Top 100 By The River Quotes
#1. She was usually idling by the river bank, or gathering berries in a field when a someone appeared, with gentle and penetrating eyes, who - with no exchange of words - understood;
Toni Morrison
#2. 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
#3. Down by the river, I shot my baby dead.
Neil Young
#4. Here beneath the towering pines, by the river blue
Farragut will ever stand, alma mater true
Bruce A. Sarte
#5. In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster.
Walter Scott
#6. First off I am 35 years old, I am divorced, and I live in a van down by the river.
Chris Farley
#7. Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.
Gaston Bachelard
#8. 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
#10. You don't have to spend a lot of money to feel like a million. A good night's sleep, a quiet walk by the river or a hug from a favorite person will do the trick.
Gina Greenlee
#11. I was born by the river, in a little tent, and just like the river I've been running ever since.
Sam Cooke
#12. Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies reviv'd, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Browning Elizabeth Barrett
#13. He
was taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it. Most of all,
he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart,
with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without
judgement, without an opinion.
Hermann Hesse
#14. 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
#15. I know a lot of people who are philosophers and they sit by the river and talk about what that underwater world might look like. And I'll say 'Dive in, man, and go see it. Swim around. You'll be okay.
Stana Katic
#16. Ambition will take you And ride you too far and Conservatism bring you to boredom once more Sit down by the river And watch the stream flow Recall all the dreams That you once used to know The things you've forgotten That took you away To pastures not greener but meaner.
Van Morrison
#17. 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
#19. 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
#21. 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
#22. Wait by the river long enough and the body of your enemy will float by you.
Sun Tzu
#23. 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
#24. Hermione looked far and far and George was a midge and a leaf was the size of a house and an acorn-cup would shelter herself ... for ... I am a tree planted by the river of water ... I am in the word tree. I am tree exactly.
H.D.
#25. One thing I learned is that the park by the river in a recent story, 'Getting Closer,' is the same park by the river that appears for a moment near the end of 'The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad,' a story first published 23 years earlier. This echo at first irritated me, then pleased me deeply.
Steven Millhauser
#26. He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.
Salman Rushdie
#27. 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
#28. Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.
Cormac McCarthy
#29. Out of the east on an Irish stallion came bounty hunter Dan His heart quickened and burdened by the need to get his man He found Pete peacefully fishing by the river, pulled his gun and got the drop He said, Pete, you think you've changed, but you have not.
Bruce Springsteen
#30. If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.
Sun Tzu
#31. We guard the edge of the world," Dawnstripe told him. "The other Clans sit cozy in their marshes and woods, fed by the river and sheltered by our moor. They never know the true taste of the wind or the scent of first snow. There's no Clan cat faster or more nimble than a WindClan cat.
Erin Hunter
#33. And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!" "By it and with it and on it and in it," said the Rat. . . . "It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing." - KENNETH GRAHAME, The Wind in the Willows
Kevin Fedarko
#34. A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow rose was to him.
And it was nothing more
William Wordsworth
#35. It's precarious to hang onto the veracity of memory because its edges are smoothed by the river of time.
Khang Kijarro Nguyen
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. It is the gifted, unorthodox individual, in the laboratory, or the study, or the walk by the river at twilight, who has always brought to us, and must continue to bring to us, all the basic resources by which we live.
Caryl Parker Haskins
#39. Yet half the beast is the great god Pan, To laugh, as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man. The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain
For the reed that grows never more again As a reed with the reeds of the river.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#40. Breakups usually don't happen down by the river with beautiful lighting. The moment you realize your relationship may be over might happen in Aisle 11 of Rite-Aid and the person you're with has disregarded your feelings and your needs by bringing you the wrong toothbrush again for the fourth time.
Jay Duplass
#41. We all end in the ocean. We all start in the streams. We're all carried along, by the river of dreams.
Billy Joel
#42. The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences.
Nelson Algren
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. (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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Why is it that one of the best songs in the world has to be written by the BeeGees?
Benedict
Tricia Walker
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. I've always been fascinated by the Mississippi River and the way of life in these small river towns.
Daniel Woodrell
#70. Thus, sped by currents of curiosity afloat the swift river of rumor do secrets sail to strange ports.
Will Eisner
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Every human being has the right to search for happiness, and by 'happiness' is meant something that makes other people feel content.
Paulo Coelho
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. . . . 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. God hides the fires of hell within paradise.
Paulo Coelho
#98. 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
#99. Virtue dwells at the head of a river, to which we cannot get but by rowing against the stream.
Owen Feltham
#100. 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
