Blood River Quotes & Sayings

When the ships had lifted, they returned across the river to the silence of death. Then his grandfather told him, "Many fine things your father had planned for you: learning and useful work and a life of satisfaction and peace. Do you recall this?"
"Yes, Grandfather."
"The learning you shall have. You will learn patience and resource, the ability of your hands and your mind. You will have useful work: the destruction of evil men. What work could be more useful? This is Beyond; you will find that your work is never done - so therefore you may never know life of peace. However, I guarantee you ample satisfaction, for I will teach you to crave the blood of these men more than the flesh of woman."
The old man had been as good as his word. — Jack Vance

She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.
She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here. — Neil Gaiman

Moses and Aaron were directed to visit the riverside next morning, where the king was accustomed to repair. The overflowing of the Nile being the source of food and wealth for all Egypt, the river was worshiped as a god, and the monarch came thither daily to pay his devotions. Here the two brothers again repeated the message to him, and then they stretched out the rod and smote upon the water. The sacred stream ran blood, the fish died, and the river became offensive to the smell. The water in the houses, the supply preserved in cisterns, was likewise changed to blood. But "the magicians of Egypt did so with their enchantments," and "Pharaoh turned and went into his house, neither did he set his heart to this also." For seven days the plague continued, but without effect. — Ellen G. White

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

If history teaches us any lessons at all, it teaches us that force applied to religion creates not a purity of faith but a river of blood. — Edwin Gaustad

Your flesh is my earth. Your blood is my river. Your breath is my sky. Your body is my world. — Ginn Hale

He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie's. — Anna Quindlen

Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood, — Enoch

I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger. — Aime Cesaire

A hawk swooped overhead and Mapleshade imagined it feasting on Ravenwing's body after she had finished with him. He would bleed a river of blood, every drop spilled for her helpless kits ... — Erin Hunter

Start with a girl whose blood has been steeped in Korea for generations, imprinted with Confucianism and shamanism and war. Extract her from the mountains. Plant her in wheat fields between the Red River and the Mississippi. Baptize her. Indoctrinate her. Tell her who she is. Tell her what is real.
See what happens.
Witness a love affair with freaks, a fascination with hermaphrodites and conjoined twins, a fixation on Pisces and pairs of opposites. Trace a dream that won't die: a vision of an old woman slumped on a bench, her spirit sitting straight out of the body, joined to the corpse at the waist. — Jane Jeong Trenka

Beyond the River of the Blessed, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Avalon. Our swords were shattered in our hands and we hung our shields on the oak tree. The silver towers were fallen, into a sea of blood. How many miles to Avalon? None, I say, and all. The silver towers are fallen.
... waters,where the stars shone like bonfires at night and the green of day was always the green of spring. Youth, love, beauty-I knew them in Avalon. Proud steeds, bright metal, soft lips, dark ale. Honor ... — Roger Zelazny

And do not forget that the blood of rebellion flows through your veins, that around your soul meanders the river of perfection; above all stay devoted to your art - even if it is only the art of living! - above all remain loyal to it. — Philippe Petit

No one should live forever," I whisper. "Isn't that how it goes? There must be a balance. No birth without death. No life without tears. What is taken from the world must be given back. No one should live forever, but should give his blood to the river when the time comes so that tomorrow another may live. And so it goes. — Jessica Khoury

Immanuel, God with us-that He would leave the spiritual realm and be present in the flesh and blood in such an act of humility is a staggering notion. As it is, He willingly gave His blood, in the flesh, so that others might find life, for it is written: "He did not come by water only, but by blood," and "Without the shedding of blood there is no remission." Now blood is required to give new life to the dead.
I tell you, He did not give only a small amount to satisfy this requirement. He was beaten and crushed and pierced until that blood flowed like a river for the sake of love. It was for love, not religion, that He died.
There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins. And those plunged beneath that watery grave to drink of His blood will never be the same. — Ted Dekker

In an even wilder part of the river's jungle of cane and gum and pin oak, there is an Indian mound. Aboriginal, it rises profoundly and darkly enigmatic, the only elevation of any kind in the wild, flat jungle of river bottom. Even to some of us - children though we were, yet we were descended to literate, town-bred people - it possessed inferences of secret and violent blood, of savage and sudden destruction, as though the yells and hatchets we associated with Indians through the hidden and seceret dime novels which we passed among ourselves were but trivial and momentary manifestations of what dark power still dwelled or lurked there, sinister, a little sardonic, like a dark and nameless beast lightly and lazily slumbering with bloody jaws ... — William Faulkner

I been wading in the water. I been walking all over the River Jordan. But what it get me, huh? I done been baptized with blood of the lamb and the fire of the Holy Ghost. But what I got, huh? My enemies all around me picking the flesh from my bones. I'm chocking on my own blood and all you got to give me is salvation? — August Wilson

The night-soil men can see a bird walking in trees. It isn't a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin and is on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies. It is a woman who has left her skin i a corner of a house made out of wood. It is a woman who is reasonable and admires honeybees in the hibiscus. — Jamaica Kincaid

The energy that moves life is the force of the Feminine. She is unstoppable. She is the source of all life, the mover of blood, the breather of breath, the flow of the river's water. The Feminine is life. We can feel Her moving and living in any moment we are open to Her, or as Her. — David Deida

After sealing the door, Alqash went to the river to cleanse the blood from his hands and the dagger, and also to wash his hands of the faith that he had forfeited in exchange for short-lived riches. — Musharraf Ali Farooqi

Four are the tributaries of the great river. Four are the harvests from floodseason to dust. Four are the great treasures: timbalin, myrrh, lapis, and jungissa. Four bands of color mark the face of the Dreaming Moon. Red for blood. White for seed. Yellow for ichor. Black for bile. — N.K. Jemisin

You think you know all there is to know about here immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. — Neil Gaiman

They can stop a river by building a dam, but I will be damned if they can stop my river of blood flowing through my veins and heart. — Anthony Liccione

It was warm and salty, chalky and bittersweet. It tasted like the blood of some old, old thing. I tried not to think about how much at the mercy of these strange people I now was. But in fact my courage was failing. Both Dona Catalina and the guide's mocking eyes had slowly gone cold and mantislike. A wave of insect sound sweeping up the river seemed to splatter the darkness with shards of sharpedged light. I felt my lips go numb. Trying not to appear as loaded as I felt, I crossed to my hammock and lay back. Behind my closed eyelids there was a flowing river of magenta light. It occurred to me in a kind of dream mental pirouette that a helicopter must be landing on top of the hut, and this was the last impression I had. When I regained consciousness I appeared to myself to be surfing on the inner curl of a wave of brightly lit transparent information several hundred feet high. Exhilaration gave way to terror as I realised that my wave was speeding toward a rocky coastline. — Terence McKenna

Reading Myself
Like thousands I took just pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire
somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
and have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus ...
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work live long
enough for the sweet tooth bear to desecrate
this open book..my open coffin — Robert Lowell

So that the new generation that will be born can enjoy happiness.
To pay the cost we will have to shoulder corpses and cross a river of blood
(Riza Hawkeye
Fullmetal Alchemist) — Hiromu Arakawa

The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills. For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great juggernaut of stars form in the sky and threaten to roll over and crush him ... the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood. — Ray Bradbury

I'm hunger. I'm thirst. Where I bite, I hold till I die, and even after death they must cut out my mouthful from my enemy's body and bury it with me. I can fast a hundred years and not die. I can lie a hundred nights on the ice and not freeze. I can drink a river of blood and not burst. Show me your enemies. — C.S. Lewis

If the ways of this world are based on equivalent exchange, as alchemy says, then in order to allow for a new generation to enjoy good fortune, then the price that we must pay is to carry the bodies of the dead across a river of blood. — Hiromu Arakawa

Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and noted orator, tried to unite the Indians against the white invasion: The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the Redmen to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. That no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers - those who want all and will not do with less. Angered when fellow Indians were induced to cede a great tract of land to the United States government, Tecumseh organized in 1811 an Indian gathering of five thousand, on the bank of the Tallapoosa River in Alabama, and told them: Let the white race perish. They seize your land; they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven. — Howard Zinn

He was shadows. Cool, calm, dead. Like Conash. The boy who had been Conash, but was no longer. Dead boy. Dead Son. Born dead in a river of blood under a Death Moon in a blizzard, and given a grave-name. — T.C. Southwell

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims
they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River) — Dennis Lehane

Father and son had been on poor terms (even Cicero acknowledged this) and it was arranged for the young man to be accused of parricide. This was among the most serious offenses in the charge book and was one of the few crimes to attract the death penalty under Roman law. The method of execution was extremely unpleasant. An ancient legal authority described what took place: According to the custom of our ancestors it was established that the parricide should be beaten with blood-red rods, sewn in a leather sack together with a dog [an animal despised by Greeks and Romans], a cock [like the parricide devoid of all feelings of affection], a viper [whose mother was supposed to die when it was born], and an ape [a caricature of a man], and the sack thrown into the depths of the sea or a river. — Anthony Everitt

Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood. — Rudolfo Anaya

The river Guadalquivir
Flows between oranges and olives
The two rivers of Granada
Descend from the snow to the wheat

Oh my love!
Who went and never returned

The river Guadalquivir
Has beards of maroon
The two rivers of Granada
One a cry the other blood

Oh my love!
Who vanished into thin air — Federico Garcia Lorca

If your sins were blood, child, you would drown in a river of your own making. — Sabaa Tahir

Chapter 12 Your blood is a river. Chapter — Niall Williams

How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds must be, if things like this are possible! Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren't even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn't stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands, — Erich Maria Remarque

An attraction to self-discovery and self-expression can be uplifting and assist us combat epic boredom. The toll of writing truthfully as possible can cause the writer to spiral emotionally out of control. Writing's tempest temperament can prove a fatal attraction and many notable writers succumbed to the dark knight's powerful sword. Too many writers and a cast of dead poets found themselves dangerously adrift on the flowing river of black ink interlocked in a life and death struggle with the creative streams of impulsion colliding with the rocky pods of madness. All artists must fight off the impulse to surrender to the aftershock of madness. The mad vein of stabbing pain that we might think belongs exclusively to ourselves is in actuality the capstone of the blood sport known as communal anxiety. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I find myself most drawn to: art that has arisen from a deeply personal conversation between the artist and the work at hand. It is art that walks perilously close to the Edge, that crosses the river of blood into Faerie, that flies so high it is scorched by the sun, and then returns to tell the tale to us. It is art that needed to be written, or painted, or sung, or woven, or otherwise shaped. It is art gifted by the Mystery to the maker ... and then, in turn, gifted to us. — Terri Windling

Sonnet V
I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway place
patiently the river asks for its share of the drizzle
and, bit by bit, a tomorrow passing in poems approaches
so I carry faraway's land and it carries me on travel's road
On a mare made of your virtues, my soul weaves
a natural sky made of your shadows, one chrysalis at a time.
I am the son of what you do in the earth, son of my wounds
that have lit up the pomegranate blossoms in your closed-up gardens
Out of jasmine the night's blood streams white. Your perfume,
my weakness and your secret, follows me like a snakebite. And your hair
is a tent of wind autumn in color. I walk along with speech
to the last of the words a bedouin told a pair of doves
I palpate you as a violin palpates the silk of the faraway time
and around me and you sprouts the grass of an ancient place - anew — Mahmoud Darwish

look up to yourselves from the bottom of the river;
those of you on top should provide some pity for those underneath..
the displaced is helpless,
like blood that no one wants to buy in the oil market! — Ashraf Fayadh

Morwen had perceived Galadir's lips over every body part and it was like tearing the flesh slowly and savor every muscular fiber. Savoring the man's skin was like drinking a river of blood. But then the blood and flesh were missing. There was only him. — Chiara Cilli

You did this on purpose," I said to Justin as the man continued to strap me in.
"Maybe," he said.
"What is it you're playing at? Your girlfriend is down there at the river."
"Let's jump together."
"Come on Lenah!" Tony called from below.
"If you jump with me, Tracy will know."
Justin stood up. "Know what?"
"I mean , she'll think you did it on purpose."
"I did do it on purpose," he said.
"You two," the bungee man said. "Keep you eyes open if you're jumping together. Don't bash heads or anything. I hate cleaning up blood."
"If you jump with me-" I started to say.
"I don't care anymore. — Rebecca Maizel

The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire. — Charles Dickens

On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames. — Edwidge Danticat

In the gun game, we are the most hunted. The river of blood that washes the streets of our nation flows mostly from the bodies of our black children, — Harry Belafonte

There was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one. A foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth. And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror's wand. — Rohinton Mistry

A century ago she might have been beautiful, her face reflected in the river instead of a mirror. But all the years have changed more than the shape of our blood and eyes. We wear fear now like a turquoise choker, like a familiar shawl. — Sherman Alexie

The only river i would like to be drown is the river filled with the blood of Jesus. — Michael Bassey Johnson

She sits on the iron throne
She is one and three
The dark lady
the redgold lady
The blank lady
oracle
of blood, she who must be
obeyed
forever
Her glass wings are gone
She floats down the river
singing her last song — Margaret Atwood

your sins were blood, child, you would drown in a river of your own making." Elias — Sabaa Tahir

When he reached the Neva he stood still for a minute and turned a keen glance up the river into the smoky frozen thickness of the distance, which was suddenly flushed crimson with the last purple and blood -red glow of sunset, still smouldering on the misty horizon ... Night lay over the city, and the — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren't even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn't stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands. Only a military hospital can really show you what war is. — Erich Maria Remarque

When rowan leaves are dank and rusting And rowan berries red as blood, When in my palm the hangman's thrusting The final nail with bony thud, When, over the foul flooding river, Upon the wet grey height, I toss Before my land's grim looks, and shiver As I swing here upon the cross, Then, through the blood and weeping, stretches My dying sight to space remote; I see upon the river's reaches Christ sailing to me in a boat. — Alexander Blok

Mississippi blood is different. It's got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there's strength in it, too. Strength that's been beat but not broke. — Greg Iles

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 woman's love is quick to turn into a passion for revenge
an obsession that becomes an endless river of blood, flowing on from generation to generation. — Fumiko Enchi

A man, a life - it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were. — Philipp Meyer

I feel like my blood a giant river swell up inside me and I'm drowning. My head all dark inside. Feel like giant river I never cross in front me now. Ms Rain say, You not writing Precious. I say I drownin' in river. She don't look me like I'm crazy but say, If you just sit there the river gonna rise up drown you! Writing could be the boat to carry you to the other side. — Sapphire.

He held his hand up to his face and licked the wound. Blood. Old-tasting and rich like the sediment of a river. He looked at Jimmy. The blood on their faces meant they were part of the same stream now, bobbing in the current, borne forward effortlessly under the slowly twirling dome of the sky. — Richard Wagamese

Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,
Though you are the sister of the river willows,
I will kill you with my singing,
Without spilling your blood on the ground.
Not touching you with my hand,
Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,
But with your unimaginable groans
I will finally slake my thirst.
From her, who wandered the earth before me,
Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,
From her, who still exists in the ether
From her you will set me free. — Anna Akhmatova

And if there is water there let it be from a river. And if there is peace let it be from silence and forgetting. From the slow settle of dust on a house worn down, on a history lost, on a woman buried quietly into geography. And if there is memory let it be disjointed and nonsensical, let it disturb understanding and logic, let it rise like birds or hands into the blood blue bone of the sky, whispering its nothing beyond telling. ( ... ) Let someone lose the captions to all of the photographs; let them pile into new logics and forms that outlive us.
- "Siberia: Still Life of a Moving Image" (6. Representation) — Lidia Yuknavitch

I, Rooster John Byron, hereby place a curse
Upon the Kennet and Avon Council,
May they wander the land for ever,
Never sleep twice in the same bed,
Never drink water from the same well,
And never cross the same river twice in a year.
He who steps in my blood, may it stick to them
Like hot oil. May it scorch them for life,
And may the heat dry up their souls,
And may they be filled with the melancholy
Wine won't shift. And all their newborn babies
Be born mangled, with the same marks,
The same wounds of their fathers.
Any uniform which brushes a single leaf of this wood
Is cursed, and he who wears it this St George's Day,
May he not see the next. — Jez Butterworth

And then we cowards
who loved the whispering
evening, the houses,
the paths by the river,
the dirty red lights
of those places, the sweet
soundless sorrow
we reached our hands out
toward the living chain
in silence, but our heart
startled us with blood,
and no more sweetness then,
no more losing ourselves
on the path by the river
no longer slaves, we knew
we were alone and alive.
(Translated By Geoffrey Brock) — Cesare Pavese

For me, the present agony of departure, the silent terror of leaving a place known to me if hated, the well-nigh impossible task of conquering the fear that possessed me. Not the fear of that hasty look round, the sudden plunge headlong and the giddy shock of hard, cold water, the river itself entering my lungs, rising in my throat, tossing me upon my back with my arms outflung - I could hear the sob strangled in my chest and the blood leave me - but fear of the certain knowledge that there was no returning, no possible means of escape, and no other thing beyond. — Daphne Du Maurier

The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane's heart. — Bonnie Jo Campbell

Nothing is clear now. Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as thought it were magnified
a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on a man's hands
or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world. The darkening sky is hugely blue, gashed with rose, blood, flame from the volcano or wound or flower of the lowering sun. The wavering green, the sea of grass, piercingly bright. Black tree trunks, contorted, arching over the river. — Margaret Laurence

Grandma Natasha was sitting in the tent watching public service announcements on TV. They were showing a blond model in a bikini doing the backstroke in a river of blood flowing along Arlozorov Street. "She's not a real blonde," Grandma Natasha grumbled, pointing at the model. "She has it bleached. — Etgar Keret

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

I always knew I'd be a sailor. In my cradle, playing with my toes, I knew it. What else could there have been? The sailors had made my blood move before I was born, I now believe. As my mother stood one night upon the shit-smelling Bermondsey shore with me in her belly, the sailors had sung out there across the great river, and their siren song had come to the shell-pink enormity that was my listening ear newly formed in the amniotic fluid.
Or so I believe. — Carol Birch

Land lasts longer than blood or love. It is not like a river. — Annick Smith

John the Baptist, who we are told was related by blood to Jesus, was preaching the impending judgement of God, urging repentance and moral reform, and baptizing in the Jordan River those who responded. — Kenneth Scott Latourette

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks of the river. — Will Durant

We have come to a stream of blood. That it will lead us to a river of the same stuff I have no doubt. And, further along, to an ocean. In this world the graves yawn and none of the dead rest easy. — Stephen King

The important things in life always happened by accident. At fifteen she didn't know much, in fact, with each passing year she was a lot less clear about most things. But this much she did know. You could worry yourself sick trying to be a better person, spend a thousand sleepless nights figuring out how to live clean and decent and honest, you could make a plan and bolt it in place, kneel by your bed every night and swear to God you'd stick to it, hell, you could go to church and promise properly. You could cross your heart seven times with your eyes tight shut, cut your thumb and squeeze it and pen solemn vows on a rock with your own blood then throw it in the river at the stroke of midnight. And then, out of the black beyond, like a hawk on a rat, some nameless catastrophe would swoop into your life and turn everything upside down and inside out forever. — Nicholas Evans

I could step off the end of this pier but i got
shit to do and an appointment on tuesday
to shed uninvited blood and tissue
i'll miss you, i say
to the river to the water
to the son or daughter
i thought better of
i could fall in love with jersey
at sunset
but i leave the view to the rats
and tiptoe back — Ani DiFranco

Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.
It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity — Jim Thompson

The land has a memory.
Every stream and river runs with a confession of sorts, history whispered over rocks, lifted in the beaks of birds at a stream, carried out to the sea. Buffalo thunder across plains whose soil was watered with the blood of battles long since relegated to musty books on forgotten shelves. Fields once strewn with blue and gray now flower with uneasy buds. The slave master snaps the lash, and generations later, the ancestral scars remain.
Under it all, the dead lie, remembering. — Libba Bray