Quotes & Sayings About Rainwater

Corporations continue to do their dirty work in poor countries. At the turn of the 21st century, the World Bank put pressure on Bolivia to privatize water services. Bechtel, the engineering giant, took control of this vital resource in Cochabamba. Bechtel's executives immediately raised the price of water so high that most people could not afford it. Its contract, made in collusion with the Bolivian government, gave Bechtel the right to charge people for water they took from their own wells. Bechtel even sent collectors into people's homes to demand payment for rainwater that people gathered in pots and pans on their roofs. — David Zindell

As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater. — Charles Duhigg

The scullery roof had sprung a leak: she put down a bowl to catch the drips, but the rainwater spread and darkened, to make treasure maps and Whistler nocturnes of the walls and ceiling. — Sarah Waters

The research included neutron resonance spectroscopy, the angular distribution of pion elastic and inelastic scattering on nuclei with optical model fitting. — James Rainwater

Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe. — Toni Morrison

All of a sudden, there is no hurry. There will be time for everything. For the breezes that blow and for the rainwater drying in the gutters, for Maury to find a place of safety in the world, for Malcolm to come back from the dead and ask her about birds and jets. For the big things too, things like beauty and vengeance and honor and righteousness and the grace of God and the slow spilling of the earth from day to night and back to day again.
It is spread out before her, compressed into one single moment. She will be able to see it all. — Alden Bell

The Praesidium stood on four pillars and for most of its height was square in cross-section. Not far above the dials, however, the corners of the square floor-plan were cleaved off, making it into an octagon, and not far above that, the octagon became a sixteen-sided polygon, and above that it became round. The roof of the Praesidium was a disk, or rather a lens, as it bulged up slightly in the middle to shed rainwater. It supported the megaliths, domes, penthouses, and turrets of the starhenge, which drove, and was driven by, the same clock-works that ran the dials. — Neal Stephenson

The essence of good business is knowing when to step on a train and when to step off. — Richard Rainwater

Outside the window, one lone car passed and threw a violent blast of rainwater over the sidewalk. It was a storm, by now. Looking at that rain, I was falling deeply in love with our warm bar. What could you do, with a world like that? I was in love with every minute of being alive even as I floundered. — Monica Drake

The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still. — Helen Macdonald

Take rainwater kept for several years, and mix a sextarius of this water with a pound of honey The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days, and then left on a shelf near the fire. If you have no rain water, then boil spring water. — Columella

She had something Adam didn't. Curiosity. First step to growth
and if it wasn't for Eve's Adam would still be sitting by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of Eden, Eve hadn't bothered naming the animals. On the other hand she'd discovered how to milk some of them and how best to eat the eggs of others. She'd decided she wasn't overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from bamboo and banana leaves, into which she'd retire when the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won't be surprised to hear about is that she'd already domesticated a cat and called it Misty. — Glen Duncan

rainwater onto the back of her neck. Her eyes remained defiant. — Anonymous

We take a word, such as freedom, and dress it up to mean the ability to bear firearms, display flags, collect rainwater or grow clean food, but absolute freedom is not a relative construct. It is not there one minute or outlawed the next. It can never be seized or given. It is ever-lasting and omnipresent. — Anita B. Sulser PhD

A strange breeze rustled through the clearing, temporarily overpowering the stink of trash and murk. It brought the smell of berries and wildflowers and clean rainwater, things that might've once been in these woods. Suddenly I was nostalgic for something I'd never knew. — Rick Riordan

They're telling me that grief naturally pools as rainwater does," I said. "If we have good drainage it moves through us; it fills up and drains away. But if we don't have energy moving through us it can pool up and get swampy and heavy. All we see is this pool of grief and we begin to stare into it as Narcissus did. It can become a little bit self-indulgent. We're not honoring the people we're missing, the times of our lives that have changed, or the future that's waiting for us." None of the spirit people suggested Crystal bury or deny her grief, but rather that she find a way to move through it. Knowing she would be honoring them more by expressing her grief and letting it pass, rather than keeping it alive as a memorial, Crystal felt refreshed and optimistic about letting her usually cheerful nature surface once more. — Priscilla Keresey

She rolled the mysterious plunkin across in front of the hearth and stared at it. It still looked disconcertingly like a severed head. "What do we do with this?"
Dag sat cross-legged and smiled
not much of a smile, but a start. "Lots of choices. They all come down to plunkin. You can eat it raw in slices, peel it and cut it up and cook it alone or in a stew, boil it whole, wrap it in leaves and cook it in campfire coals, stick a sword through it and turn it on a spit, or, very popular, feed it to the pigs and eat the pigs. It's very sustaining. Some say you could live forever on plunkin and rainwater. Others say it would just seem like forever. — Lois McMaster Bujold

In the murky puddle of rainwater collected at the entrance of the tomb, I spied my own reflection,a dark, hatted figure against a pewter sky. — Linda Lappin

The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge, and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the grass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the Earth, to grow it again with the roots toward heaven. — Michael Shaara

I'd love to paint our roof white - it's so hot down here in Texas! - and I'd love to have a rainwater collection system to save rain runoff for later. I also love to fantasize about keeping chickens in the backyard. — Katherine Center

I FLEW over the rooftops of the city, listened to some jazz at Preservation Hall, drank rainwater down in Pirate's Alley, ducked into a kitchen on Dauphine and Orleans and was fed by an old couple who was sure I was both tame and owned by a neighbor. It was the great thing about the city: nothing really surprised anyone. They expected to see things out of the ordinary. A black panther eating gumbo was normal. — Mary Calmes

Avoid Calcutta's un- healthy monsoon. From June until the end of September over a meter and a half of rain bombards the city. Outhouses overflow and contaminate water used for drinking, bathing, and washing cooking utensils. Many of the eight thousand annual deaths caused by cholera and gastrointestinal diseases occur during the rains. Antiquated, silt-clogged sewage pipes drain only a quarter inch of rainwater per hour. Manhole covers are removed to facilitate drainage, and in nonstop rains (more than thirty centimeters, or a foot, in twenty-four hours), open sewers, hidden under water, become booby traps as pedestrians inadvertently plunge into them and drown. — James O'Reilly

All summer the smells of nettles and daisies and rainwater purl through the gardens. — Anthony Doerr

Someone asked me what are the secrets to my success, and I said 'There are three: Timing, timing, timing.' — Richard Rainwater

There's always something happening in the world that creates an opportunity to try to fix a business and build a business. — Richard Rainwater

In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics. — James Rainwater

I view real estate as the most intriguing opportunity that I've seen in my business lifetime. — Richard Rainwater

[Once Ummon asked a lesser light Are you a gardener> Yes it replied Why have turnips no roots> Ummon asked the gardener who could not reply Because said Ummon rainwater is plentiful] I think about this for a moment. Ummon's koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon's way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to. — Dan Simmons

Coca Cola's Eva Water has hypnotized you into thinking that a sip of rainwater can kill you. — S.A. David

He remembers an afternoon not long after his wife's arrest when he caught himself avoiding puddles of rainwater on the streets. When he realised what he was doing it struck him as ridiculous and even reprehensible that he was still prey to such petty concerns. He began deliberately splashing through all the biggest puddles, as if to show some higher power how little he cared about anything anymore. His daughter copied him. Skipping and dancing as if she and the rain shared a secret complicity. — Glenn Haybittle

I don't understand the theory that nonprofit hospitals that run at forty percent capacity and do not pay taxes should be granted some special privilege. I like level playing fields. — Richard Rainwater

I'm just not the type who wants to draw attention to himself. — Richard Rainwater

If nature is left to itself, fertility increases. Organic remains of plants and animals accumulate and are decomposed on the surface by bacteria and fungi. With the movement of rainwater, the nutrients are taken deep into the soil to become food for microorganisms, earthworms, and other small animals. Plant roots reach to the lower soil strata and draw the nutrients back up to the surface. — Masanobu Fukuoka

He realized with sudden clarity that the power axis in a conflict shifted once your adversary had heard you plead for divine intervention while her hands and mouth and body brought you to screaming climax on her kitchen table. — Jane Rainwater

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation's sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. — Charles Duhigg

He was a Marine, for heaven's sake! He knew how to kill a man with his bare hands. He'd been shot and stabbed and nearly died. He'd faced down evil in its purest form; met the Grim Reaper and spit in his eye. None of that had prepared him for this - facing the wrath of the woman he loved and knowing that wrath was justified. — Jane Rainwater

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater ... — Bill Mollison

By the light of the hominy fire Sixo straightens. He is through with his song. He laughs. A rippling sound like Sethe's sons
make when they tumble in hay or splash in rainwater. His feet are cooking; the cloth of his trousers smokes. He laughs.
Something is funny. Paul D guesses what it is when Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out, Seven-O! Seven-O! — Toni Morrison

Water, running - It was observed in ancient times that ghosts dislike crossing running water. In modern Britain this knowledge is sometimes used against them. In central London a net of artificial channels, or runnels, protects the main shopping district. On a smaller scale, some house-owners build open channels outside their front doors and divert the rainwater along them. — Jonathan Stroud

pile, I started to see the golden kernels everywhere, ground into the mud by tires and boots, floating in the puddles of rainwater, pancaked on the steel rails. Most of this grain is destined for factory farms and processing plants, so no one worries much about keeping it particularly clean. Even so, it was hard not to register something deeply amiss in the sight of so much food lying around on the wet ground. — Michael Pollan

Green roofs, roadside plantings, porous pavement, and sidewalk gardens have been proven to reduce flooding. They absorb rainwater before it swamps the streets and sewage systems. — Frances Beinecke

What do you think I live on, rainwater and daydreams? — Laini Taylor

When he'd made it thirty strides or so Logen turned around and looked back. The pot was sitting forlorn by the lake, already filling up with rainwater. They'd been through a lot together, him and that pot. "Fare you well, old friend." The pot did not reply. — Joe Abercrombie

Miz Ellen, what do you carry in that handbag of yours that has enough wallop to knock down a full-grown man? - Dan Landry — Jane Rainwater

The logical extension of a burgeoning population and urbanization is the conversion of open spaces into paved ground. This has resulted in flooding of cities as well as water scarcity due to groundwater depletion and the lack of rainwater harvesting. — Anonymous

To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one's fellow man even a fellow man striving to do the same to you creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was. — Robert Charles Wilson

A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater. — Pat Conroy

His eyes are two buckets of rainwater: deep, fresh, clear. Hurt. — Tahereh Mafi

I sold my Chevron. I sold my ConocoPhillips. I sold my Statoil. I sold my ENSCO. I sold my Pioneer Natural Resources. I sold everything. — Richard Rainwater

I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind ... — W.G. Sebald

The parched know --

real thirst
draws rainwater
from an empty sky. — Ivan M. Granger

If you happen to be in the right place at the right time, the capitalist system is a beautiful thing. — Richard Rainwater

My father, who had previously been a civil engineer, died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. — James Rainwater

The gods preferring their libations diluted with rainwater and mixed with freshly cut grass. — Thomm Quackenbush

After I completed the tree climb in the damp mist, my hands were covered with a muddy residue of bark and rainwater, and I was exhausted. But I was very happy. — Ned Hayes

Rainwater purls from cloud to roof to eave. — Anthony Doerr

Already, China's world-leading solar industry provides water heating for 35 million buildings, and India's pioneering use of rainwater harvesting brings clean water to tens of thousands of homes. — Christopher Flavin

I hit the goddamn jackpot with celebrity dreams this a.m. In the latest dream I was in bed with Tom and Katie. I've never thought much of Tom Cruise but as I watched him fuck Katie fueled with insane lust and cocaine I murmured, 'God, Tom, I admire you so much.' Katie went to the bathroom to clean up and Tom fucked me. I was too happy to remember that I always preferred Ice Man to Maverick. — Misti Rainwater-Lites

He is rainwater and smoke and wishes. He is honey and wind and bitter as truth and sharp with hurting and endlessly, unbearably sweet. He is air, finally, endlessly — Amy Zhang

The Maria Mayer shell model suggestion in 1949 was a great triumph and fitted my belief that a nuclear shell model should represent a proper approach to understanding nuclear structure. — James Rainwater