Top 100 By The River Quotes
#1. History is not just a tale of men's making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past.
Bernard Cornwell
#2. The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.
Dennis Lehane
#3. The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame ...
and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused Concord River with the most famous in history.
Henry David Thoreau
#4. So when that Angel of the darker Drink, at last shall find you by the river-brink,
And, offering his Cup, invite your Soul forth to your Lips to quaff-you shall not shrink.
Omar Khayyam
#5. The night was as dark by this time as it would be until morning; and what light we had, seemed to come from the river than the sky, as the oars in their dipping struck at a few reflected stars.
Charles Dickens
#6. What makes a kingdom great is its being like a down-flowing river,
the central point towards which all the smaller streams under Heaven converge; or like the female throughout the world, who by quiescence always overcomes the male. And quiescence is a form of humility.
Laozi
#7. I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. -Loving Frank
Nancy Horan
#8. The Thames is a wretched river after the Mersey and the ships are not like Liverpool ships and the docks are barren of beauty ... it is a beastly hole after Liverpool; for Liverpool is the town of my heart and I would rather sail a mudflat there than command a clipper out of London
John Masefield
#9. Down by the river, I shot my baby dead.
Neil Young
#10. Here beneath the towering pines, by the river blue
Farragut will ever stand, alma mater true
Bruce A. Sarte
#11. Day, in a gazebo by a river in the middle of fucking nowhere in the Colorado Mountains, the man known throughout the dark, harsh, fetid, hostile underbelly of this great United States as Ghost got married to one of the most beautiful women Nick had ever laid eyes on. She
Kristen Ashley
#12. If you aren't a fisher you'll see many things, but the river, except where it is ridden by waterfowl or waded by moose, will rarely enter your thoughts, much less stimulate your spirit. It's different if you fish. The surface of the water tells a story ...
Paul Schullery
#13. (As are all living things. All are caught in the river of power that is the Force, trapped by its currents. Only those who wield the dark side of the Force are capable of changing those currents; they are riverbreakers. They do not surrender to fate. They are its foes.) The
Chuck Wendig
#14. A freezing cold underground river. A dark cave lit by ghosts. A man too stupid to realize you loved him. This is what you want?"
"All of it. Especially the very stupid man.
Molly Ringle
#15. My maternal granddad, Leonard, was full of amazing stories. He was an orphan, with 11 or 12 brothers and sisters, and he used to tell us about growing up near the Irrawaddy river and how one brother was eaten by a crocodile.
Jamie Cullum
#16. When you give in to aversion and anger, it's as though, having decided to kill someone by throwing him into a river, you wrap your arms around his neck, jump into the water with him, and you both drown. In destroying your enemy, you destroy yourself as well.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche
#17. Around the outskirts of the city, cut off from town by the black oval of the river, everything was in darkness. Everyone ugly was in bed by now.
Scott Westerfeld
#18. I've often thought a blind man could find his way through London simply by gauging the changes in innuendo: mild through Trafalgar Square, less veiled towards the river.
Louis Bayard
#19. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
W. H. Auden
#20. All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows ...
Wendell Berry
#21. Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.
Gaston Bachelard
#22. Living on the water took away the boundaries created by land and custom and introversion. Without fences and driveways, the water provided a constant thread of connection and dependency.
Lily Graham
#23. One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.
Julia Gregson
#24. In a deep river there is richness and many fish can live; but the shallow pool is soon dried up by the strong sun, and nothing remains except mud and dirt. For most of us, love is an extraordinarily difficult thing to understand because our lives are very shallow.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#26. I was born by the river, in a little tent, and just like the river I've been running ever since.
Sam Cooke
#27. It occurred to me that no words by the tongue of man can express the simplicities of a quiet land, so I returned to the river.
Daniel J. Rice
#28. We always have the necessary resources to face the storms that life throws at us, but most of the time,those resources are locked up in the depths of our heart and we waste an enormous amount of time trying to find them.By the time we've found them,we already been defeated by adversity.
Paulo Coelho
#29. I developed my training routine going into my senior year at Jackson State. I found this sandbank by the Pearl River near my hometown, Columbia, Miss. I laid out a course of 65 yards or so. Sixty-five yards on sand is like 120 on turf, but running on sand helps you make your cuts at full speed.
Walter Payton
#30. Silence is the sea, and speech is like the river. The sea is seeking you: don't seek the river. Don't turn your head away from the signs offered by the sea.
Rumi
#31. Why is it that one of the best songs in the world has to be written by the BeeGees?
Benedict
Tricia Walker
#32. And I'll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads - the won't stir by day, only by dark on the river.
Virginia Woolf
#33. I live by the sea, but the body of water I have the most feeling about is the Mississippi River, where I used to row and skate, ride on the ferry in childhood, watch the logs or just dream.
Susan Glaspell
#34. I've always been fascinated by the Mississippi River and the way of life in these small river towns.
Daniel Woodrell
#35. Thus, sped by currents of curiosity afloat the swift river of rumor do secrets sail to strange ports.
Will Eisner
#36. And when our bodies rise again,
they will be wildflowers, then rabbits,
then wolves singing a perfect love
to the beautiful, meaningless moon.
Philip Appleman
#38. My parents came from the Kyushu Island in the Southern part of Japan to find work in Tokyo. So we could only afford to live downtown, in a low-income area. It was just by the river, and whenever a typhoon came around, we were under water up to, like, here. That's the kind of place we lived in.
Takashi Murakami
#39. The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?
Jeanette Winterson
#40. Youth is like being carried through life by a strong current," Admiral Winter said. "All you feel is the speed of the river, the thrill of rapids, never comprehending your utter lack of control, your constant peril.
Andrea Cremer
#41. No one can step twice into the same river, nor touch mortal substance twice in the same condition. By the speed of its change, it scatters and gathers again.
Heraclitus
#42. Every human being has the right to search for happiness, and by 'happiness' is meant something that makes other people feel content.
Paulo Coelho
#43. Walking on willow tree roads by a river dappled with peach blossoms, I look for spring light, but am everywhere lost. Birds fly up and scatter floating catkins. A ponderous wave of flowers sags the branches.
Wang Wei
#44. That's why we live by a river. Occasionally, I forget and pat Lit on the back
'
'I hate that.'
King Midas & Lit
Rick Riordan
#45. If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adiron dacks, think of all the places it journeys by as it goes out to sea forever - think of that wonderful Hudson Valley.
Jack Kerouac
#46. Many is the night I have sat by the roaring river the rain never ending them logs so green bubbling and spitting blazing in a rage no rain can staunch.
Peter Carey
#47. After what felt like an eternity, we started to walk the trails. I looked at my watch. We had only been by the river for 30 minutes. So strange. Time lasts forever when you are actually in the moment.
Jeff Brown
#48. And isn't that strange, she thought, the way one city can swirl inside another; the way you can be in one country yet carry another country in your skin; the way a place is changed by whoever comes to it, the way silt invades the body of a river.
Carolina De Robertis
#49. All the really great records or people who made them somehow came from Memphis or Louisiana or somewhere along the Mississippi River ... And singers like Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters gave me the feeling that they were right there, standing by the river.
John Fogerty
#50. Just as a river by night shines with the reflected light of the moon, so too do you shine with the light of your family, your people, and your God. So you are never far from home, never alone, wherever you go.
Karen Cushman
#52. A tranquil summer sunset shone upon him as he approached the end of his walk, and passed through the meadows by the river side. He had that sense of peace, and of being lightened of a weight of care, which country quiet awakens in the breasts of dwellers in towns.
Charles Dickens
#53. A river continually fed by a living fountain may as soon end its streams before it come to the ocean, as a stop be put to the course and progress of grace before it issue in glory.
John Owen
#54. . . . This
is not the same river at my fingertips.
There are no paths, no sunken roads
familiar in the forest, by which we can
retrace our steps,
by which we can escape
by which we can reclaim and return,
or hear the child's song running in the timothy . . .
John Daniel Thieme
#55. She was glad she'd missed the river of corpses that must have filled the city streets during the initial phase of clean-up - wagon after wagon groaning beneath the weight of crushed bodies, white flesh seared by fire and slashed by sword, rat-gnawed and raven-pecked - men, women, and children.
Steven Erikson
#56. Lichfield, England. Swallows certainly sleep all winter. A number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water, and lye in the bed of a river.
Samuel Johnson
#57. Of all the sacred places on the coast, none is more comforting than where rivers join the sea. By the river's disappearance we are reminded of life's passing, while by the ocean's beauty we accept it, in a hope we cannot explain.
Robert Adams
#58. The Voice of the River is a beautifully written, deeply inclusive and profoundly spirtual work of art. I am moved by its great genorosity above all, and its wisdom. It is a gift like no other.
Carole Maso
#59. The Shat-el-Arab is a noble river or estuary. From both its Persian and Turkish shores, however, mountains have disappeared, and dark forests of date palms intersected by canals fringe its margin heavily, and extend to some distance inland.
Isabella Bird
#60. But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself
maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow.
Alexandra Fuller
#61. If people volunteered in the same way to construct schools or roads or even clear the river of plastic wrappers, by God, Pakistan would become a paradise within a year.
Malala Yousafzai
#62. So answer me, are you merely a cowardly Moses, pointing the way to the Promised Land but poisoned by doubt and so unable to cross the River Jordan?
Tony Vigorito
#63. Nature uncovers the inner secrets of nature in two ways: one by the force of bodies operating outside it; the other by the very movements of its innards. The external actions are strong winds, rains, river currents, sea waves, ice, forest fires, floods; there is only one internal force-earthquake.
Mikhail Lomonosov
#64. Time itself flows on with constant motion, just like a river: for no more than a river can the fleeting hour stand still. As wave is driven on by wave, and, itself pursued, pursues the one before, so the moments of time at once flee and follow, and are ever new.
Ovid
#65. Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion when a levee gave way. The coroner, for reasons unstated, recorded just two deaths.
Bill Bryson
#66. 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
#67. Imagine yourself as a pebble which has been thrown into a river. The pebble sinks through the water effortlessly. Detached from everything, it falls by the
Thich Nhat Hanh
#68. God hides the fires of hell within paradise.
Paulo Coelho
#69. In each of us there is internal knowledge, a gentle voice, beckoning us
toward well-being. It tells us to let go, to stay in the river of present experience, not to dam up our lives by worrying about potential futures or bemoaning past mistakes.
Marcey Shapiro
#70. Virtue dwells at the head of a river, to which we cannot get but by rowing against the stream.
Owen Feltham
#71. Ricky had taught me a few cuss words. I usually practiced them in the woods by the river, then prayed for forgiveness as soon as I was done.
John Grisham
#72. Both citizens and noncitizens bribed by the Party by means of jobs and liquor cast as many illegal ballots as they can in a single day, after which said votes will be either tossed in the river or purposefully miscounted.
Lyndsay Faye
#73. The logs of wood which move down the river together Are driven apart by every wave. Such inevitable parting Should not be the cause of misery.
Nagarjuna
#74. The headlong stream is termed violent
But the river bed hemming it in
Is termed violent by no one.
Bertolt Brecht
#75. I am in the river now. I must have fallen. And I am in this river.
And I am just washed away
by the current of
the river.
This is not a river. It is just a small
rivulet.
Sandra Harner
#76. By any reasonable standard, Riverside Drive would be considered the best street in New York. Where else, after all, are there such views-not of a narrow river, as there is across town, but of one of the noblest rivers in the United States.
Paul Goldberger
#77. Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful.
Leonard Nimoy
#78. It seemed a strange thing to him, when earth was earth and rain was rain, that scrawny pines should grow in the scrub, while by every branch and lake and river there grew magnolias. Dogs were the same everywhere, and oxen and mules and horses. But trees were different in different places.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#79. He had sleepless eyes, his mouth a little swollen, the deeply tanned skin somehow burnished. Kestrel thought that she, too, must look like this: polished by desire, the way a river stone holds a luster from having been made so smooth.
Marie Rutkoski
#80. I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.
Aldo Leopold
#82. The stream of civilisation flows on like a river: it is rapid in mid- current, slow at the sides, and has its backwaters. At best, civilisation advances by spirals.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#83. The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.
Sylvia Plath
#84. Cassivelaunus had prepared the river for Caesar, by planting it full of stakes (and had, no doubt, put up a notice-board).
Jerome K. Jerome
#85. To move from controlling to trusting life is like exhausting ourselves by trying to put our arms around a river until we realize we have to enter the river and let the current take us.
Mark Nepo
#86. The Colorado River was at a record low and the towers in Lake Mead stood high out of the water. But the Angelenos committed communal suicide by watering lawns as usual.
Robert A. Heinlein
#87. Asked if an army can be made to imitate the SHUAI-JAN, I should answer, Yes. For the men of Wu and the men of Yueh are enemies; yet if they are crossing a river in the same boat and are caught by a storm, they will come to each other's assistance just as the left hand helps the right.
Sun Tzu
#88. Over the years, I found myself traveling parts of the Lewis and Clark Trail, putting my hands in the river where they set out from St. Louis, viewing the Great Falls of Montana, standing by the same Pacific Ocean they saw with such joy.
Joseph Bruchac
#89. It's precarious to hang onto the veracity of memory because its edges are smoothed by the river of time.
Khang Kijarro Nguyen
#90. I want to stand by the river in my finest dress. I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness. I want to dance for the renewal of the world.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#91. So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown. This account I am transmitting down the river by canoe, and it may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#92. The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
Pat Conroy
#93. Oh, river! darkling river! what a voice
Is that thou utterest while all else is still
The ancient voice that, centuries ago,
Sounded between thy hills, while Rome was yet
A weedy solitude by Tiber's stream!
William C. Bryant
#94. His dreams were getting more frightful - rising black swirls of water, cars floating by like river bugs - but he didn't know much about how to build a boat. The steam box was a start, even if he couldn't tell Annie, even though the line between faith and becoming unhinged seemed perilously narrow.
Rae Meadows
#96. Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!
Robert Louis Stevenson
#97. By the twelfth day of his fast, Raju himself has become a tourist attraction. Before an enormous crowd and an American television crew, the starving man is helped down to the drought-stricken river to pray:
R.K. Narayan
#98. By perceiving ourselves as part of the river, we take responsibility for the river as a whole.
Vaclav Havel
#99. Nothing so challenges the American spirit as tackling the biggest job on earth ... Americans are stimulated by the big job; the Panama Canal, Boulder Dam, Grand Coulee, Lower Colorado River developments, the tallest building in the world, the mightiest battleship.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#100. We all end in the ocean. We all start in the streams. We're all carried along, by the river of dreams.
Billy Joel
