a garmet of motion, tremendous, immortal."
James Dickey

The old swimming hole of those of us with a touch of gray in our hair is now, ten to one, polluted and the boy of today is apt to be stricken with typhoid who swims in it. Pollution is the big thing that this mighty national crusade has got to battle.
Will H. Dilig, Isaak Walton league Monthly, September 1922
 

It is sheer coincidence that my hunk of the creek is strewn with boulders.  I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I scent the virgin breath of mountains, I feel a spray of mist on my cheeks and lips, I hear a ceaseless splash and susurrus, a sound of water not merely poured smoothly down air to fill a steady pool, but tumbling live about, over, under, around, between, through an intricate speckling of rock.  It is sheer coincidence that upstream from me the creek’s bed is ridged in horizontal croppings of sandstone, I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I see the light on the water careening towards me, inevitably, freely, down a graded series of terraces like the balanced winged platforms on an infinite, inexhaustible font.  “Ho, if you are thirsty, come down to the water; ho, if you are hungry, come and sit and eat.”  This is the present, at last.  I can pat the puppy any time I want.  This is the now, this flickering, broken light, this air that the wind of the future presses down my throat, pumping my buoyant and giddy with praise. 

     My God, I look at the creek.  It is the answer to Merton’s prayer, “ Give us time!”  It never stops.  If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek.  You don’t run down the present; pursue it with baited hooks and nets.  You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.  You’ll have fish left over.  The creek is the one great giver.  It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation.  This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.

     Here is the word from a subatomic physicist:  “Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves.”  Let me twist his meaning.  Here it comes.  The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, laving roiling with the beauty like sharks.  The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1983

If you grew up in the country, chances are you have fond memories of lazy days down by a river, creek or pond.
Darlene Donaldson, The River, from Country Magazine

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet

Ill habits gather by unseen degrees, As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
John Dryden,Book xv. The Worship of Æsculapius, Line 155.

And see the rivers how they run
Through wood and mead, in shade and sun,
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave, they go
A various journey to the deep.
Like human life to endless sleep.
John Dyer, Grongar Hill, l. 93

And see the rivers how they run
Through wood and mead, in shade and sun,
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave, they go
A various journey to the deep
Like human life to endless sleep.
John Dyer: Grongar Hill, 1726

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To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also
to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.
In both we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding
the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself
over and over again.
Gretel Ehrlich, Sisters of the Earth

River History It's morning in the Absaroka Mountains. The word “absaroka” means "raven" in the Crow language, though I've seen no ravens in three days. Last night I slept with my head butted against an Engelmann spruce and on waking the limbs looked like hundreds of arms swinging in a circle. The trunk is bigger than an elephant's leg, bigger than my torso. I stick my nose against the bark. Tiny opals of sap stick to my cheeks and the bark breaks up, textured: red and gray, coarse and smooth, wet and flaked.

A tree is an aerial garden, a botanical migration from the sea, from those earliest plants, the seaweeds; it is a purchase on crumbled rock, on ground. The human, standing, is only a different upsweep and articulation of cells. How treelike we are, how human the tree.But I've come here to seek out the source of a river and as we make the daylong ascent from a verdant valley, I think about walking and wilderness. We use the word "wilder-ness," but perhaps we mean wildness. Isn't that why I've come here? In wilderness, I seek the wildness in myself -- and in so doing, come on the wildness everywhere around me because, after all, being part of nature, I'm cut from the same cloth.

Following the coastline of a lake, I watch how wind picks up water in dark blasts and drops it again. Ducks glide in Vs away from me, out onto the fractured, darkening mirror. I stop. A hatch of mayflies powders the air and the archaic, straight-winged dragonflies hang, blunt-nosed, above me. A friend talks about aquatic bugs: water beetles, spinners, assassin bugs, and one that hatches, mates, and dies in a total lifespan of two hours. At the end of the meadow the lake drains into a fast-moving creek. I quicken my pace and trudge upward. Walking is also an ambulation of mind. The human armour of bones rattles, fat rolls, and inside this durable, fleshy prison of mine, I make a beeline toward otherness, lightness, or, maybe like a moth, toward flame.

Somewhere along the trail I laugh out loud. How shell like the body seems suddenly--not fleshy at all, but inhuman and hard. And farther up, I step out of my body though I'm still held fast by something, but what? I don't know.

How foolish the preparations for wilderness trips seem now. We pore over our maps, chart our expeditions. We "gear up" at trailheads with pitons and crampons, horse packs and backpacks, fly rods and cameras, forgetting the meaning of simply going, of lifting thought-covers, of disburdenment. I look up from these thoughts. A blue heron rises from a gravel bar and glides behind a gray screen of dead trees, appears in an opening where an avalanche downed pines, and lands again on water.

I stop to eat lunch. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The Gautama said that the first men ate the earth and found it sweet."  I eat baloney and cheese and think about eating the earth. It's another way of framing our wonder in which the width of the mouth stands for the generous palate of consciousness.  I cleanse my palate with miner's lettuce and stream water and try to imagine what kinds of sweetness the earth provides:  the taste of glacial flour, or the mineral taste of basalt, the fresh and foul bouquets of rivers, the desiccated, stinging flavor of a snowstorm--like eating red ants, my friend says.

As I begin to walk again it occurs to me that this notion of "eating the earth" is not about gluttony, hedonism, or sin, but, rather, unconditional love. Everywhere I look I see the possibility of love. To find wildness, I must first offer myself up, accept all that comes before me: a bullfrog breathing hard on a rock; moose tracks under elk scats; a cloud that looks like a clothespin; a seep of water from a high cirque, black on brown rock, draining down from the brain of the world.

At tree line, birdsong stops. I'm lifted into another movement of music, one with no particular notes, only wind sounds becoming water sounds, becoming wind sounds.  Above, a cornice crowns a ridge and melts into a teal and turquoise lake, like a bladder, leaking its wine.

On top of Marston Pass I'm in a ruck of steep valleys and gray, treeless peaks. The alpine carpet, studded with red paintbrush and alpine buttercups, gives way to rock. Now all the way across a vertiginous valley, I see where water oozes from moss and mud, how, at its source, it quickly becomes something else.

Emerson also said: "Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation." The ooze, the source of a great river, is now a white chute tumbling over soft folds of conglomerate rock. Wind tears at it, throwing sheets of water to another part of the mountainside: soft earth gives way under my feet; clouds spill upward and spit rain. Isn't everything redolent with loss, with momentary radiance, a coming to different ground? Stone basins catch the waterfall, spill it again, like thoughts strung together, laddered down.

I see where melt water is split by a rock-half going west to the Pacific, the other going east to the Atlantic, for this is the Continental Divide. Down the other side the air I gulp feels softer. Ice spans and tunnels the creek, then, when night comes but before the full moon, falling stars have the same look as that white chute of water, falling against the rock of night.

To rise above tree line is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into birdsong, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves. It is to forget discontent, undisciplined needs. Here the world is only space, raw loneliness, green valleys hung vertically. Losing myself to it--if I can--1 do not fall ...or, if I do, I'm only another cataract of water.

Wildness has no conditions, no sure routes, no peaks or goals, no source that is not instantly becoming something more than itself, then letting go of that, always becoming. It cannot be stripped to its complexity by cat scan or telescope. Rather, it is a many-pointed truth, almost a bluntness, a sudden essence like the wild strawberries strung along the ground on scarlet runners under my feet. Wildness is source and fruition at once, as if every river circled round, the mouth eating the tail-and the tail, the source.

Now I am camped among trees again. Four yearling moose, their chestnut coats shiny from a summer's diet of willow shoots, tramp past my bedroll and drink from a spring that issues sulphurous water. The ooze, the white chute, the narrow stream-now almost a river-joins this small spring and slows into skinny oxbows and deep pools before breaking again on rock, a stepladder of sequined rimes.

To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again.

Gretel Ehrlich, Montana Spaces, edited by William Kittredge (1988)

"To trace the history of a river or a raindrop…is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind
descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the
lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again."
Gretel Ehrlich - From Islands, The Universe, Home, 1991 

“I stand by the river and I know that it has been here yesterday and will be here tomorrow and that therefore, since
I am part of its pattern today, I also belong to all its yesterdays and will be a part of all its tomorrows. This is a
kind of earthly immortality, a kinship with rivers and hills and rocks, with all things and all creatures that have ever
lived or ev3er will live or have their being on the earth. It is my assurance of an orderly continuity in the great
design of the universe.”
Virginia S. Eifert 

The sky wheeled over me. For an instant, as I bobbed into the main channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the
vast tilted face of the continent. It was then that I felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my fingertips, and the
warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward. Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me
in dancing springs of sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by
grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea...
Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in the water.
Loren Eisley

We used to think that energy and water would be the critical issues for the next century.
Now we think water will be the critical issue.
Mostafa Tolba, Egypt and former head of the U. N. Environmental Program
Albert Eistein

I do not know much about gods;
but I think that the river is a strong brown god–sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages, The Four Quartets,

The River itself has no beginning or end.  In its beginning, it is not yet the River; in its end, it is no longer the River.  What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it.  At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?
T. S. Eliot
 

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston,
as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Books

The good rain, like the bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the
stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past, -- as it is to me extent a fiction of the present, -- the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

The mill cannot grind with water that is past.
English 17^th Century Proverb.

A habitat is where it's at.
Keep them so the ducks can quack,
The marshes filter the water's dirt,
They're homes for many who we don't
want hurt.
Save The Wetlands
Paul L. Errington, "Of Men and Marshes" 

Millions long for immortality who do not
know what to do with themselves
on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz

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Life is always flowing on like a river, sometimes with murmurs, sometimes without bending this way ot that, wed do no exactly se why; now ion beautiful picturesque places, now through barren and uninteresting scenes, but always flowing with a look of treachery about it; it is so swift, so voiceless, yet so continuous.
Faber

For keenest enjoyment, I visit when the dew is on them,
or in cloudy weather, or when the rain is falling:
and I must be alone or with someone who cares for them as I do.
David Fairchild 

The water was cold. It was thick, like slush ice. Only it kind of lived. One part of you knowed it was just water, the same thing that had been running under this same bridge for a long time, yet when them logs would come spewing up outen it, you were not surprised, like they was a part of water, of the waiting and the threat.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"We have rearranged the rivers at our pleasure as one might change the apples in a bowl." -
Thomas Hornsby Ferril 

Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe—
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
Wynken, Blynken and Nod.
Eugene Field

And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the river-lip on which we lean--
            Ah, lean upon it lightly!  For who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!
Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur, ln 77

With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
            And this was all the Harvest that I reaped--
"I came like water, and like Wind I go"
Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur, ln 109

Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
Nor Whence, like water willy-nillyflowing;
            And out of it, as Wind along the waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.
Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur, ln 113

There's a river somewhere that flows through the lives of everyone.
Roberta Flack 

The children must be drawn towards and not away from the woods and fields and waters and must
be led to see more clearly that . a man cut off from fellowship with the creatures of the open air is
like a tree deprived of all its lateral roots and trimmed to a single branch. He may grow down and
up, but he cannot grow out."
Stephen Forbes, Founder and first chief of the Natural History Survey

The woods are made for the hunters of dreams,
The brooks for the fishers of song;
To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
The streams and the woods belong.
Sam Water Foss, The Bloodless Sportsman

Praise be, my Lord, for Sister Water. Who is most useful, humble, precious, and chaste?
St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), The Canticle of the Sun, translated by Matthew Arnold

Be praised my lord for Sister Water
because she shows great use and humbleness in hers and
preciousness
And depth
St. Francis of Assisi, Earth Prayers from Around the World, 1991

When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.
Benjamin Franklin

In rivers and bad governments, the lightest things swim at the top.
Benjamin Franklin

            Help us
            To protect these waters
these wild lands you open on
instill in us
            the powers
            to contain the ooze of mines
the excrement of need
Protect these
aquifers and springs
            of highland rock
the breath of winds
we blossom by
Walt Franklin, Earth Prayers from Around the World, 1991

Rivers
Rivers hardly ever run in a straight line.
Rivers are willing to take ten thousand meanders
and enjoy every one
and grow from every one.
When they leave a meander,
they are always more
than when they entered it.
When rivers meet an obstacle,
they do not try to run over it.
They merely go around
but they always get to the other side.
Rivers accept things as they are,
conform to the shape they find the world in,
yet nothing changes things more than rivers.
Rivers move even mountains into the sea.
Rivers hardly ever are in a hurry
yet is there anything more likely
to reach the point it sets out for
than a river?
James Dillet Freeman

XXVII
With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d—
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”

XXIX
Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as wind along the Waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing
Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

To get clear water, one must go to the source.
French Proverb

Dirty water will quench few.
French 16^th Century Proverb

(The water commissioner in Rome) must see that no one draws water without a written authorization from Caesar. He must exercise great vigilance against manifold forms of fraud.
Frontius (about A.D. 35-about A.D. 103), The Water Supply of Rome, c. 100

The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear
A number in. But what about the brook
That held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length
And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed
A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
From growing under pavements of a town;
The apple tree be sent to hearth-stone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
In fetid darkness still to live and run --
And all for nothing it had ever done
Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps
That such a brook ran water. But I wonder
If from its being kept forever under
The thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep.
Robert Frost, A Brook in the City 

All rivers do what they can for the sea.
Thomas Fuller: Gnomolagis,  1732