Beside River Quotes & Sayings

In all my fantasies about our first kiss - and there'd been about six hundred thousand of them - I never once imagined it would be like that one. Our dream kiss usually involved moonlight, or fog, or moonlight and fog, a very mysterious and romantic combination, at least in the right locale. Moonlit fog beside a lake or a lazy river: romantic. Moonlit fog in almost any other place, like a narrow alleyway: Jack the Ripper. — Rick Yancey

Below the mill the rivers merge. First they flow close beside each other, undecided, overawed by their longed-for intimacy, and then they fall into each other and get lost in one another. The river that flows out of this melting pot by the mill is no longer either the White or the Black, but it is powerful and effortlessly drives the mill wheel that grinds the grain for bread.
Primeval lies on both the White and Black rivers and also on the third one, formed out of their mutual desire. The river arising from their confluence below the mill is called The River, and it flows on calm and contented. — Olga Tokarczuk

In a state of grace, the soul is like a well of limpid water, from which flow only streams of clearest crystal. Its works are pleasing both to God and man, rising from the River of Life, beside which it is rooted like a tree. — Saint Teresa Of Avila

God have mercy on my soul. Sometimes I wish they'd all just die. My friend and his mother and his father and my aunt and all the neighbors and passers-by and drivers who leave their cars parked by the river and even the poor innocent children who run around in the park beside the river. God have pity on my soul and make me better. Or unmake me. — Roberto Bolano

I was born in a country of brooks and rivers, in a corner of Champagne, called Le Vallage for the great number of its valleys. The most beautiful of its places for me was the hollow of a valley by the side of fresh water, in the shade of willows ... My pleasure still is to follow the stream, to walk along its banks in the right direction, in the direction of the flowing water, the water that leads life towards the next village ... Dreaming beside the river, I gave my imagination to the water, the green, clear water, the water that makes the meadows green ... The stream doesn't have to be ours; the water doesn't have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring. — Gaston Bachelard

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

Standing beside the river, realizing that the water of earth is recycled forever, she deeply understood this: that there are two "presents." One is of the moment. The other is of a longer moment - the "moment" that includes the history and knowledge one knows. So that, she mused, if the tears shed by the mother of Isis are now part of this river then I am somehow connected to her in this longer "present" that I am able to envision and that contains both of us. — Alice Walker

And we have the night ahead of us
to stroll in lilac-scented gardens. Everything there
is here. It is all ours. You are mine, I am yours
and the shadow, your shadow, laughs like an orange. The dream
did its job and, like a postman, hurried on
to someone else. So we have to be
worthy, this evening, of ourselves, and of a river
that runs along beside us, and that we flow into as it flows into us. — Mahmoud Darwish

The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.

I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go. — Laurie Perez

And sometimes, and only in spring,
a dove from the river's soft vale of lilies
will fly as close to you as trust,
and a calm in the great reds of autumn
will, as often as you need, lie down
beside you, raising a brow you've known
above the eyes of the only woman
you will ever have a need to dream or touch. — James Ragan

River on the ferry, Billy swam beside it, and Harriet remembered the donkey and the donkey cart of her first — Rose Tremain

I remember sitting and meditating beside a slow flowing river in India, and I got the feeling that this river could teach me all the secrets of the mystery of life. If we learn to surrender to a stone, a flower, to a man, to a woman, or a river, it becomes a door to the Whole. — Swami Dhyan Giten

It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London. — T. S. Eliot

Love, why have you sought the horde
of spearsmen, why the tent
Achilles pitched beside the river-ford? — Hilda Doolittle

Wow," Puck mused, standing beside me. "The River of Dreams." ... Moons, comets and constellations rippled on the surface, and other, stranger things floated upon the misty black waters. Petals and book pages, butterfly wings and silver medals. The hilt of a sword stuck out of the water at an odd angle, the silver blade tangled with ribbons and spiderwebs. A coffin bobbed to the surface, covered in dead lilies, before sinking into the depths once more. The debris of human imaginations, floating through the dark waters of dream and nightmare. — Julie Kagawa

I myself was born beside a river - the Avon in Sarum. So when I first encountered New York's great harbor and the Hudson River as a teenager, and came to understand their historic canal and railroad links to the vast spaces of the Midwest, I felt both the thrill of a new adventure and a deep sense of homecoming. — Edward Rutherfurd

After all, don't care how you want to sit there and deny the knowledge of River Mumma sitting on her rock - don't care how you deny the knowledge of fallen angels who can jump into your body as they please, or the knowledge of ancestors who sit beside your bed and watch when they not harkening on to the sounds of drumming - don't care how you deny any of it, all of it is still true. All of them things still exist, because them do not need the permission of your belief. — Kei Miller

He dreamed at one point in his slumbers of New York. In his dream he was walking late at night along the East Side, beside the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that new lifeforms were now emerging from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights. — Douglas Adams

You never stand beside the same river twice; you have to keep looking upstream. — Donald Keough

My name used to be in the papers daily
As having dined somewhere,
Or traveled somewhere,
Or rented a house in Paris,
Where I entertained the nobility.
I was forever eating or traveling,
Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.
Now I am here to do honor
To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.
No one cares now where I dined,
Or lived, or whom I entertained,
Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden! — Edgar Lee Masters

The people who lived beside the river for thousands of years, and whose history was intertwined with that landscape, have been very effectively excluded from ts recorded narrative. — Helen Humphreys

The time of the autumn floods came and the hundred streams poured into the Yellow River. ... Then the Lord of the River was beside himself with Joy, believing that all the beauty in the world belonged to him alone. — Zhuangzi

Passing through the orchard, Mr. Clutter proceeded along beside the river, which was shallow here and strewn with islands - midstream beaches of soft sand, to which, on Sundays gone by, hot-weather Sabbaths when Bonnie had still "felt up to things," picnic baskets had been carted, family afternoons whiled away waiting for a twitch at the end of a fishline. — Truman Capote

Raven has lost deeply, again and again, and she, too, has buried herself. There are pieces of her scattered all over. Her heart is nestled next to a small set of bones buried beside a frozen river, which will emerge with the spring thaw, a skeleton ship rising out of the water. — Lauren Oliver

If time were a river, he felt as if eternity had stopped beside him on the bank to rest, sharing every story ever told, every victory ever won, every love ever known. — Julia Butler

No, the last thing she cared about was whether people were staring at the boy and girl kissing by the river, as London, it's cities and towers and churches and bridges and streets, circled all about them like the memory of a dream. And if the Thames that ran beside them, sure and silver in the afternoon light, recalled a night long ago when the moon shone as brightly as a shilling on this same boy and girl, or if the stones of Blackfriars knew the tread of their feet and thought to themselves: At last, the wheel comes to a full circle, they kept their silence. — Cassandra Clare

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

Mount Fuji was mostly invisible n the summer, but on clear days she could see its grand and graceful silhouette dominating the northern sky. White herons gathered in the river upstream from laundry suds pouring out of a city grate, and hydrangeas bloomed on the banks, dropping blue and lavender petals over soda cans and bento cartons littered beside the asphalt. — Sara Backer

But I called, as we came near, to one who stood beside the water's edge, asking him what men did in Astahahn and what their merchandise was, and with whom they traded. He said, "Here we have fettered and manacled Time, who would otherwise slay the gods." I asked him what gods they worshipped in that city, and he said, "All those gods whom Time has not yet slain." (from "Idle Days on the River Yann") — Lord Dunsany

But perhaps there are in us forces other than mind and heart, other even than the senses - mysterious forces which take hold of us in the moments when the others are asleep; and perhaps it was such forces that Melchior had found in the depths of those pale eyes which had looked at him so timidly one evening when he had accosted the girl on the bank of the river, and had sat down beside her in the reeds - without knowing why - and had given her his hand. — Romain Rolland

He watched the early light of the new moon glint fretfully on the river, now silver slivers, now darkness, as the night breeze stirred the choked growth on the banks and lifted the tree branches. The watersteps were a deserted invitation, and he envied Hori who must surely even now be reclining on the bottom of his skiff, Antef beside him, their fishing lines tied to the boat whilst they watched the stars and gossiped. His fountain tinkled like music in the darkness, and the monkeys sighed and snuffled in their favourite warm spot under the stone basin, which still held the warmth of the day's heat. — Pauline Gedge

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer — Leonard Cohen

The Beatrice that obsessed Dante was a Florentine named Bice di Folco Portinari. Envision this moment (and, in all fairness, I am envisioning it the way Henry Holiday did in his exquisite nineteenth-century painting): Bice is walking beside the Arno River, dressed in white, the fabric clinging to her legs and outlining her slender thighs, and there is Dante. He meets her at the corner of one of the bridges that span
the river. His left hand, at first glimpse, is moving casually toward his hip; it is only on a more careful study that one realizes his hand is actually going up to his heart. Meanwhile, his right hand is resting on the bridge's waist-high stone balustrade, as if Bico's beauty is such that he needs to steady himself when he beholds her. — Chris Bohjalian

This Maya is everywhere. It is terrible. Yet we have to work through it. The man who says that he will work when the world has become all good and then he will enjoy bliss is as likely to succeed as the man who sits beside the Ganga and says, "I will ford the river when all the water has run into the ocean." — Swami Vivekananda

Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn't easily moved. This human inability to foresee
or to watch out for
long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer. (109) — Ronald Wright

Now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw all of the light and color and history it contained and carried in its slow - moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going — Lois Lowry

As the youth came on in front of the others, he got the bronze in his chest beside the right nipple. On through his shoulder it went and he fell to earth in the dust like a sooth black poplar whose branchy top falls in the low grassland of a mighty marsh to the gleaming ax of some chariot-maker, who leaves t to dry by the banks of a river that he may bend him a rim for a beautiful chariot. Even such was the fall of Anthemion's son Simoeisius — Homer

Forward now. Forward to battle slaughter. Beware the man who loves battle. Ravn had told me that only one man in three or perhaps one man in four is a real warrior and the rest are reluctant fighters, but I was to learn that only one man in twenty is a lover of battle. Such men were the most dangerous, the most skillful, the ones who reaped the souls, and the ones to fear. I was such a one, and that day, beside the river where the blood flowed into the rising tide, and beside the burning boats, I let Serpent-Breath sing her song of death. I remember little except a rage, an exultation, a massacre. This was the moment the skalds celebrate, the heart of the battle that leads to victory, and the courage had gone from those Danes in a heartbeat. — Bernard Cornwell

A hidden mussel was blowing bubbles like a spring through the sand where his boot was teasing the water. It was the little pulse of bubbles and not himself or herself that was the moment for her then; and he could have already departed and she could have already wept, and it would have been the same, as she stared at the little fountain rising so gently out of the shimmering sand. A clear love is in the world - this came to her as insistently as the mussel's bubbles through the water. There it was, existing there where they came and were beside it now. It is in the bubble in the water in the river, and it has its own changing and its mysteries of days and nights, and it does not care how we come and go. — Eudora Welty

I buried her on the shore," he whispered as Fireheart padded up and sat down beside him. "She loved the river." He raised his head to where the first stars of Silverpelt were beginning to appear. "She hunts with StarClan now," he mewed softly. "Someday I'll find her again, and we'll be together. — Erin Hunter

HOW TO BREAK INTO BLACKTHORNE (A list by Operatives Morgan, Baxter, Sutton, and McHenry) Step 1. Become slightly crazy. Step 2. So crazy you actually volunteer to go over a fifty-foot waterfall. Step 3. Swallow a lot of very cold river water. Step 4. Cough and gag. Step 5. Repeat Step 4 until it feels like maybe your lungs aren't inside your body anymore. Step 6. Remember that a really cute boy is beside you, so try to cough in a far more attractive manner. Step 7. Be grateful you're still alive. — Ally Carter

May with its light behaving
Stirs vessel, eye and limb,
The singular and sad
Are willing to recover,
And to each swan-delighting river
The careless picnics come
In living white and red.

Our dead, remote and hooded,
In hollows rest, but we
From their vague woods have broken,
Forests where children meet
And the white angel-vampires flit,
Stand now with shaded eye,
The dangerous apple taken.

The real world lies before us,
Brave motions of the young,
Abundant wish for death,
The pleasing, pleasured, haunted:
A dying Master sinks tormented
In his admirers' ring,
The unjust walk the earth.

And love that makes impatient
Tortoise and roe, that lays
The blonde beside the dark,
Urges upon our blood,
Before the evil and the good
How insufficient is
Touch, endearment, look. — W. H. Auden

In this sometimes turbulent world, the river is a cosmic symbol of durability and destiny; awesome, but steadfast. In this period of deep national concern, I wish everyone could live for a while beside a great river. — Helen Hayes

So,Miss Fitt," Clarence said once we turned onto a tree-lined road beside the river, "you are no doubt wondering why I invited you out."
I swatted the ribbon from my eyes. "And here I assumed it was my unsurpassable good looks."
He chuckled. "That was, of course, part of my motivation."
"Only part?" I slid my gaze left and watched him from the corner of my eye. "Well then,the rest of your reason must be that bribe you mentioned the other evening."
"Something like that. — Susan Dennard

Restorative niche' is Professor Little's term for the place you go when you want to return to your true self. It can be a physical place, like the path beside the Richelieu River, or a temporal one, like the quiet breaks you plan between sales calls. — Susan Cain

This is the Death's-head Moth," he said. "That's nightshade she's sitting on - we're hoping she'll lay." The moth was wonderful and terrible to see, its large brown-black wings tented like a cloak, and on its wide furry back, the signature device that has struck fear in men for as long as men have come upon it suddenly in their happy gardens. The domed skull, a skull that is both skull and face, watching from its dark eyes, the cheekbones, the zygomatic arch traced exquisitely beside the eyes. "Acherontia styx," Pilcher said. "It's named for two rivers in Hell. Your man, he drops the bodies in a river every time - did I read that?" "Yes," Starling said. "Is it rare?" "In this part of the world it is. There aren't any at all in nature. — Thomas Harris

Running was Clover's favorite thing to do, after reading. She loved the way the cement felt hard and unforgiving under her feet until she reached the park and the dirt path that wound its way alongside the Truckee River.
She liked the wind in her face and how it smelled like water. And the way Mango ran beside her, keeping her company. But most of all she liked the way the steady pace untangled her thoughts. — Shaunta Grimes

There was a numbness in Clary's hands, a hard pressure in her chest. It was lovely, she could see that: the city rising up beside her like a towering forest of silver and glass, the dull gray shimmer of the East River, slicing between Manhattan and the boroughs like a scar. — Cassandra Clare

Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right.
This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world
No, YOU move. — J. Michael Straczynski

Today, the first & last of every Tree/ Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River. — Maya Angelou

It is good to feel small beneath the sparkling northern lights, small beside the mighty river. Nature is so close to us up here. My troubles and difficulties just shrivel up. I like being insignificant. — Asa Larsson

The light bounced off the water and shimmered against the buildings on the other side of the river. Joseph walked, listening to the sound of what was beneath his feet, and soon he noticed he was alone. He turned and saw Frankie had stopped beside Albert and filled her jacket pockets. Looking at the two of them, Joseph wondered for a moment if Leo had ever come down here to go mudlarking, his red hair shining in the sun. the vision seemed so vivid, but then Joseph remembered that Leo wasn't real, and the boy dissolved like smoke into the winter sky. — Brian Selznick

I, the driver of this car, that used to be Jim Ross, the teamster, and J.A. Ross and Co., general merchandise at Queen Centre, California, am now J. Arnold Ross, oil operator, and my breakfast is about digested, and I am a little too warm in my big new overcoat because the sun is coming out, and I have a new well flowing four thousand barrels at Los Lobos river, and sixteen on the pump at Antelope, and I'm on my way to sign a lease at Beach City, and we'll make up our schedule in the next couple of hours, and 'Bunny' is sitting beside me, and he is well and strong, and is going to own everything I am making, and follow in my footsteps, except that he will never make the ugly blunders or have painful memories that I have, but will be wise and perfect and do everything I say. — Upton Sinclair

We were all that mattered back then, or have you forgotten? Do you not remember that night? How we stood beside the river and followed the Shawnee way? Do you remember what I whispered to you?"
She shook her head, refusing to look at him. She tried to wrest her wrist free, but he held fast.
"You are lying," he accused quietly. "You can't forget."
"How do you know?" she threw back at him.
Alex smiled. "Because I can't," he admitted sadly. — Cathy Maxwell

Joy. In every breath. In every moment. In every turn of the blossom to face the sun. In every stream of juice that trails my chin from fruit so sweet. In Him. In the coolness of the evening when He walks beside us and His laughter lifts across the river as He delights in our wonder over this place He has given us. In silence. In starlight. In shouting an anthem of gladness that shakes the earth and hails birds into flight. — Alanna Rusnak