River Delta Quotes & Sayings

Unkar Delta at Mile 73
The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke's description of "raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet." Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified. — Ann Zwinger

The Nile, draining out into the Mediterranean. The bright lights of Cairo announce the opening of the north-flowing river's delta, with Jerusalem's answering high beams to the northeast. This 4,258 mile braid of human life, first navigated end-to-end in 2004, is visible in a single glance from space. — Chris Hadfield

The way I saw it, people are like leaves that have fallen into a swift-moving stream. As the leaves get carried downstream, some are caught in rocks and never get any farther. Some are swept to shore. Others - the lucky ones - keep going, missing the stones, staying clear of the shore, staying afloat until they reach the river delta and break free into open water. — Tony Curtis

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico. — Charles Kuralt

1939 and the children of Britain are on the move. David and Frankie, two boys from the East End of London, are thrown together by chance. Totally opposite in temperament an character, they form an unlikely friendship. This friendship is compromised by the presence of Elizabeth; who test their loyalties to the limit. — Terry Knowles

For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home. — Orhan Pamuk

The Waterfall and the Sea
Her love and passion are a waterfall, fed from the wellspring of her heart,
gently tumbling into a pool, preparing herself to share her gifts.
His passion and love are like the sea, deep and wide, waiting mysteriously,
Patiently he awaits her calling out through time and space
She hears his call, her pool overflowing.
Her love and passion gushing over her banks she rushes toward him
Winding and twisting she finds her way, destined to reach his shores
He awaits her arrival and she opens her delta as his tide comes in
Their waters mingle every molecule of her river with his sea
Forever mixing and sharing their passion and love in that place between
The Waterfall and the Sea — Christopher Earle

A good story, you'd have said, is like our river Drina: never calm, it doesn't trickle along, it is rough and broad, tributaries flow in to enrich it, it rises above its banks, it bubbles and roars, here and there it flows into shallows but then it comes to rapids again, preludes to the depths where there's no splashing. But one thing neither the Drina nor the stories can do: there's no going back for any of them. The water can't turn back and choose another bed, just as promises now can't be kept. No drowned man comes up again asking for a towel, no love is found again, no tobacconist fails to be born in the first place, no bullet shoots out of a neck and back into the gun, the dam will hold or will not hold. The Drina has no delta. — Sasa Stanisic

Fields and more fields on either side of the road.From where they are it looks as if the whole world were green.But from higher up,from a hill-if there were a hill in this flat country-or from a pyramid(one of the many that two thousand years ago lined this route from Thebes to Memphis,from the Delta to the Cataract)or from an aeroplane today,you would be able to see how narrow the strip green was,how closely it clung to the winding river.The river like a lifeline thrown across the desert, the villages and the town hanging on to it, clustering together, glancing over their shoulders at the desert always behind them.Appeasing it,finally,by making it the dwelling of their head. — Ahdaf Soueif

There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and these were not his people.
Those were not his dumplings. — Cory Doctorow

A far cicada rings high and clear over the river's heavy wash. Morning glory, a lone dandelion, cassia, orchids. So far from the nearest sea, I am taken aback by the sight of a purple land crab, like a relict of the ancient days when the Indian subcontinent, adrift on the earth's mantle, moved northward to collide with the Asian landmass, driving these marine rocks, inch by inch, five miles into the skies. The rise of the Himalaya, begun in the Eocene, some fifty million years ago, is still continuing: an earthquake in 1959 caused mountains to fall into the rivers and changed the course of the great Brahmaputra, which comes down out of Tibet through northeastern India to join the Ganges near its delta at the Bay of Bengal. — Peter Matthiessen

Only the most ignorant still believe, like Saint Augustine, that time is a river. We others know it is a delta: that it branches out and seeks new routes, that it rejoins itself only to seek a thousand new courses. Some may be waterfalls, some no more than little stagnant pools passed by the tide, forever still...

This is one of those times. A pool. I sink down in it. I want to stay forever in this water. — Majgull Axelsson

Of the river of time, he worries neither about its spring nor its delta. — Yann Martel

If you look at the paths of other actors, most people have a curve where you hit it and there's a time where you make a lot of money and they let you make your movies, and then they take it away and it's gone. — Casey Affleck

Improv is a very big thing for me. The thing with actors is I do not understand at all how they do what they do. I'm fascinated by it, and I have such a respect for it. — Gina Prince-Bythewood

The Okavango Delta is an astonishing sight: the great Okavango River, rather than flow towards the sea, flows inland, into the sands of the Kalahari. — Alexander McCall Smith

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth's plant and animal population. I hadn't anticipated it would be so loud. — Bill Buford

There was always something. It's like with this one, there's always something that's mad that I look back on it and go, that's pretty amazing to say that I've done that or been there. — Karl Pilkington

The Greeks - who knew everything - knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired. — Erica Jong

CLEOPATRA TO THE ASP

The bright mirror I braved: the devil in it
Loved me like my soul, my soul:
Now that I seek myself in a serpent
My smile is fatal.

Nile moves in me; my thighs splay
Into the squalled Mediterranean;
My brain hides in that Abyssinia
Lost armies foundered towards.

Desert and river unwrinkle again.
Seeming to bring them the waters that make drunk
Caesar, Pompey, Antony I drank.
Now let the snake reign.

A half-deity out of Capricorn,
This rigid Augustus mounts
With his sword virginal indeed; and has shorn
Summarily the moon-horned river

From my bed. May the moon
Ruin him with virginity! Drink me, now, whole
With coiled Egypt's past; then from my delta
Swim like a fish toward Rome. — Ted Hughes

Bangladesh is largely a river delta, and the rising sea level means that when storms come in, the human sanitation is backing up, the ability to farm. — Bill Gates

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