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

(A Montana statue) holds that a river has a right to overwhelm its banks and inundate its floodplain. Well, that's interesting, because it's not a right that we assign to the river. The river has earned it through centuries of deluging and shaping the floodplain and the floodplain has a right to its rampaging river. They've earned their rights through a kind of reciprocal action.
Dan Kemmis, quoted in Harper's, February 1991.

See the rivers, how they run,
Changeless toward a changeless sea.
Charles Kingsley, The Saint's Tragedy. Act ii, sc.2

I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains.
One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge,
but one misses a world of loveliness.
Adeline Knapp 

What are the Tibers and Scamanders, measured by the Missouri and the Amazon?  Or
what the loveliness of Ilissus or Avon, by the Connecticut or the Potomac?  The waters
of These American rivers are as pure and sweet, and their names would be as poetical,
were they familiar to us in song, as the others, which have been immortalized for ages.
S. L. Knapp:  Lectures on American Literature, 1829

Henceforth were your hearts
Hardened:  they became
Like a rock and even worse
In hardness. 
For among rocks
There are some from which
Rivers gush forth; others
There are which when split
Asunder send forth water;
And others which sink
For fear of God.  And God is
Not unmindful of what ye do
Koran, Chapter 2, verse 74

Behold!  In the creation
Of the heavens and the earth;
In the alternation
Of the Night and the Day;
In the sailing of the ships
Through the Ocean For the profit of mankind;
In the rain which God
Sends down from the skies,
And the life which He gives therewith

To an earth that is dead;
In the beasts of all kinds
That He scatters
Through the earth;
In the change of the winds,
And the clouds which they
Trail like their slaves
Between the sky and the earth;
(Here) Indeed are Signs
For a people that are wise.
Koran, Chapter 2, verse 164

Remember He covered you
With a sort of drowsiness,
To give you calm as from
Himself, and he caused
Rain to descend on you
From heaven , to clean you
Therewith, to remove from you
The stain of Satan,
To strengthen your hearts,
And to plant your feet,
Firmly therewith
Koran, Chapter 8, verse 11

The likeness of the life
Of the Present is
As the rain which We
Send down from the skies:
By its mingling arises
Theproduce of the earth—
Which provides food
For the men and animals:
(It grows) till the earth
Is clad with its golden
Ornaments and is decked out
(In beauty): the people to whom
It belongs think they have
All powers of disposal over it:
There reaches it Our command
By night or by day,
And We make it
Like a harvest clean-mown
As if ithad not flourished
Only the day before!
Thus do We explain
The signs in detail
For those who reflect.
Koran,  Chapter10, verse 24

And in the earth are tracts
(Diverse though) neighboring,
And gardens of vines
And fields sown with corn,
And palm trees—growing
Out of single roots or otherwise:
Watered with the same water,
Yet some of them We make
Moreexcellent than others to eat.
Behold, verily in these things
There are Signs for those
Who understand!
Koran, Chapter 13, verse 4

He sends down water
From the skies, and the channels
Flow, each according to its measure:
But the torrent bears away
The foam that mounts up
To the surface. Even so,
Form that (ore) which they heat
In the fire, to make ornaments
Or utensils therewith,
There is a scum likewise.
Thus doth God (by parables)
Show forth Truth and Vanity.
For the scum disappears
Like froth cast out;
While that which is for the good
Of mankind remains
On the earth. Thus doth God
Set forth parables
Koran, Chapter 13, verse 17

And We send the fecundating winds,
Then cause the rain to descend
From the sky, therewith providing
You with water (in abundance),
Though ye are not the guardians
Of its stores.
Koran, Chapter 15, verse 22

It is He Who sends down
Rain from the sky:
From it ye drink,
And out of it (grows)
The vegetation on which
Ye feed your cattle
Koran, Chapter 16, verse 10

By means of water, we give life to everything.
Koran, Chapter 21, verse 30 

We made from water every living thing.
Koran, Chapter 21, verse 30

And (further), thou seest
The earth barren and lifeless,
But when We pour down
Rain on it, it is stirred
(To life), it swells.
And it puts forth every kind
Of beautiful growth (in pairs).
Koran, Chapter 22., verse 5

It is He who has
Created man from water:
Then has He established
Relationships of lineage
And marriage: for thy lord
Has the power (over all things).
Koran, Chapter 25, verse 54

So We opened the gates
Of heaven, with water
Pouring forth.
Koran, Chapter 54, verse 11

And We caused the earth
To gush forth with springs.
So the waters met (and rose)
To the extent decreed
Koran, Chapter 54, verse 12

And tell them that
The water is to be
Divided between them:
Each one’s right to drink
Being brought forward
(By suitable turns).
Koran, Chapter 54, verse 28

By water flowing constantly,
Koran, Chapter 56, verse 31

See ye the water
Which ye drink?
Koran, Chapter 56, verse 68

Say: “See ye?--
If your stream be
Some morning lost
(In the underground earth),
Who then can supply you
With clear-flowing water?”
Koran, Chapter 67, verse 30

I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as
rivers. Most of what I love about the country is a gift of the rivers. . . . America is a great story, and there is a river
on every page of it.
Charles Kuralt, On the Road With Charles Kuralt

America is a great story, and there is a river on every page of it.
Charles Kuralt - From The Magic of Rivers

Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a
home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers.
Charles Kuralt - From The Magic of Rivers

I was sitting on the beach one summer day, watching two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand. They were
hard at work building an elaborate sandcastle by the water's edge, with gates and towers and moats and internal
passages. Just when they had nearly finished their project, a big wave came along and knocked it down, reducing it
to a heap of wet sand. I expected the children to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all their hard
work. But they surprised me. Instead, they ran up the shore away from the water, laughing and holding hands, and
sat down to build another castle. I realized they had taught me an important lesson.
Harold Kushner, When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough

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Every Human should have the idea of taking care of the environment,
of nature, of water.
Dalai Lama

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free, Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer
yourselves to the sea.                                    
Sidney Lanier, The Marshes of Glynn, 1878 

Here and there,
Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes,
And the marsh is meshed with a million veins,
That like as with row and silvery essences flow
In the rose-and-silver evening glow,
Farewell, my lord Sun!
The creeks overflow; a thousand rivulets run
Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh grass stirr;
Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr;
Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run;
And the sea and the marsh are one.
And still the plains of the waters be!
The tide in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
And it is night
Sidney Lanier, From the Marshes of Glynn, 1884

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong
nothing can surpass it.
Lao-Tzu, Chinese philosopher (6th century B.C.)

The best of men is like water;
Water benefits all things
And does not compete with them.
It dwells in (the lowly) places that all disdain,
Wherein it comes near to Tao.
Lao-Tsu (6th century B.C.), Tao-te Ching

Who is there that can make muddy water clear? But if permitted to remain still, it will gradually become clear of itself.
Lao-Tsu (6th century B.C.), The Way of Virtue, 550 B.C.

The best of man is like water,
Which benefits all things, and does not contend with them,
Which flows in places that others disdain,
Where it is in harmony with the Way.
So the sage:
Lives within nature,
Thinks within the deep,
Gives within impartiality,
Speaks within trust
Governs within order,
Crafts within ability,
Acts within opportunity.
He does not contend, and none contend against him.
Lao Tzu

Nothing on earth is so weak and yielding as water, but for breaking down the firm and strong it has no equal.
Lao-Tsze

The highest good is like water. It nourishes the ten-thousand things.
It flows in places men reject, and so is like the Tao" -     
Lao Tzu

Water flows humbly to the lowest level.
Nothing is weaker than water,
Yet for overcoming what is hard and strong,
Nothing surpasses it.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Only want sets a limit to waste.
Latin Proverb

The Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyu built a teahouse on the side of a hill overlooking the sea. Three guests were
invited to the inaugural tea ceremony. Hearing about the beautiful site, they expected to find a structure that took
advantage of the wonderful view. After arriving at the garden gate, they were perplexed to discover a grove of trees
had been planted that obstructed the panorama. Before entering the teahouse, the guests followed the traditional
custom of purifying their hands and mouths at the stone basin near the entry. Stooping to draw water with a
bamboo ladle, they noticed an opening in the trees that provided a vision of the sparkling sea. In that humble
position they awakened to the relationship between the cool liquid in the ladle and the ocean in the distance,
between their individuality and the ocean of life.
Anthony Lawlor, The Temple in the House

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third
thing that makes water and nobody knows what that is.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Pansies, 1929

Water is the eye of a landscape
Vincent Lean, Collectanea, 1902

We abuse land because we view it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which
we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Greater familiarity with marshes on the part of more people could give man a truer and more wholesome view of himself in relation to Nature. In marshes, Life's undercurrents and unknowns and evolutionary changes are exemplified with a high degree of independence from human domi nance as long as the marshes remain in marshy condition. They have their own life-rich genuineness and reflect forces that are much older, much more permanent, and much mightier than man .
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac 

The richest value of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present but rather in the future.”
“The good life on any river may…depend on the perception of its music, and the preservation of some music to perceive.
Aldo Leopold

…perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters…glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.
Aldo Leopold

We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of
history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

"Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children's lifetime. The health of our waters is the
principal measure of how we live on the land."
Luna Leopold

The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), Sand County Almanac, 1949

In polluted rivers and bad governments, the lightest things float to the top.
Raymond Lesser

A river is the report card for its watershed."
Alan Levere,CT DEP

THE RESOLVE
To come to the River,
the brook hurtles through rainy woods,
over – topping rocks
that before the rain were islands.

Its clearness is gone,
and the song.
It is a rich brown,
a load of churned earth goes with it.

The sound now is a direct,
intense sound of direction.
Denise Levertov

Since water still flows, though we cut it with swords
And sorrow returns, though we drown it with wine,
Since the world can in no way answer to our cravings,
I will loosen my hair tomorrow and take to a fishing boat.
Li Po

It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river.
Abraham Lincoln. Reply to National Union League, June 9, 1864.

So Nature deals with us, and takes away
Our playthings one by one, and by the hand
Leads us to rest.
Henry W. Longfellow, Nature

Be not like a stream that brawls
Loud with shallow waterfalls,
But in quiet self-control
Link together soul and soul
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Songo River, Stanza 11

How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and the heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rain in Summer, 1846.

The rising moon has hit the stars;
Her level rays, like golden bars,
Lie on the landscape green,
With shadows brown between.

And Silver white the river gleams,
As if Diana, in her dreams,
Had dropt her silver bow
Upon the meadows low
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Endymion

Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet,
Womanhood and childhood fleet!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Maidenhood.

By the shores of Gitchee Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis,
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, 1855

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?
Larry Lopez, Arctic Dreams 

'The north changes the world. In the winter the snow comes, covers the land. When it breaks in the spring, the
mountains and hills will gather all the deteriorated stuff and bring it down to the Columbia, the main channel, and
take it away. What goes out in the ocean will never return. And we have a brand new world in spring. The high
water takes everything out, washes everything down. That's why we pray to the water, every morning and night.
' This is not an attitude found in the Army Corps of Engineers literature.
Martin Louie, Sr., an elder of the Colville Tribe displaced by Grand Coulee Dam, William Dietrich,
Northwest Passage

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone not by violence but by oft falling.
Lucretius 

Continual dropping wears away a stone.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. I, 313

Where the streame runneth smoothest, the water is deepest.
John Lyly, Euphues and his England, page 287.

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A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It 

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone,
although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are
almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the
canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a
four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. 
I am haunted by waters.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

We sat on the bank and the river went by. As always, it was making sounds to itself, and now it made sounds to us.
It would be hard to find three men sitting side by side who knew better what a river was saying.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and
runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the
words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It 

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?
Douglas Malloch, Uncle Sam's River, Stanza 1

If it's your Mississippi in dry time,
If it's yours, Uncle Sam, when it's wet,
If it's your Mississippi in fly time,
In flood time it's your Mississippi yet.
Douglas Malloch, Uncle Sam's River, st. 6

Wetlands havea poor public image.... Yet they are among the earth's greatest natural assets... mankind's
waterlogged wealth.
Edward Maltby, Waterlogged Wealth, 1986

Freedom alone is not enough without light to read at night, without time or access to water to irrigate your farm, without the ability to catch fish to feed your family,"
Nelson Mandela in a speech given at the launch of the World Commission on Dams report Nov. 2000

Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
Hans Margolius 

This is not dead land, it is only thirsty land.
Frances Marion, Westward the Dream, 1948

By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals.
Christopher Marlowe:  The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, 1599

Swift or smooth, broad as the Hudson or narrow enough to scrape your gunwales, every river is a world of its own,
unique in pattern and personality. Each mile on a river will take you further from home than a hundred miles on a
road.                               
Bob Marshall

Genius is a bend in the creek where bright water has gathered,
and which mirrors the trees, the sky and the banks. It just does
that because it is there and the scenery is there. Talent is a fine
mirror with a silver frame, with the name of the owner
engraved on the back.
Edgar Lee Masters

Day after day we looked for rain, and day after day we saw
nothing but the sun. Lavender that we had planted in the spring
died. The patch of grass in front of the house abandoned
its ambitions to become a lawn and turned into the dirty yellow
of poor straw. The earth shrank, revealing its knuckles and
bones, rocks and roots that had been invisible before.
Peter Mayle

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called rain."
Michael McClary

Nothing alters a river as totally as a dam. A reservoir is the antithesis of a river - the essence of a river is that it
flows, the essence of a reservoir is that it is still." A symbiotic relationship cannot exist when the essential character
of one of the organisms is denied.
Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers  

Ancient traditions have long associated holy wells and springs as very special places
of the Goddess or anima mundi: symbolic of the Great Mother and associated with
birth, the feminine principle, the universal womb, the prima materia, the waters of
fertility and refreshment and the fountain of life. The dreaming sites, as they are called,
have also been associated with visions, healing, and other paranormal experiences. In
ancient Greece, for example, there were more than three-hundred medical centers
placed at water sources, where patients experienced healing.
Christopher and Tricia McDowell, The Sanctuary Garden, 1998, p. 62 

The Niagara is more than a river--it is a lesson in what happens when neighbors dump garbage on one another's front lawn.
Thomas McMillan, Canadian Minister of the Environment, quoted in U.S. News and World Report, 16 February 1987

A raft means a river. A river means rapids and rapids spells
death. You got the wrong guy.
Bob McGraw: Well, you have just made it through the worlds most
dangerous rapids and now its beer time. [Bob throws a beer can to
Irwin]
Irwin: You mean I risked my life and you give me lite beer?
Bob McGraw, Up the Creek, 1984

As the word Abraham means the father of a great multitude of men, so the word Mississippi means the father of a great multitude of waters.  His tribes stream in from east and west, exceedingly fruitful the lands they enrich.  In this granary of a continent, this basin of the Mississippi, will not the nations be greatly multiplied and blest?
Herman Melville

In the time that I have been acquainted with this region I have become increasingly
aware of it as a testament of water, the origin and guide of its contours and gradients
and of all the lives - the plants and small creatures, and the culture - that evolved here.
That was always here to be seen, of course, and the recognition has forced itself,
in one form or other, upon people in every part of the world who have been directly
involved with the growing of living things. The gardener who ignores it is soon
left with no garden.
W. S. Merwin, A Shape of Water, 1997

Men travel far to see a city, but few seem curious about a river.  Every river has, neverthless, its individually, its great silent interest. Every river has, moreover, its influence over the people who pass their livers within sight of its waters.
H. S. Merriman, The Sowers

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone,
in the forest, at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible,
perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world,
the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges,
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the
hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks I am going to listen.
Thomas Merton, 1983, Raids on the Unspeakable

Water helped ancient man learn those first lessons about the rights of others and responsibility to a larger society....
It became part of the moral and mental legacy parents passed on to their children.
M. Meyer, "Water in the Hispanic Southwest"

Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my bruised
psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and
fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain's belly,sculpted the land, peeled back the planet's history exposing the texture of time itself.
Harry Middleton, Rivers of Memory

The bad news is that if the drought keeps up, within a few years we'll all be drinking reclaimed sewer water. The good news is that there won't be enough to go around.
Bill Miller, quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times, 4 March 1977

What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we
were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it
is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?
Henry Miller, The World of Sex, 1940

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
A. A. Milne, Pooh's Little Instruction Book

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to
watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly
know everything there is to be known.
A. A. Milne, Pooh's Little Instruction Book

Innumerable as the stars of night,
Or stars of morning, dewdrops which the sun
Impearls on every leaf and every flower.
John Milton

TO LOOK AT ANYTHING
To look at anything,
If you would know that thing,
You must look at it long;
To look at this green and say
‘I have seen spring in these woods,’
will not do –
You must be the thing you see;
You must be the dark snakes
of stems and ferny plumes of leaves.
You must enter in to the small silences between the leaves.
You must take your time.
And touch the very peace they issue from.
John Moffitt

We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing
that without its blessings the people have no source of soul."
Thomas Moore - From The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life

A river sings a holy song conveying the mysterious truth that we are a river, and if we are ignorant of this natural law, we are lost."
Thomas Moore - From The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life

Water has sunk more grievances than wine
And will continue to. Turn the water on;
Stick your hand in the stream; water will run
And kiss it like a dog, or it will shake
It like a friend, or it will tremble there
Like a woman sobbing with her hair
Falling in her face.
Thomas Moore, Hymn for Water, Stanza 2

There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet
As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.
Thomas Moore, The Meeting of the Waters.

Only gamefish swims upstream.
John Trotwood Moore,  The Unafraid

The Sun shines not on us but in us.
The Rivers flow not past,
But through us…
John Muir

Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make
possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters
of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves."
"Our planet is beset with a cancer which threatens our very existence and which will not respond to the kind of
treatment that has been prescribed in the past. The cancer of water pollution was engendered by our abuse of our
lakes, streams, rivers, and oceans; it has thrived on our half-hearted attempts to control it; and like any other
disease, it can kill us.
We have ignored this cancer for so long that the romance of environmental concern is already fading in the shadow
of the grim realities of lakes, rivers and bays where all forms of life have been smothered by untreated wastes, and
oceans which no longer provide us with food."
Senator Ed Muskie of ME arguing for the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, CRS, 1972 Legislative
History, pp 164, 161-62:

High quality water is more than the dream of the conservationists, more than a political slogan; high quality water, in the right quantity at the right place at the right time, is essential to health, recreation, and economic growth.
Edmund S. Muskie, U.S. Senator, speech, 1 March 1966

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Water is the most precious, limited natural resource we have in this country….But because water belongs to no one--except the people--special interests, including government polluters, use it as their private sewers.
Ralph Nader, in David Zwick and Marcy Benstock, Water Wasteland, 1971

“It is water, in every form and at every scale, that saturates the mind.”
National Geographic

All the water that will ever be is, right now.                                     
National Geographic, October 1993
To my fellow swimmers:
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift, that there are those
who will be afraid. They will try to
hold on to the shore, they are being
torn apart and will suffer greatly.
Know that the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore,
push off into the middle of the river,
keep our heads above the water.
And I say see who is there with you and celebrate.
At this time in history, we are to take nothing
personally, least of all ourselves,
for the moment that we do,
our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves. Banish the word struggle
from your attitude and vocabulary.
All that we do now
must be done in a sacred manner
and in celebration.
We are the ones
we have been waiting for.
Native American, Hopi Elders 2001

Rivers flow.
The sea sings.
Oceans roar.
Tides rise
Who am I?
A small pebble on the grand shore;
Who am I?
To ask who I am.
Isn’t it enough to be?
Native American saying

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.
Native American, Chinook Blessing Litany

May the Great Spirit watch over you as long as the rivers shall run and the grass shall grow.
Native American Blessing

That flowing water! That flowing water! My mind wanders across it.
That broad water! That flowing water! My mind wanders across it.
That old age water! That flowing water! My mind wanders across it.
Native American, Myth of the Mountaintop Way quoted in Navajo Wildlands
The river has great wisdom and whispers it's secrets to the hearts of men.
Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river
has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then
will you find that money cannot be eaten.
Native American, Cree Prophecy

The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives.
Native American Proverb

The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests
or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak.
I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence....
Pablo Neruda

Ancient rock paintings remind us that there are no unclaimed lands, that people have always lived here. They are
wayposts along the river journey to the interior of the mind and heart.
Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

It's hard to see a river all at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn't a point where you stand.
In the beginnings of the river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is
always tipping the balance from one stream to another. History changes with each tiny event, shaping an outcome
that we can only fully grasp in hindsight. And that view changes as we move farther downstream.
Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

The ancient Irish bards knew the Salmon of Knowledge as the giver of all life's wisdom. In the salmon's leap of understanding like a leap of faith, we can see ourselves "in our element," immersed in the river of life. The cycle
of the salmon's journey reminds us that all rivers flow to the same sea.
Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

The rapids beat below the boat
Deep in the heart of the land
Feel the pulse of the river in the pulse at your throat
Deep in the heart of the land.
Lynn Noel, Veins in the Stone

The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never
forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land.
Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

The first river you paddle runs through the rest of your life. It bubbles up in pools and eddies to remind you who
you are.
Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

We are deep at the bottom of this river of time, caught up in the current of the moment where all the rivers
rendezvous.
Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

Unfortunately, our rivers carry the waste into the bay like veins into a heart.
Patrick Noonan, quoted in Countryside, Winter 1990

In every glass of water we drink, some of the water has already passed through fishes, trees, bacteria, worms in the
soil, and many other organisms, including people...Living systems cleanse water and make it fit, among other things,
for human consumption.
Elliot A. Norse in R.J. Hoage, ed., Animal Extinctions, 1985

In every glass of water we drink, some of the water has already passed through fishes, trees, bacteria, worms in the soil, and many other organisms, including people…. Living systems cleanse water and make it fit, among other things, for human consumption and for the needs of other species. Trout are even fussier in their needs than we are.
Elliot A. Norse, in R.J. Hoage, ed., Animal Extinctions, 1985

Our bodies are molded rivers.
Novalis

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Keeping in touch with childhood memories keeps us believing
in life’s simplest pleasures like a rainy afternoon,
a swingset, and a giant puddle to play in.
Chrissy Ogden

Our precious heritage of natural and unspoiled beauty and unpolluted streams, once exhausted and destroyed, can
never be replaced. . . . We have a golden opportunity to save the few remaining scenic and wild rivers as part of
our nation's heritage for this and coming generations.
Alvin O'Konski, Congressman from Wisconsin (regarding the St. Croix River)

It was good to lie in the tent knowing the rain was replenishing the water supply, that none of it was being lost except where it ran off the smooth rocks, that even between them, in every cleft and crevice where there was nay accumulation of humus at all, it would be held for months to come.
Sigurd Olson, Listen Point

Even stones under
mountain waterfalls compose
odes to plum blossoms.
Onitsura

Rivers and all creatures that inhabit the water were put here for wise men to contemplate and fools to ignore
Don Orth, Blacksburg, VA

In many of these cities, the reason for their founding is their location on the river. By reconnecting to what makes them unique, they are reviving themselves and their identity.
Betsy Otto, Community Rivers Program at American Rivers

In sweet water there is a pleasure ungrudged by anyone.
Ovid, 13 A.D.

Gutta cavat lapidem (Dripping water hollows out a stone)
Ovid, Epistulae Ex Ponto, Book 3, no. 10, 1. 5

Fluminaque obliquis einxit declivia ripis;
Quae, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa;
In mare perveniunt partim, campoque recepta
Liberioris aquae pro ripis litora pulsant.
He confined the rivers within their sloping banks;
Which in different places are part absorbed by the earth;
Part reach the sea, and being received within the plain;
Of its freer waters, beat the shore for banks.
Ovid Met. I. 39

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Lying like short curls of thread thrown onto a map, the protected rivers remain strongholds of the free-flow and
refuges of the riparian Eden, of the mountain farmer and the rural landowner. The rivers are stretched-out green
reserves overflowing with life, potential, and promise.
Tim Palmer, The Wild and Scenic Rivers of America

Rivers are exquisite in their abilities to nurture life, sublime in functioning detail, impressive in contributions of global significance.
Tim Palmer, Lifelines

Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills, fears. People
stare into the moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire. What is it that draws and holds us? The
rivers' reflections of our lives and experiences are endless . . .
Tim Palmer, Lifelines

Streams represent constant rebirth. The water flows in, forever new, yet forever the same; they complete a journey
from beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again.
Tim Palmer, Lifelines

The river is the center of the land, the place where the waters, and much more, come together. Here is the home of
wildlife, the route of explorers, and recreation paradise. . . . Only fragments of our inheritance remain unexploited,
but these streams are more valuable than ever.
Tim Palmer, Lifelines

Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills and fears. People
stare into the moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire. What is it that draws and holds us? The
rivers' reflections of our lives and experiences are endless. The water calls up our own ambitions of flowing with
ease, of navigating the unknown. Streams represent constant rebirth. The waters flow in, forever new, yet forever
the same; they complete a journey from beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again.
Tim Palmer - From Lifelines

Dead fish indicate that trouble for people is not far behind
Tim Palmer, America by Rivers

If you want the rainbow, you've got to put up with a little rain.
Dolly Parton

Rivers are roads that move.
Blaise Pascal:  Pense'es, vii, 1670

Rivers are highways that move on, and bear us whither we wish to go.
Blaise Pascal,Thoughts. Chap. ix. 38.

Rivers are highways that move on, and bear us whither we wish to go.
Blaise Paschl,Thoughts, Ibid. Chap. 9,38

The physical rhythm of life established through sensitivity to
qualitative time mirrors the ebb and flow of water. Maintaining
rhythm is dependent on our daily decisions concerning vocation,
recreation and work. Using the image of water roots Watershed
Spirituality in diversity and pluralism. Life in a "variety of forms"
implies an emphasis on inter-religious appreciation
and the universalist vision.
Arthur Paul Patterson, Watershed Spirituality

The metaphor of the river allows me to use imagination and information, thought and knowledge, poetry and science.
Judy Pearson, President's Speech to the 2003 NCA Convention

The earth holds a silver treasure, cupped between ocean bed and tenting sky. Forever the heavens spend it, in the showers that refresh our temperate lands, the torrents that sluice the tropics. Every suckling root absorbs it, the very soil drains it down; the rivers run unceasing to the sea, the mountains yield it endlessly….Yet none is lost; in vast convection our water is returned, from soil to sky, and sky to soil, and back again. To fall as pure as blessing. There was never less; there could never be more. A mighty mercy on which life depends, for all its glittering shifts water is constant.
Donald Culross Peattie and Noel Peattie, A Cup of Sky, 1950

It has been related that dogs drink at the river Nile running along, that they may not be seized by the crocodiles.
Phaedrus, Book i. Fable 25, 3.

Don't empty the water jar until the rain falls.
Philippine proverb

Water is the best of all things.
Pindar (C. 522-C. 438 B.C.), Olympian Odes

Water rises in mist, freezes into hail, swells in waves, falls headlong in torrents; air becomes thick with clouds and rages with storms; but earth is kind and gentle and indulgent, ever a handmaid in the service of mortals, producing under our compulsion, or lavishing of her own accord, what scents and savours, what juices, what surfaces for the touch, what colours! How honestly she repays the interest lent her!
Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79), Natural History, A.D. 77

Water is the principle, or the element, of things
All things are water.
Plutarch, (about A.D. 46-after A.D. 119), Placita philosophorum

Using the proverb frequently in their mouths who enter upon dangerous and bold attempts, “The die is cast,” he took the river.
Plutarch, Life of Cæsar.

For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have
lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that
water supports.
We have been quick to assume rights to use water but slow to recognize obligations to preserve and protect it...
In short, we need a water ethic--a guide to right conduct in the face of complex decisions about natural systems we
do not and cannot fully understand.
Sandra Postel, Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity

I wish to make it clear to you, there is not sufficient water to irrigate all the lands which could be irrigated, and only a small portion can be irrigated….I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict!
John Wesley Powell, Speech, Los Angeles International Irrigation Conference, 1893
 

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Altissima quæque flumina minimo sono labi (The deepest rivers flow
with the least sound).
Q. Curtius, vii. 4. 13.

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Passions are likened best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.
Sir Walter Raleigh, the Silent Lover, Prelude

Who owns Cross Creek? The redbirds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages. And after I am dead, who am childless, the human ownership of grove and field and hammock is hypothetical. But a long line of redbirds and whippoorwills and blue-jays and ground doves will descend from the present owners of nests in the orange trees, and their claim will be less subject to dispute than that of any human heirs. Houses are individual and can be owned, like nests, and fought for. But what of the land? It seems to me that the Earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers it seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

One could almost say, then, that the history of the Colorado River contains a metaphor for our time. One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam--fifty-year flowering of hopes when all things appeared possible. And one could say that amid the salt-encrusted sands of the river's dried-up delta, we began to founder on the Era of Limits.
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986

There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow
that is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace, even for a day, changes us, reminds us of other
rhythms beyond the sound of our own heartbeats.
Jeff Rennicke, River Days: Travels on Western Rivers, A Collection of Essays

Rivers are ribbons that tie us to the spirit of the land.                                                      
Jeff Rennicke

According to Democritus, truth lies at the bottom of a well, the water
of which serves as a mirror in which objects may be reflected. I have
heard, however, that some philosophers, in seeking for truth, to pay
homage to her, have seen their own image and adored it instead.
Charles Richter

Life processes take place in an aqueous medium. All organisms are
composed mostly of water, whether they dwell in the oceans, lakes,
and rivers, or on the land. Because the physical and chemical properties
of water are well suited to the requirements of life, it is no accident that
life is a water-based phenomenon.
Robert E. Ricklefs, Ecology

It ain't no use to grumble and complain;
It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice;
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain,
Why, rain's my choice.
James Whitcomb Riley, Rain, 1849 – 1916

Becoming Water...
...I no longer relate to me. I am pure water-yet more. I flow in the river that contains me... I no longer experience
through eyes or ears. I perceive. I am a liquid that fills every part of the Earth. I can feel the consciousness of the
Earth, the rhythm of its breath. I flow among the dense particles of solid rock, knowing the rock's consciousness.
I am all puddles, ponds, lakes, and oceans.
No longer an isolated entity, I flow in savage splendor down rocky ravines, laughing as the sound of torrential,
thundering water bounces and echoes from the rocks. I lie in calm tranquility in icy, land-locked lakes containing the
fish that swim in my sluggish depths. I am rain falling from the skies, and, frozen, I fall as snow.
...I flow toward the sea...
Michael J. Roads, Journey into Nature: A Spiritual Adventure

Water is a very good servant, but it is a cruel master.
C.G.D. Roberts, Adrift in America, 1891

A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness, it rolls a bank of fog across the wild
morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier, the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bog
meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.
Theodore Goodridge Roberts, The Blue Heron

I like rivers
Better than oceans, for we see both sides.
An ocean is forever asking questions
And writing them aloud along the shore
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Roman Bartholow, Part 111

I came where the river
Ran over stones;
My ears knew
An early joy.
And all the waters
Of all the streams
Sang in my veins
That summer day.
Theodore Roethke, The Waking, 1948

Sumpul
The afternoon has fallen into black dust,
And from the dust emerges death.
In the red river we swam, desperate to live.
We splashed in its water and then,
Bruised, we were floated by them.
From the river the massacred body arose.
Sumpul drowned in blood,
Sumpul deafened by the shots,
River turned red,
River swollen with anguish,
Witnessing river, your hidden heart
Containing the anonymous screams of martyrs--
Of children, tender shoots,
Of mothers, fruiting trees
And old ones, ancient oaks
Facing you is Yankee torture,
Murderous sounds and the growl of the dog,
Splattering this universe with shrapnel,
Splitting open pregnant stars,
Slashing the face of the peasant.

Beast, take note:
The worker's face will carry this scar.
River,
We seek your water made holy by force,
And with it anoint our arms,
With reddened eyes.
In a single, slaughtered droplet we watch
The sun, its hopeful yellow;
In its yellow is a future,
A victor, a triumph, a people.
In your winding current
We seek the wide and war-injured reflection of the people
Confronting a vast machine;
Their last words cursing despotism
Their words like weapons, their body a shield,
Their ideals, pure light.

I want to respond to the screams of the people,
To fixed eyes shooting off hatred,
To hoist your spirit in the fighting flags of guns.
I salute you with each shot aimed at the enemy
I swear to remember you in our future land,
And in the sky brimming with stars,
And in the first maize field of winter,
And in the waters of every river where I live.
Jose Alejandro Romero, A Salvadoran emigrant

Where the stream went (its future, so to speak) I had no idea. Where it came from (its past), same thing. What do you know of someone you meet in the middle of his course, that flat, deep stretch of now that is all you get at first acquaintance?
Bill Roorbach, Temple Stream, Letters from Maine

Then there’s the outflow pipe, flowing nicely, about ten inches in diameter (this is a small town, and not everyone’s on town water, so the pipe is small, too) – faint smell of chlorine, the town anus perfumed.
Bill Roorbach, Temple Stream, Letters from Maine

I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes – hills and streams and plains – the mountains over our land and nature’s wealth deep under the earth -- are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

The public must retain control of the great waterways.  It is essential that any permit to obstruct them for reasons and on conditions that seem good at the moment should be subject to revision when changed conditions demand.
Teddy Roosevelt, 1908

All earth's full rivers can not fill
The sea that drinking thirsteth still.
Christina Georgina Rossett, By the Sea.
 

A river does not just happen; it has a beginning and and end. Its story is written in rich earth, in ice, and in
water-carved stone, and its story as the lifeblood of the land is filled with colour, music and thunder.
Andy Russell, The Life of a River

Every peasant is proud of the pond in his village because from it he measures the sea.
Russian proverb

CHROMO
This old river town saw the
Early steamboats.
The line of wharf and houses is a faded chromo.
It is bleached and bitten standing
To steady the sunrises.
Carl Sandburg, Honey and Salt

LESSON
In early April the trees
End their winter waiting
With a creep of green on branches.

In early October the trees
Listen for a wind crying,
For leaves whirling.

The face of the river by night
Holds a scatter of stars
And the silence of summer blossoms
Falling to the moving water.

Come clean with the child heart.
Laugh as peaches in the summer wind.
Let rain on the house roof be a song.
Let the writing on your face
Be a smell of apple orchards in late June.
Carl Sandburg, Honey and Salt
 

In the Western United States, water flows uphill to money.
Glen Sanders

People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves
of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the
ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by
themselves without wondering.
Saint Augustine

Believe one who knows: You will find something greater in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you
that which you can never learn from masters.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistles 

In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy.
John Sawhill, The Nature Conservancy 

Water is the formless potential out of which creation emerged. It is the ocean of unconsciousness enveloping the islands of consciousness. Water bathes us at birth and again at death, and in between it washes away sin. It is by turns the elixir of life or the renewing rain or the devastating flood.
Praised be Thou, O Lord, for sister water, who is very useful, humble, precious, and chaste.
St. Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Sun

In the western United States, water flows up hill to money
Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center

To serve the cause of water adequately... We must get to know it in its true being. And how do we do this? Why, by treating it in the very way exemplified by its own behavior; that is, whenever we encounter it, we wash the tablet of our souls clean of all other impressions in order to allow the being of water to make its imprint on us.
Theodor Schwenk, Water: The Element of Life

STREAMS
I so love water-laughter,
Its bubbling flecks and gleams,
I pray in the hereafter
There somewhere may be streams.
I’d have for my companion
In some celestial nook,
Beneath a spreading banyan,
The music of a brook.
Its measures would entice me,
Uncumbered by the clay,
Its melody suffice me
Till drooped the heavenly day.
Then its all-liquid laughter
Would murmur through my dreams;
I pray in the hereafter,
There somewhere may be streams.
Clinton Scollard

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steel through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honour or observation.
Sir Walter Scott

Hie Away, Hie Away
Hie Away, Hie Away,
Over bank and over brae,
Where the copsewood is the greenest,
Where the fountains glisten sheenest,
Where the morning dew lies longest,
Where the black-cock sweetest sips it,
Where the fairy latest trips it:
Hei to haunts right seldom seen,
Lovely, lonesome, cool and green,
Over bank and over brae,
Hie Away, Hie Away.
Sir Walter Scott

Like the dew on the mountain,
Like the foam on the river,
Like the bubble on the fountain,
Thou art gone, and forever!
Sir Walter Scott, Lady of the Lake. Canto iii. Stanza 16.

All things are connected, like the blood that runs in your family…The water's murmur is the voice of my father's
father.
Chief Seattle 

The earth does not belong to any man; Man belongs to the earth. This we know.
All things are connected like the blood, which unites one family. All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in
it. What he does to the web, he does to himself. This we know.
Chief Seattle, 1854

The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell
you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must
henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.
Chief Seattle – 1854 

Cleaning up a river is a cause worth fighting for…. We had allowed some people to make good profit along the Hudson and then go somewhere else to enjoy clear water.
Peter Seeger, quoted in The Cousteau Almanac, 1980

When you hear the splash
Of the water drops that fall
Into the stone bowl
You will feel that all the dust
Of your mind is washed away.
Sen-No-Rikyu

He snapped, "I'm the Lorax who speaks for the trees
which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please.
But I'm also in charge of the Brown Bar-ba-loot suits
who play in the shade in their Bar-ba-loot suits
and happily lived, eating Truffula Fruits."
"NOW . . . thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground
there's not enough Truffula Fruit to go 'round.
And my poor Bar-ba-loots are all getting the crummies
because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies!"
"They loved living here. But I can't let them stay.
They have to find food. And I hope that they may.
Good luck, boys," he cried. And he sent them away.. . .
"You're glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed!
No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed.
So I'm sending them off. Oh their future is dreary.
They'll walk on their fins and get woefully weary
in search of some water that isn't so smeary."
And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack!
From outside in the fields came a sickening smack
of an axe on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall.
The very last Truffula Tree of them all!
The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance . . .
just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance . . .
as he lifted himself by the seat of the pants.
And I'll never forget the grim look on his face
when he heisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.
. . .
"But now" says the Once-ler,
"Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not."
"SO . . .
Catch!" calls the Once-ler.
He lets something fall.
"It's a Truffula Seed.
It's the last one of all!
You're in charge of the last Truffula Seeds.
And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs.
Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care.
Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack.
Then the Lorax
and all of his friends
can come back."
Dr. Seuss, The Lorax 

Here's that which is too weak to be a sinner,
Honest water, which  ne'er left man l' the mire.  
William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens. Line 60

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees,
books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It

As WATER is in WATER
Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 4, Scene 12, 1, 2)

A little WATER clears us of this deed
Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, 1.68

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea Contagious fogs; which
falling in the land Hath every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, II, III, 1

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

A little fire is quickly trodden out;
Which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench.
William Shakespeare,King Henry VI. Part III. Act iv. Sc. 8.

A little water clears us of this deed
Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, 1.68

That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimms, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water
Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 4, Scene 12, 1, 2

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cloud, 1792 – 1822

The care of rivers is not a question of rivers,
but of the human heart.
Tanako Shozo

Clean water is not an expenditure of Federal funds; clean water is an investment in the future of our country.
Bob Shuster, U.S. Representative, quoted in Washington Post, 9 January 1987

The river is life-water. What we do with it affects the life of the people, the life of the animals, the life of the river
and the life of the waters. This is true for the world, not just for Brazil, but for the world.
Fulgêncio Manoel da Silva

Like a bridge over troubled water,
I will lay me down
Paul Simon, Song

I have left almost to the last the magic of water, an element which owing to its changefulness of form and mood and color and to the vast range of its effects is ever the principal source of landscape beauty, and has like music a mysterious influence over the mind.
Sir George Sitwell, On the Making of Gardens, 1909

The five excellences include: calligraphy, painting, poetry, medicine, and t'ai chi chuan.
I have left almost to the last the magic of water, an element which owing to
its changefulness of form and mood and colour and to the vast range of its
effects is ever the principal source of landscape beauty, and has like music
a mysterious influence over the mind.
Sir George Sitwell, On the Making of Gardens, 1909

DRIFTWOOD
Driftwood marks the shore
The alphabet of ancients
Writing a last word.
Daniel Smythe

Kind of familial branching, a chart of relationships, and a definition of place. The watershed is the first and last
nation whose boundaries, though subtly shifting, are unarguable.                                                                        
Gary Snyder

Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers'
            holding or releasing; streaming through all
            our bodies salty seas
                        in our minds so be it 

Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
            fording a stream
            barefoot, pants rolled up
            holding boots, pack on
            sunshine, ice in the shallows
            northern rockies.
Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
Stones turn underfoot, small and hard on toes
            cold nose dripping
            singing inside
            creek music,  heart music,
            smell of sun on gravel.
            I pledge allegiance.
I pledge allegiance to the soil
            of Turtle Island
            one ecosystem
            in diversity,
            under the sun--
With joyful interpretation for all.
Gary Snyder, Earth Prayers from Around the World, 1991

Standing up on lifted, folded rock
looking out and down--
The creek falls to a far valley.
hills beyond that
facing, half-forested, dry
--clear sky
strong wind in the
stiff glittering needle clusters
of the pine--their brown
round trunk bodies
straight, still,
rustling trembling limbs and twigs
listen.
This living flowing land
is all there is, forever
We are it
it sings through us--
We could live on this Earth
Without clothes or tools!
Gary Snyder, Earth Prayers from Around the World, 1991

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.
Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again…
It was rare and comforting to waken late and hear the undiminished shouting of the water in the night. And at sunup it was still there, powerful and incessant; with the slant sun tangled in its rainbow spray, the grass blue with wetness, and the air heady as ether and scented with campfire smoke.
By such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old. Every sense applauds it. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth; it is purity absolute. Watch its racing current, its steady renewal of force: it is transient and eternal. And listen again to its sounds: get far enough away so that the noise of falling tons of water does not stun the ears, and hear how much is going on underneath—a whole symphony of smaller sounds, hiss and splash and gurgle, the small talk of side channels, the whisper of flown and scattered spray gathering itself and beginning to flow again, secret and irresistible, among the wet rocks.
Wallace Stegner, Sound of Mountain Water

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
Wallace Steger, Earth Prayers from Around the World, 1991

WHERE GO THE BOATS
Dark Brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along forever,
With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
Ccastles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating
Where will all come home?

On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.

Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Child’s Garden of Verses

LOOKING GLASS RIVER
Smooth it glides upon its travel,
Here a wimple, there a gleam –
O the clean gravel!
O the smooth stream!

Sailing blossoms, silver fishes,
Paven pools as clear as air –
How a child wishes
To live down there!

We can see our coloured faces
Floating on the shaken pool
Down in cool places,
Dim and very cool;

Till a wind or water wrinkle,
Dipping marten, plumping trout,
Spreads in a twinkle
And blots all out.

See the rings pursue each other;
All below grows black as night,
Just as if mother
Had blown out the light!

Patience, children, just a minute –
See the spreading circles die,
The stream and all in it
Will clear by-and-by.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Child’s Garden of Verses


Looking-Glass rivers project Smooth it slides upon its travel,
Here a wimple, there a gleam.
O the clean gravel!
O the smooth stream!
Sailing blossoms, silver fishes,
Paven pools as clear as air.
How a child wishes
To live down there!
We can see our colored faces
Floating on the shaken pool
Down in cool places
Dim and very cool;
Till a wind or water wrinkle,
Dipping marten, plumping trout,
Spreads in a twinkle
And blots all out.
See the Rings pursue each other;
All below grows black as night,
Just as if mother
Had blown out the light! 
Patience Children, just a minute.
See the spreading circles die;
The stream and all in it
Will clear by-and-by.
Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses

Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along forever,
With trees on either hand.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Where go the Boats? Stanza 1

There's no music like a little river's.  It plays the same tune (and that's the favourite)
Over and over again, and yet does not weary of it like men fiddlers.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Prince Otto. Chap.2

The River, on…
The river, on from mill to mill,
Flows past our childhood’s garden still:
But, ah! We children never more
Shall watch it from the water-door!
Below the yew it still is there—
Our phantom voices haunt the air
As we were still at play,
And I can hear them call and say:
“How far is it to Babylon?”

Ah, far enough, my dear,
Far, far enough from here—
Yet you have farther gone!
“Can I get there by candlelight?”
So goes the old refrain.
I do not know – perchance you might—
But only children hear it right.
Ah! never to return again!
The eternal dawn beyond a doubt,
Shall break on hill and plain,
And put all stars and candles out,
Ere we be young again.
Robert Lewis Stevenson

Drought
There had never been a summer like it.
The sun burned down, day after day, from a sky that had forgotten rain. The grass was brunt in the parched fields. The cattle, ribs showing, eyes staring, swayed in the relentless heat, and gave no milk.
The little pigs sickened and died
Water was rationed. Only from six until eight in the morning could they fill the buckets, and take water to the troughs. After that, the taps were dry.
The river was only a memory. The clay was mottled and barred, and cracked and hard. There was a shallow pool in the center of the lake, which was scummed and foul.
The world had narrowed to a few dry fields; to a herd of dying cattle: to endless work, so that hands were blistered and sore from carrying metal handles that held the sun, and burned the dry skin.
Not even nightfall brought peace, for the nights were hot, and lightning flickered continu0ously, and thunder rumbled ominously. Yet no drop of rain fell.
There were mirages on the fields. Clear cool water lying in the hollows, blue as the summer sun. The farmer and his wife ran to them. They vanished, without a trace, leaving only a memory and another beckoning lake in the far distance.
The farmer grew thin and gaunt and angry. His temper flickered with the lightning. Unable to rail at his God, he railed at his wife, searing her with his tongue, as the sun seared the fields.
There was only one sanctuary.
There was water for just one hour every morning; and her spirit broke. One night, as the sun vanished in a long flare of red, she walked barefoot to the little church.
She was a small woman, made smaller by her weariness. Her shoulders bowed, aching, from the constant carrying of buckets; from the constant need to bury the dying animals; from the constant fear that their troubles were driving her man mad.
She stood in the doorway.
The lamp burned at the feet of the carved Madonna, with her serene face, and with her child cradled against her. She was the essence of peace; the reminder of a time long ago when the farmer's wife had been a child and had leaned against her father's strength on such a night as this.
He had held her close when the storm raged, and comforted her, and told her there was nothing to fear. She longed for him now.
She longed to be a child again, and unaware of adult woes.
She put out her finger, and traced the pattern of Mary's robe. It was etched in dust. She took her handkerchief and tried to clean the statue. The lamp burned low. The shadows moved. The lightning flashed four times on the walls.
And then came darkness.
The farmer's wife knelt and crossed herself.
Should the lightning kill her, she would die in front of her God.
Holy Mary, have pity on us, for we are miserable sinners.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Forgive my man, for the drought is driving him mad, and I cannot help him.
The whole town feared the drought and feared the storm and longed for rain. Children cried fretfully, tossing off clinging sheets that were damp against small bodies. Parents, wakeful, made cups of tea, careful with the water, and watched the flickering sky.
A police car prowled slowly along lamplit streets, windows wide, the men, sweltering, sitting in shirtsleeves, watching the shadows fly before them, banished by the headlights' glare.
They passed the other church, where the vicar of the parish kept his own vigil. He was an old man, white-haired, thin-faced, and so kind that the suffering of his parishioners was a constant torment. He feared for the world in which he lived. Fire and flood; famine and earthquake; war, and men who found a high pleasure in killing, born with bloodlust that was worse than that of the beasts of the jungle, for they only killed to eat and live.
He was afraid of the ceaseless flickering light beyond the town, over the bare moors; it lighted the town.
There was a rustle in the church.
A rat fled along the pews and vanished down a hole. The vicar hated rats.
There were rats in the other church too. The heat had brought them out of the ground in search of water. The farmer's wife saw the sudden scurry and the wicked eyes, and the twisting tail, and went out into the night, afraid now of her own church.
She needed company, but she did not know where to find it.
There were lights in the other church. She walked towards it, head bowed, afraid of the night; afraid of the scorching sun; afraid of her own frailty. She hesitated at the lighted door, but her need for companionship was great.
She went inside.
The church was austere. Bare white walls, and high arched ceiling, with pillars that soared out of sight, hidden by shadows. The altar was covered in a white cloth, and on it was a silver crucifix. The vicar turned his head and smiled at her, welcoming her, although he had never seen her before.
Behind her, shadowy, came a cat. The cat was thirsty too. He lived wild, party of a factory at the edge of the town, but the men had so little water now that they had forgotten the cat. It was a large tabby; it came to the vicar and purred and rubbed against his legs.
It leaped to the font and drank.
The woman gasped, thinking this sacrilege. She would have chased the animal out of the church, but the old man smiled at her again.
"Even the fall of a sparrow," he said softly. "Would God deny a little cat a drink of water?"
There was no sound in the church but the soft lapping.
The cat leaped to the ground and weaved between the old man's legs, while light flashed on the white-washed walls, splashed through the stained-glass windows, bathing the altar in blood; flared on the pews and the lectern.
The old man knelt.
Our father, who art in heaven…
The woman whispered softly under her breath.
Mary, have mercy upon us, for we are miserable sinners.
The cat crept between the old man, and the farmer's wife, glad of company. They kept vigil together in the dusty church. Dust motes danced in the candle beams.
Out on the moors a young fox was dreaming of water. Water, clear and cool, sparkling over grey rocks; water, deep and green, in pools under the trees. He lapped at it, and woke and tried to lick cracked lips, but he had no saliva.
Water!
He needed it to save his life. He had not drunk for three days. He had tried to drink from the sheep trough, but the farmer, defending his water with his gun, had shot across the beast's back. The shot had grazed him, and the wound was sore.
Stiff-legged, the fox loped into town, sniffing the air. There was no water n the moors. There might be water in the gutters, in the endless streets. Sometimes he raided dustbins there.
He tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry.
The storm was mounting. Thunder rumbled continuously, lightning sheeted and forked and cracked. Terrified children screamed; dogs crept under beds, or into cup-boards, anywhere out of the repeated glare, wanting only to hide their eyes in the dark.
The houses were awake. Red-eyed men in need of a shave went downstairs to make tea with the carefully husbanded water left from the day before. There would be no water until eight in the morning.
Water.
It was more precious than gold. More precious not than anything else that men possessed. It was worth stealing; worth fighting for. All suffered alike. Money could not buy an extra drink; money could not buy an extra bucketful; money could not fill the empty reservoirs.
In the valleys the once drowned housed stood up against the sky, ghost homes risen from the water; doors gaped empty, windows frames held no glass; the tower of the old Norman church stood square again, and gulls roosted on the slimed green stones.
The rocks in the streambeds that fed the reservoirs were baked by the sun, and barely cool to the touch at night.
The fox crossed the dry streambed. The rocks rolled beneath him. He slipped and fell, and lay still, exhausted, until lightning cleaved the dark again, and he dragged himself erect.
The way had never seemed so long. The path was endless. Step by slow step he crept along it, his body aching, his legs feeble, his heart pounding.
Suddenly, thin on the air, clear and cool, came the sound of a hunting horn.
The fox paused, one leg raised, ears pricked.
Clear and high, mellow and sweet.
The View Halloo.
And then the sound of a galloping horse and a long howling.
The fox ran.
He ran from memory. He ran from fear. He ran from terror. He ran from the baying of the hounds. He leaped the brook, though it had long forgotten water. He dived through bramble cover, tearing his fur and skin, so that his shoulder bled, and his dusty mask bled and there was a bead of blood on the end of his dry nose. He licked at it. It was wet.
He ran through a drainpipe and out at the other end.
He leaped along the trunk of a fallen tree and at the end of it6 cleared seven feet as he jumped to break his scent. He circled, but there was no water to foil the trail.
The horn sounded again.
In the church, the farmer's wife stared at the vicar and crossed herself. There had been no huntsman in the village for many years, through the children said that on stormy nights, when the lightning dazzled in a summer sky, he hunted again over paths he once had known so well.
The minister watched the lightning play on the walls, and listened to the thunder of phantom hooves and the sound of a phantom horn. He prayed for rain.
Father have mercy.
Thy children are sinful, but they know not what they do.
Gracious Lord, have pity on us.
Holy Father, send us rain; rain to drown the pestilence; rain to flood the reservoirs; rain to wash us clean again.
H thought of the days of his youth, spent with his father and mother in a far away mission house.
Swimming in a still lagoon; in a tropical sea, palm trees dark against a vivid sky. Then college in England and a forest stream in a southern county, where the trout grew fat and flashed to the hook, silver arches with gleaming scales. Would there ever be fish again?
He thought of trees. Of deep green shade, and water dripping from the branches; of water streaming down the trunks, of raindrops dancing on the roof of the church.
There was a dry patter.
Was it rain?
He ran to the door to look out, forgetting the cat, who leaped up, startled and indignant, and then curled itself again at the base of the altar, not wishing to brave the noisy night.
It was not rain.
It was the dusty footsteps of a driven fox, fleeing f4rom the phantom horn. The beast ran down the road, and behind it came the soft shimmer of light, light that was hidden when the lightning flashed.
The horn sounded again.
Long, and low, and sad, calling to unseen hounds.
Hoofbeats thundered on the ground and behind them came the drumroll of thunder in the hills. Lightning flashed on an empty road, and a small fox, running, his strength almost spent.
The fox ran into the church.
The vicar closed the door.
The beast lay quiet, his sides heaving. His eyes closed. His dusty coat spread over the worn carpet, as if he had been spilled by a careless hand. His open mouth panted, sucking the dry air deep inside him.
There was a silver chalice on the altar.
Inside the cupboard were the precious bottles of holy water. The vicar took one, and opened it, and filled the chalice. The fox heard the sound, and opened his eyes, but he could not move. Exhaustion had claimed him.
The vicar could not allow the fox to die, there in his church, within reach of life.
Thunder rolled again.
The horn sounded again, faint and far away.
The old man sat on the edge of the pew, his knees aching from too long contact with the hard stone floor. The cat turned his head and saw the fox. He did not move. He had known thirst too.
The old man bent and set the chalice in front of the fox.
The farmer's wife watched, fascinated, knowing the fox was the enemy that raided her hen run; that took the dying lambs; that stole the water from the troughs. But she could not deny him drink.
Once again there was the sound of slow lapping.
The chalice was empty.
The old man filled it three times before the fox was done with drinking.
He ceased lapping.
But there was still a sound.
The sound of falling water. Of raindrops, hitting the hard stone roof; beating on the pavements, slipping down the glass of the windows.
Rain
The vicar flung wide the door. The fox ran into the night, and stood, rain beating against his coat, mouth lifted to the sky, rain falling into his throat, rain soothing his aching eyes.
Rain!
The cat ran into the rain and stood, mouth lifted too.
The vicar stood in the rain and the woman ran into the rain, feeling it wet against dry parched skin, wet against dusty hair, wet against clothes that had need a wash for days.
People flocked into the rain, raced through the rain, held out their arms and lifted their faces, and then, driven by one thought, turned towards the church, wet and weary, a sodden army, to thank their God for the end of the drought.
The fox and the cat vanished into the night.
The farmer's wife crossed herself, and thanked her God, and walked through the night to the farm where she found her husband standing in the yard, his face turned up to the sky, a smile on his lips. He took her hand and they walked to the gate, and watched the cattle lift heir heads too, and saw them move, and saw the old horse come out from beneath the trees, and stand rock still savoring rain. Rain, to swell the streams and fill the reservoirs. Rain, to wash the cattle clean and lay the dust, and freshen the sere leaves of trees that had forgotten water.
Out on the moors, the fox stood in the growing stream, feeling the water cool dry pads and soothe aching bones. The cat lapped at a pool, knowing joy.
Even the rats drank.
The thunder died away. The lightning ceased to flash. Only the rain poured down, steadily relentlessly, blessing the parched land.
In the church, the vicar spoke to a massed congregation.
The lord moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.
Voices lifted. Praise my soul, the King of Heaven.
The woman and the man in the farmyard heard it and echoed the words.
Only one child in the congregation did not sing. He was staring at a silver chalice that glittered on the worn carpet, and wondering why it was there.
The vicar saw it, and remembered, and smiled to himself.
He listened to the rain, and the far away sweet echoes of a hunting horn, and the beat of phantom hooves on the ground, and hoped that the fox was safe in his earth, and then he lifted his head and led the praise again.
He blessed the congregation.
They stood in the streets, faces lifted to the sky, unable to believe that now the drought was ended.
They brought out pans, and held them to fill.
Dawn brought a rain washed sky, and the sound of birds, singing their own praises for water, a rising crescendo of ecstatic noise that continued long after the shadows had been chased away by light.
Joyce Stranger, The Monastery Cat and Other Animals, 1982
 

You must learn to run your kayak by a sort of ju-jitsu. You must learn to tell what the river will do to you, and given those parameters see how you can live with it. You must absorb its force and convert it to your uses as best you can. Even with the quickness and agility of a kayak, you are not faster than the river, nor stronger, and you can beat it only by understanding it.
Strung, Curtis and Perry, Whitewater

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.
Swedish Proverb

Don't throw away the old bucket until you know whether the new one holds water.
Swedish proverb

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives forever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Algernon Charles Swinburne

O river, river, never yet
Was half your glory sung;
And never skill of painter’s brush
Nor praise of poet’s tongue
Shall half reveal the majesty,
The charm, the primal grace
That clothe you and attend your ways
And shine from out your face.
Frederick Oakes Sylvester, Principia College

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To give a cup of water; yet its draught
Of cool refreshment, drained by fevered lips,
May give a shock of pleasure to the frame
More exquisite than when nectarean juice
Renews the life of joy in happiest hours.
Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, Ion. Act 1, Sc. 2

same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was…water move, water move…
Talking Heads

Being is epitomized, not by impenetrable rocks, but by waves spreading themselves over the surface of the sea. These perfectly exemplify change, and the eternally changeless. —
Richard Taylor, With Heart and Mind

There is not any one town or city which hath
            A navigable river at it that is poor, nor scarce
            Any that are rich which want a river with the
            Benefit of boats.
John Taylor: A New Discovery by Sea. 1623

"To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same -- follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road."
Edwin Way Teale

"I chatter, chatter as I flow to join the brimming river, for men may come and men may go, but I go on forever."
Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Brook, 1887

Till last by Philip’s farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Brook

The Brook
I come from haunts of coot and tern,
I make a sudden sally
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges
By thirty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Brook

Water sustains all.
Thales of Miletus

Day
Waking one morning
In a pleasant land,
By a river flowing
Over golden sand: --

Whence flow ye, waters,
O’er your golden sand?
We come flowing
From the Silent Land.

Whither flow ye, waters,
O’er your golden sand?
We go flowing
To the Silent Land.

And what is this fair realm?
A grain of golden sand
In the great darkness
Of the Silent Land.
James Thomson

Take everything as it comes; the wave passes, deal with the next one
Tom Thomson, 1877-1917

Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents."
Henry David Thoreau

Water is the only drink for a wise man.
Henry David Thoreau

A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "The Ponds" (1854).

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.  I drink at it; but I but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.  Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.  I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.  I cannot count one.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything." We go to the river's edge for comfort, spiritual renewal, meditation, solitude; we go to the river to feel and know the continuance of life.
Henry David Thoreau

It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went.
Henry David Thoreau

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air
and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

I was born upon thy bank, river,
My blood flows in thy stream,
And thou meanderest forever
At the bottom of my dream
Henry David Thoreau, Journals (1906), 1842 entry.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools,
but the gentle touches of air and
water working at their leisure
with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau, Earth prayers from Around the World, 1991

What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other travel. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois;paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau

I keep some portion of my early gleam;
Brokenly bright, like moonbeams on a river,
It lights my life, a far illusive dream,
Moves as I move, and leads me on forever.
Two score and ten.
John Townsend Trowbridge

"...As scientists understand more and more about the interdependence not only of living things but of rocks,
rivers--the whole of the univers--I am left in awe that I, too, am a part of this tremendous miracle.  Not only am I a part of this pulsating network, but I am an indispensable part. It is not only theology that teaches me this, but it is the truth that environmentalists shout from the rooftops.  Every living creature is an essential part of the whole
Desmond Tutu

“What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water?---Drink this slush?”
“Can’t you drink it?”
“I could if I had some other water to wash it down with.”
Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affected the water’s mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent, bank-carving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it hold nearly an acre of land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese. If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and you will find them both good: the one is good to eat, the other is good to drink. The land is very nourishing, the water is thouroughly wholesome. The one appeases hunger; the other thirst. But the natives do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them. When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of the glass, they stir it up and then take the draught as they would gruel. It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once used to it, he will prefer it to water. This is really the case. It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for all other purposes, except baptizing.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississppi

I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning…the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its milewide tide along, shining in the sun.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

The face of the river, in time, became a wonderful book . . . which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

"It was a kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't even feel like talking loud, and it wasn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of low chuckle.
Mark Twain

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

The Mississippi River towns are comely, clean, well built, and pleasing to the eye, and cheering to the spirit. The Mississippi Valley is as reposeful as dreamland, nothing worldly about...nothing to hang a fret or worry upon.
Mark Twain

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
Mark Twain

Whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting about.
Mark Twain, attributed, late 19th century

Brimming Water
Under my feet the moon
Glides along the river.
Near midnight, a gusty lantern
Shines in the heart of the night.
Among the sandbars flocks
Of white egrets roost,
Each one clenched like a fist.
In the wake of my barge
The fish leap, cut the water,
And dive and splash
Tu Fu

The lapping of lake water
Is like the weeping of women,
The fertile tears of women
That water the dreams of men.
Jean Star Untermeyer, Growing Pains, 1886

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, 1989

For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the animal kingdom that is comparable to a river.
Henry Van Dyke

It is with rivers as it is with people:  the greatest are not always the most agreeable
Nor the best to live with.
Henry van Dyke, Little Rivers, Chap. 2

Hills may exalt the spirit; rivers cleanse and soothe it. Seas and forests awe men by their vastness; rivers are informal and companionable. One part of a woodland is pretty much like the rest of it; dozens of mountains resemble each other; no single acre of oceans, lake or pond differs perceptibly from the remainder. No one has ever seen two rivers that were identical for a furlong. No one ever will.
Frederic F. Van de Water, In Defense of Worms, 1949

Only when humankind respects the integrity of creation, in conformity to God’s providential plan, will we reach a true appreciation of the significance of water in creation and form mankind.
Vatican, Water, an Essential Element for Life, 2003

Dear Stream!  Dear bank, where often I
Have sat and pleased my pensive eye,
Why, since each drop of they quick store
Runs thither whence it flowed before,
Should poor souls fear a shade or night,
Who came, sure, from a sea of light?
Or since those drops are all sent back
So sure to thee, that none doth lack,
Why should frail flesh doubt any more
That what god takes He'll not restore?
Henry Vaughan, The Waterfall

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that
Which comes, so with time present.
Leonardo da Vinci, From his notebooks, translated by Edward McCurdy 

If you gave me several million years, there would be nothing that did not grow in beauty if it were surrounded by water.
Jan Erik Vold, What All the World Knows, 1970

Then Heaven, the Father Almighty, comes down in fruitful showers
into the lap of his joyous spouse, and his might, with her mighty frame
commingling, nurtures all growths.
Georgics Virgil

If you gave me several million years, there would be nothing that did not grow in beauty if it were surrounded by
water.
Jan Erik Vold, What All The World Knows, 1970

But I also know that in places, the river still runs deep, and though I've floated it in these places, it hasn't revealed
itself in such obvious ways. I know that it might be months -- years, even -- before I understand what it has to teach
me. I still need to give myself over to the flow and pattern and rhythm of it to learn its lessons and hear its messages.
The river is inside me now, I know, and I need only wait and see where the current takes me, and what lies beneath
it.
Jeff Wallach, What the River Says

It's clear to me that I will return here, as well as to other wilderness frontiers within me -- whether next year or some time later -- because I know that what the river says is what I need to hear: to know myself, to feel wild again, to confront my own limits and move beyond them into the untamed country on the other side. I will return here in spite of the river's name; but I will never return the same again, and that, after all, is most clearly what the river says.
Jeff Wallach, What the River Says

There is comfort in knowing that no matter what aspect my life takes on, this river will flow freely here, and that I
 might come to this place any time, in sadness or joy, alone or with someone I love. The waters will run smooth and
fast, and though it will be a different river coming down out of the mountains it will also retain its constancy.
Jeff Wallach, What the River Says

I love any discourse of rivers
Izaak Walton, The Complete Angler

And an ingenious Spaniard says, that rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate, and fools pass by without consideration.
Izaak Walton (1593-1683)

Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery elements are made for wise people to contemplate and for fools to pass without consideration.
Izaak Walton

Whether by snowshoe in winter or a hike in the spring, with canoe paddle, fly rod, or shotgun in the fall -- to those
who would listen, the river valley is a magic music box. To those who would observe, the pattern of color and
movement paint a picture that is a masterwork resulting from millions of years of nature's efforts, yet dynamic and
ephemeral. Minnesota is rich with stream and river resources, that beyond economic utility, make up our living
environment, delight our senses, and indeed, form and mold our culture.
Tom Waters, The Streams and Rivers of Minnesota

It is a fascinating and provocative thought that a body of water
deserves to be considered as an organism in its own right.
Lyall Watson, Supernature

Water ... which though not absolutely necessary to a beautiful composition, yet occurs
so often, and is so capital a feature, that is is always regretted when wanting; and no large
place can be supposed, a little spot can hardly be imagined in which it may not be
agreeable; it accommodates itself to every situation; is the most interesting object in a
landscape, and the happiest circumstance in a retired recess; captivates the eye at a
distance; invites approach, and is delightful when near; it refreshes an open exposure;
it animates a shade; cheers the dreariness of a waste, and enriches the most crowded view;
in form, in style, and in extent, may be made equal to the greatest compositions, or
adapted to the least; it may spread in a calm expanse to sooth the tranquillity of a
peaceful scene; or hurrying along a devious course, add splendor to a gay, and
extravagance to a romantic situation.
Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, 1770

And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry,
as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky,
and whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us --
then the wayfarer hastens home;
the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure,
cease to understand, as they have ceased to see.
Nature, who for once has sung in tune,
sings her exquisite song to the artist alone --
her son and her master -- her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.
James McNeill Whistler in a lecture delivered in 1885

Sundown
Sundown is the hour for many strange effects in light and shade—enough to make the colorist go delirious – long spokes of molten silver sent horizontally through the trees (now in their brightest, tenderest green), each leaf and branch of endless foliage a little miracle, then lying all prone on the youthful-ripe, interminable grass, and giving the blades not only aggregate but individual splendor, in ways unknown to any other hour.
I have particular spots where I get these effects in there perfection. One broad splash lies on the water, with many ripping twinkle, offset by the rapidly deepening black-green murkey-transparent shadows behind, and at intervals all along the banks. These, with great shafts of horizontal fire thrown among the trees and along the grass as the sun lowers, give effects more peculiar, more and more superb, unearthly, rich and dazzling.
Walt Whitman

REQUIEM FOR A RIVER
“So we diverted the river,” he said
showing blueprints
and maps
and geological surveys.
“It’ll go in this canal now.”

The Rio Blanco River starts in a glacier
Up the white-capped Andes.
It has run through a green valley
mor three million years,
maybe more.

Now in this year
when the Rio Blanco copper mine
at 12,000 feet altitude
gets underway,
The river has to go.

Pick it up,
Move it over –
Anything is possible.
Don’t stand in the way
of progress.
And a 90-million-dollar mine.
“We concreted the dam,” bert said.

THANKS.
Kim Williams

The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight; but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past, -- flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time.
John Greenleaf Whittier

It is a kind of meditation, paying attention to one thing. All morning I've been reading the water, looking for surface
signs that reveal what's underneath.
Mimi White Yankee Magazine, June 1993

Water that stirs not stinks.
Ancrene Wisse, c. 1180-1200

Where can you match the mighty music of their names?--The Monongahela, the Colorado, the Rio Grande  the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Hudson (Sweet Thames!);  the Kennebec, the Rappahannock, the Delaware, the Penobscot, the Wabash, the Chesapeake, the Swannanoa, the Indian River, the Niagara (Sweet Afton!);  the Saint Lawrence, the Susquehanna, the Tombigbee, the Nantahala, the French Broad, the Chattahoochee, the Arizona, and the Potomac (Father Tiber!)--these are a few of their princely names, these are a few of their great, proud, glittering names, fit for the immense and lonely land that they inhabit.
Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber!  You'd only be a suckling in that mighty land!  And as for you, sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song.
Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, Book VII

It is a place where great boats are baying at the harbor’s mouth,
Where great ships are putting out to sea;
It is the place where great boats are blowing in the gulf of night,
And where the river, the dark and secret river, full of strange time,
Is forever flowing by us to the sea…
Thomas Wolfe, American Landscape

To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves.
We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly,
squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.
Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader

Yet for most people, even for most history books, it is an invisible river, for most do not see its central role in our
lives.
Ann Woodlief, In River Time, the Way of the James

No check, no stay, this streamlet fears:
            How merrily it goes.
'Twill murmur on a thousand years
            And flow as now it flows.
Wordsworth, The Fountain. St. 6

She floats upon the river of his thoughts.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spanish Student. Act ii. Sc. 3.

Then soon with the emblem of truth overflowing,
And dripping with coolness, it rose from the well….
The old oaken bucket, the ironbound bucket,
The moss-covered bucket, which hung in the well.
Samuel Woodworth, The Old Oaken Bucket

The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion
William Wordsworth, Lines composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
William Wordsworth, Poems of Nature

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will;
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Earth has not anything to show more fair.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

To write history without putting any water in it is to leave out a large part of the story. Human experience has not
been so dry as that."
Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire, 1985

The crisis of our diminishing water resources is just as severe (if less obviously immediate) as any wartime crisis we
 have ever faced. Our survival is just as much at stake as it was at the time of Pearl Harbor, or the Argonne, or
Gettysburg, or Saratoga.
Jim Wright, U.S. Representative, The Coming Water Famine, 1966

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Steven Wright

To the waters, and the wild, with a Faerie, hand in hand,
for the world is more full of weeping ... than you can understand.
W.B. Yeats

A Rinse In The River

               One of the delights of the river evening, especially after chinning up sandstone and shale ledges and poking around dry, silty terraces, is a rinse in the river. There is a place below Turks Head which, at high water, fulfills the requirements of privacy and a safe place out of the current. The water temperature in May is hardly tepid, at 62° F., but the air is warm. There are two table rocks, firm sandstones, upon which I can stand and safely submerge, letting the water swirl around me. In water that is so opaque, it is a matter of some faith to sit down. The current nudges but little in this back eddy, yet it is still easy to feel the erosive power of a big springtime river. The river sounds ear close. Seated eye level with the surface, I feel like an apprentice Lorelei, learning the siren sounds of the river.

              The silt wells and fumes, voluminous and soft, just beneath the surface. It is fascinating to discover that by moving a hand just under water I can evoke all kinds of kaleidoscopic patterns. This silt settles out of a container of river water within twenty-four hours, but the remaining water looks like clam juice, colored by finer particles that do not precipitate as quickly in response to gravity.  These extremely small particles are colloidal; since they have more surface compared to their volume, and so a specific gravity less than that of water, they remain in suspension almost indefinitely, settling out only if they cluster together to form larger particles.  Gravels in a stream may fallout in less time to than a second when the velocity drops; colloidal particles may remain for decades.

The Green River, at this time of moderately heavy warmth runoff, is probably carrying more than half its silt load for the year.  The average load held in suspension by the river the is estimated at 19 tons a year, plus 2.5 million tons dissolved. The silt content near the mouth of the Green, by volume, was once estimated at 0.5 percent; it seems a minute amount, but evenly distributed by the current it forms an effective screen, creating the year-round turbidity in the river from the Gates of Lodore south.

The sandpaper surface of the rock, unslicked by algae, provides a sense of stability in a flowing, swirling, moving world. How to explain the pure delight of being here--some of it no doubt stems from the fact that, after a day of unrelenting sunshine, almost any kind of ablution feels welcome.  But there is an ineffable sybaritic pleasure beyond the necessity. The cool slide of water slips down the back of my neck, down my arm, drips off my elbow, picks patterns on the river's surface. The water that tugs around my ankles is pure hedonistic enticement, issuing a reminder of downriver delights in a branch that bnobs by, on its way to other appointments.  

After seeing ruins all day, I am extremely conscious of lose who came here before me. So too, on a warm spring evening, a thousand years ago, someone must have stood like this, soothing calloused feet, cactus-scratched legs.  I feel no time interval, no difference in flesh between who stood here then and who stands here now. The same need exists for the essentials of food and shelter, the same need  to communicate and to put down symbols for someone else to see, and, so I cannot help but believe, the same response to cool water and warm sun and heated rock and sandstone n bare feet.

The last rays of the sun keep it warm enough to air dry. The sun hangs for a moment above the cliff. As it disappears behind the rim, the air cools. And yet it is not cold; maybe time to robe and leave, but not yet, not cold yet. As long as I can stand, ankle deep, without civilization, without defense, going back to self, as long as there is yet enough warmth in the air to respect needful body temperature, so long as possible I stand here, submerged physically only to the ankles, psychologically to the base of being.

Ann Zwinger, Run, River, Run, 1976

A lake reflects its watershed – make it a pretty picture.

Be a solution to nonpoint pollution.
Brake for lakes – stop the cycle of pointless pollution.
Brown water, green weeds – lake pollution out of the blue.

Care for your watershed as if you drank from it.
Care for your watershed, for water is life.
Caution when wet: we drink what runs off the watershed.
Caution: life onboard. (Keep our waters clean.)
Clean water? Act!
Clean lakes, clear water – our forgotten treasure.

Don’t waste the watershed.
Don’t make a lake opaque.

Earth: water daily.

Everything always goes somewhere – don’t fool yourself
(we’re not fooling Mother Nature.)

For the lake’s sake, take care of the watershed.
From everything we do, this water’s for you!
From the watershed to the well – clean water begins at home.

Get into water!
Get your water well!
Give a lake a break, Jake! (take care of the watershed)
Go with the flow – prevent polluted runoff.
Green lakes from green lawns – watch what you do in the watershed.

Help mend the land and lend a hand for cleaner lakes.

If it’s on the ground, it’s in the lake.

Just Say No! to polluted runoff.

Keep your dirt where it belongs – at the construction site.

Lakes: handle with care.
Lakes … things that make ya go mmmmmmmmm.
Lakes reflect the landscape.
Land-use can equal river abuse.
Let’s clear up a few things – like lakes.
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear – water.

My achey breaky lake – take a stake in your wake!

Nonpoint pollution – it’s out of site.
Nonpoint pollution – from a thousand points of site.
Nonpoint (off-site and outta sight) pollution.

Please don’t feed the lake.

Remember: after it all flows downhill we get to drink it.
Ride herd on water – remember the buffalo.
Runoff – leftover rain life depends upon.

Shed light on watersheds, for lakes’ sake.
Sparkling water – it doesn’t just come in a bottle.

The world’s most popular drink. For over one million years.
The 3 states of water – Wisconsin, Michigan & Minnesota.
Think so you can drink. Keep our waters clean.

Watch your waterways.
Watch over your watershed – you drink what runs off.
Water, water everywhere, but not if you don’t think.
Water – I’m rather fond of it.
Water: the fact of life.
Water quality – down the drain.
Water works wonders.
Water. It’s the world’s most popular drink for over one million years.
Watersheds. We all live in one. Take care of yours.
Watersheds “R” Us: we drink what flows downhill.
We’ll never run out of buffalo, or water…
What you see is what you drink.
What’s the point of nonpoint? Pollution’s pollution – get a grip.
Wise up to the ways of clean water – take care what you do to the land.

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River Songs

The Mississippi: River of Song is a Smithsonian Institution series for public television and radio that explores the richness and vitality of American music at the close of the twentieth century. Through live performances and intimate discussions with musicians along the course of the Mississippi River, the series discovers the music that has flourished in the heart of the nation.

RIVER TUNES
American River has a growing collection of river songs and river tapes.  Check it out.

Sweetbrier College quotes
Professor Chris Witcombe’s site is awesome and should be visited by all
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/water/waterquotes.html

Garden Digest quotes for gardeners
http://www.gardendigest.com/water.htm

All about Canoes web site lists canoeing quotes
http://www.canoe.ca/AllAboutCanoes/canoe_quotes.html

Streamscapes is an Irish environmental group
http://www.streamscapes.org/site/streamscape/poetry/prose.html

River Quotes
http://www.rivernetwork.org/library/libartquo.cfm  

Water Quotes and Facts
http://jperret.tripod.com/water.html

Ann Woodlief’s In River Time:  The Way of the James
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/Rivertime/contents.htm  

Christopher Witcomb’s Sweet Briar College website “Water and the Sacred”
http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/sacredplaces/water.html
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/water/waterquotes.html

International Rivers Network links human rights and environmental protection
http://www.irn.org/index.html

St. Louis Earth Day Web Site quotes
http://www.cosmicexpress.com/earthday_site/earthday.html  

Outdoor Club Wilderness Quotes
http://www.outdoorclub.org/Wilderness_Quotes.html

Quotes and Sayings on New Brunswick’s Rivers
http://www.elements.nb.ca/theme/rivers/quotes/quotes.htm

High Country News
http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.ArchiveBySubject?subject=Rivers&category=Water

Garden Digest Quotes for Gardeners
http://www.gardendigest.com/water.htm

Reading List for Water Conservation for Phoenix AZ
http://www.ci.phoenix.az.us/WATER/books.html#AGE3