River Island Quotes & Sayings

The baking wind tore at his hat and he held it by the brim with one hand. It relieved him to look at it, for the great river was like a long tale, of both great joy and great woe. And it seemed to be a story road that a person could take, and it would take him to some place where he could free his mind. Men had striven against one another to control the unreeling river-road, battling at New Madrid and Island Number Ten, at Baton Rouge and Vicksburg, in the heat of the summer and the humid choking air of the malarial swamps. But the river carried away men and guns and the garbage of war, covering it over, washing itself clean again as if they had never been. — Paulette Jiles

After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. — Robert Hass

The city of Cork - the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are - is actually an island, a river island. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling's world within a world; Twain's slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave? — Richard Louv

He drove to work, his car a sunny little island of calm in the middle of the swollen river of misery that was the morning commute. — Scott Meyer

At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can't find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world. — Timothy Egan

Amy Martin (ladysky) and Daniel Baciagalupo had a month to spend on Charlotte Turner's island in Georgian Bay; it was their wilderness way of getting to know each other before their life together in Toronto began. We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly
as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth
the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.
Little Joe was gone, but not a day passed in Daniel Baciagalupo's life when Joe wasn't loved or remembered. The cook had been murdered in his bed, but Dominic Baciagalupo had had the last laugh on the cowboy. Ketchum's left hand would lvie forever in Twisted River, and Six-Pack had known what to do with the rest of her old friend — John Irving

I always like to look for adventure when I go away. I have gone on several horse adventures with my wife - from Guangxi we went up to the High Tibetan region. We also went along the Hurunui River on horseback in the South Island of New Zealand. — Antony Gormley

Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another. — Roberto Bolano

They have little in common, save for their geography, and the fact that each has a version of this city straddling this river on this island country, and in each, that city is called London. — Victoria Schwab

The old bells of the church of San Frediano toll with bold resounding strokes. In their wake broadening rings of silence seem to echo up over the rooftops. The setting sun rakes incandescent highlights over the water. A group of waterfowl on an island of grass half way across the river appear made of silver light. — Glenn Haybittle

The proof given by Wright, that non-adaptive differentiation will occur in small populations owing to "drift," or the chance fixation of some new mutation or recombination, is one of the most important results of mathematical analysis applied to the facts of neo-mendelism. It gives accident as well as adaptation a place in evolution, and at one stroke explains many facts which puzzled earlier selectionists, notably the much greater degree of divergence shown by island than mainland forms, by forms in isolated lakes than in continuous river-systems. — Julian Huxley

Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me. — China Mieville

We live in a state with a wonderful climate and plenty of natural beauty, from the shores of Cumberland Island to the Chattahoochee River to the Blue Ridge Mountains. — Roy Barnes

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

Juet's journal frequently records how only a tiny quantity of alcohol was needed to get the Indians drunk, 'for they could not take it'; and tales of the drunkenness that greeted Hudsons' arrival persisted among the native Indians until the last century. Indeed Heckewelder claims that the name Manhattan is derived from the drunkenness that took place there, since the Indian word 'manahactanienk' means 'the island of general intoxication'. — Giles Milton

I have watched the river and the sea for a lifetime. I have seen rivers rob soil from the roots of trees until the giants came foundering down. I have watched shores slip and perish, the channels silt and change; what was beach become a swamp and a headland tumble into the sea. An island has eroded in silent pain since my boyhood, and reefs have become islands. Yet the old people used to say, People pass away, but not the land. It remains forever. Maybe that is so. The land changes. The land continues. The sea changes. The sea remains. — Keri Hulme

The moment I stepped out the front door I was faced again with Manhattan. There it was, oh splendid ship of concrete and steel, aluminum, glass and electricity, forging forever up the dark river. (The hudson - like a river of oil, filthy and rich, gleaming with silver lights.) Manhattan at twilight: floating gardens of tender neon, the lavender towers where each window glittered at sundown with reflected incandescence, where each crosstown street became at evening a gash of golden fire, and the endless flow of the endless traffic on the West Side Highway resembled a luminous necklace strung round the island's shoulders. — Edward Abbey

I don't know if you have ever seem a map of a person's mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child's mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less and island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. — J.M. Barrie

I'm from New York. My grandparents were settlers of Long Island City. When they came here, there was no bridge, and they had to hire a boat across the river. They had a farm, and my grandmother had to go once a week to Manhattan to buy provisions - very primitive. — Iris Apfel

I was literally fabricated over in France and born about six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. This was the heart of the Depression. For the first 12 years of my life we lived in a terrible ghetto on the East River. — Bob Cousy

Out of the firelight everything was black and silver, black island, rocks and trees carved cleanly out of the sky and silver river with a flashing light rippling back and forth along the lip of the fall. — William Golding

The first two things Gaudencio Rivera was made aware of
within hours of arriving by carabao-drawn cart at the secluded town of Tagbaoran on the island province of Palawan
were these: that the most beautiful woman in creation dwelt by the river, and that it was pointless to even dream of being loved by her. — Dean Francis Alfar

The rapacious white tribe who were arriving in increasing numbers, not only as convicts but also as settlers, wanted to own everything they touched. They slashed and burned the wilderness so that they might graze their sheep and grow their corn. They erected fences around the land they now called their own and which henceforth they were prepared to defend with muskets and sometimes even their lives. They built church steeples and prison walls and homes of granite hewn from the virgin rock and timber cut from the umbrageous mountain forests. They possessed everything upon the island, the wild beasts that grazed upon its surface, the birds that flew over it, the fish that swam in its rushing river torrents and the barking seals resting in the quiet bays and secluded inlets. Everything they thought worthwhile was attached to the notion of ownership. — Bryce Courtenay

Well, there are worse things
Than staring at the water on a Sunday.
There are worse things
Than staring at the water
As you're posing for a picture
After sleeping on the ferry
After getting up at seven
To came over to an island
In the middle of a river
Half an hour from the city
On a Sunday.
On a Sunday in the park with- — Sondheim Stephen

No man is an island, as they say. No. I've tried it. I've gone on retreats at various times in my life for three or four or five days. I was desperate to get out of there and talk to somebody. But I fly fish a lot, and I can only do that really by myself. I find I'm never lonesome when I'm on a river, far from it, but it's a lonely practice. — Liam Neeson

Nearly one-quarter of all orcas captured for display during the late sixties and early seventies showed signs of bullet wounds. Royal Canadian fighter pilots used to bomb orcas during practice runs, and in 1960, private fishing lodges on Vancouver Island persuaded the Canadian government to install a machine gun at Campbell River to cull the orca population. — David Kirby

After the island of Sebu follow immediately the island of Mindanao, an island of more than three hundred leguas in circumference, and Jolo, which is small. Lower down is the island of Borneo, a very large island, more than five hundred leguas in circumference. All of these islands are densely populated, although that of Borneo is not subdued. Neither is that of Mindanao in entirety, but only the river of Botuan, Dapitan, and the province and coast of Caragan. — Antonio De Morga

One place that I looked at a lot from space and which looks alluring is New Zealand, especially the North Island. It's a big broad valley with a river flowing through it, and you can see the wine-making dryness of the land. — Chris Hadfield

I would like to go to Kalimantan island in Sumatra to see the carvings and longhouse sculptures. I've also always wanted to look at the wood carvings along the Sepik River in New Guinea. — Antony Gormley

In the interval from about February to May 1609, there was considerable material progress in and about Jamestown. Perhaps forty acres were cleared and prepared for planting in Indian corn, the new grain that fast became a staple commodity. A "deep well" was dug in the fort. The church was re-covered and twenty cabins built. A second trial was made at glass manufacture in the furnaces built late in 1608. A blockhouse was built at the isthmus which connected the Island to the mainland for better control of the Indians, and a new fort was erected on a tidal creek across the river from Jamestown. — Charles E. Hatch

As you go down the water,' he said, 'you will find that the trees will fail, and you will come to a barren country. There the River flows in stony vales amid high moors, until at last after many leagues it comes to the tall island of the Tindrock, that we call Tol Brandir. There it casts its arms about the steep shores of the isle, and falls then with a great noise and smoke over the cataracts of Rauros down into the Nindalf, the Wetwang as it is called in your tongue. That is a wide region of sluggish fen where the stream becomes tortuous and much divided. There the Entwash flows in by many mouths from the Forest of Fangorn in the west. About that stream, on this side of the Great River, lies Rohan. On the further side are the bleak hills of the Emyn Muil. The wind blows from the East there, for they look out over the Dead Marshes and the Noman-lands to Cirith Gorgor and the black gates of Mordor. — J.R.R. Tolkien

In the springtime, we have softshell crab from Maryland, which I'd never had until I came to America. In the summer and early fall, we have striped bass, 'stripeys,' which come all the way up the Hudson River but mostly gather in the sound at the tip of Long Island, off Montauk. — Daniel Boulud

A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; - such is our personality. — Cyril Connolly

The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death's dominion. But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that burden of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright rays. And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes, a bridge of light appeared to span the air between him and the sun, while the river sparkled under it. — Charles Dickens

A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. — China Mieville

Crucial to Lee's plan was the defense of that part of Long Island directly across the East River and particularly the imposing river bluffs near the tiny hamlet called Brooklyn, which was also spelled Breucklyn, Brucklyn, Broucklyn, Brookland, or Brookline, and amounted to no more than seven or eight houses and an old Dutch church that stood in the middle of the Jamaica Road, the main road inland from the Brooklyn ferry landing. — David McCullough

The school was located on its own private island in the Pacific Northwest not far from the small community of Gold River, British Columbia, Canada. Through natural means it could only be reached by boat or float plane. However, many students reached the school by means that were far from natural. There were portals in various parts of the world that brought students to Fairhaven the moment one stepped through them. — Dianne Astle

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,

Who was the Future, died full long ago.

Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,

Poor, child, and be not to thyself abhorred.

Around thine earth sun-winged winds do blow

And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;

The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord

And the long strips of river-silver flow:

Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.

Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight

About their fragile hairs' aerial gold.

Thou art divine, thou livest, - as of old

Apollo springing naked to the light,

And all his island shivered into flowers. — Trumbull Stickney

Back then life was simple and sweet. Everything was simple and sweet. The taste of cherries, the cool shade, the fresh smell of the river. That was how we lived, in a vale among the hills, sheltered from the storms. Ignorant of the world, as though on an island. Peaceful and untroubled. And then. Then everything changed. — Cyril Pedrosa

Yet the very name Ganga-Sagar, joining, as it did, river and sea, clear and dark, known and hidden, served to remind the migrants of the yawning chasm ahead; it was as if they were sitting balanced on the edge of a precipice, and the island were an outstretched limb of sacred Jambudvipa, their homeland, reaching out to keep them from tumbling into the void. — Amitav Ghosh