Water Dam Quotes & Sayings

Skateboarders are envied by people because they just glide so free. Any time something moves like water, they'll make a dam. Every time something moves in nature, they want to stop it. — Mark Gonzales

Secrets press inside a person. They press the way water presses at a dam. The secrets and the water, they both want to get out. — Franny Billingsley

Our ideas held no water but we used them like a dam. — Modest Mouse

I once watched a natural dam break on television. I remember seeing a scenic picture of a river surrounded by trees. All of the sudden, the trees disappeared
sucked away by the collapse of the riverbank. A swell of angry water rushed around the corner wiping out everything in its path. It was sudden, and it was violent.
I see the dam break in Caleb's eyes. — Tarryn Fisher

There's nothing to stop a man from writing unless that man
stops himself. If a man truly desires to write, then he will.
Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him. And the longer
he is held back the stronger he will become, like a mass of rising
water against a dam. There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laugh
as you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will fire
the eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter,
you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send it. — Charles Bukowski

Satan does not have a body, and his eternal progress has been halted. Just as water flowing in a riverbed is stopped by a dam, so the adversary's eternal progress is thwarted because he does not have a physical body. — David A. Bednar

Where's the dam water fountain I'm thirsty? — Rick Riordan

I didn't totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didn't know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you. — Matt Haig

England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland. — Lydia M. Child

Every saved soul was a pebble into the stream that was my broken heart. I threw every pebble in and hoped the water would dam, hoped the hurt would fade, hoped the memories would fade. But the stream never dried, the hurt never ceased, and my pain never healed. — Alessandra Torre

Let us find the dam snack bar," Zoe said. "We should eat while we can."
Grover cracked a smile. "The dam snack bar?"
Zoe blinked. "Yes. What is funny?"
"Nothing," Grover said, trying to keep a straight face. "I could use some dam french fries."
Even Thalia smiled at that. "And I need to use the dam restroom."
...
I started cracking up, and Thalia and Grover joined in, while Zoe just looked at me. "I do not understand."
"I want to use the dam water fountain," Grover said.
"And ... " Thalia tried to catch her breath. "I want to buy a dam t-shirt. — Rick Riordan

Omigod," Valerie said. "Unh!" And her water broke. It was an explosion of water. A tidal wave. We're talking Hoover Dam quantity water. Water everywhere ... but mostly on Cal. Cal had been standing at the bottom of the gurney. Cal was totally slimed from the top of his head to his knees. It dripped off the end of his nose and ran in rivulets down his bald head. Valerie drew her legs up, the sheet fell away, and Cal gaped at the sight in front of him. Julie stuck her head around for a look. "Uh-oh," Julie said, "there's a foot sticking out. Guess this is going to be a breech baby." That was when Cal fainted. CRASH. Cal went over like he was a giant redwood cut down by Paul Bunyan. Windows rattled and the building shook. Everyone clustered around Cal. — Janet Evanovich

Hoover Dam," Thalia said. "It's huge."
We stood at the river's edge, looking up at a curve of concrete that loomed between the cliffs. People were walking along the top of the dam. They were so tiny they looked like fleas.
The naiads had left with a lot of grumbling - not in words I could understand, but it was obvious they hated this dam blocking up their nice river. Our canoes floated back downstream, swirling in the wake from the dam's discharge vents.
"Seven hundred feet tall," I said. "Built in the 1930s."
"Five million cubic acres of water," Thalia said.
Graver sighed. "Largest construction project in the United States."
Zoe stared at us. "How do you know all that?"
"Annabeth," I said. "She liked architecture."
"She was nuts about monuments," Thalia said.
"Spouted facts all the time." Grover sniffled. "So annoying."
"I wish she were here," I said. — Rick Riordan

In my old age, I have come to believe that love is not a noun but a verb. An action. Like water, it flows to its own current. If you were to corner it in a dam, true love is so bountiful it would flow over. Even in separation, even in death, it moves and changes. It lives within memory, in the haunting of a touch, the transience of a smell, or the nuance of a sigh. It seeks to leave a trace like a fossil in the sand, a leaf burning into baking asphalt. — Alyson Richman

Like water leaking through a dam," said Piper.
"Yeah," smiled Percy. "We've got a dam hole."
"What?" Piper asked.
"Nothing," he said. "Inside joke. — Rick Riordan

The water can't turn back and choose another bed, just as promises now cannot 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. — Sasa Stanisic

She poured us some more Scotch. It didn't seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam. — Raymond Chandler

The new dam, of course, will improve things. If ever filled it will back water to within sight of the Bridge, transforming what was formerly an adventure into a routine motorboat excursion. Those who see it then will not understand that half the beauty of Rainbow Bridge lay in its remoteness, its relative difficulty of access, and in the wilderness surrounding it, of which it was an integral part. When these aspects are removed the Bridge will be no more than an isolated geological oddity, an extension of that museumlike diorama to which industrial tourism tends to reduce the natural world. — Edward Abbey

When they lay in bed together it was - as it had to be, as the nature of the act demanded - an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the great things on earth are things of tension. It was tense as electricity, the force fed on resistance, rushing through wires of metal stretched tight; it was tense as water made into power by the restraining violence of a dam. The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much, by releasing in fulfillment all the past hours of desire and denial. — Ayn Rand

When my father was getting along in years and the past began to figure more in his conversation, I asked him one day what my mother was like. I knew what she was like as my mother but I thought it was time somebody told me what she was like as a person. To my surprise he said, "That's water over the dam," shutting me up but also leaving me in doubt, because of his abrupt tone of voice, whether he didn't after all this time have any feeling about her much, or did have but didn't think he ought to. In any case he didn't feel like talking about her to me. — William Maxwell

Words, like tranquil waters behind a dam, can become reckless and uncontrollable torrents of destruction when released without caution and wisdom. — William Arthur Ward

To be a queen-that would not sweeten the bitter water against which I had been building the dam in my soul. It might strengthen the dam, though. — C.S. Lewis

A dam doesn't try to reason with the water. Its main purpose is to hold it still for a while. When I lecture my kids I'm doing much the same thing. I'm not trying to necessarily reason with them, just hold them still for a short while. — Spuds Crawford

One can grieve over all the water that has ever flowed over the dam. — William Maxwell

But love is much like a dam; if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current. — Paulo Coelho

Stories nowadays are put in to squares, just like everything else. Stories are ever changing. They are like rivers that flow, but mankind is busy trying to dam them up and as a result, they become stagnant. They divert the water into square swimming pools, and then add chemicals to it in order to keep it sterile. — James Rozoff

One preacher described it as if you and I were standing a short hundred yards away from a dam of water ten thousand miles high and ten thousand miles wide. All of a sudden that dam was breached, and a torrential flood of water came crashing toward us. Right before it reached our feet, the ground in front of us opened up and swallowed it all. At the Cross, Christ drank the full cup of the wrath of God, and when he had downed the last drop, he turned the cup over and cried out, "It is finished." This is the gospel. — David Platt

An old Russian folk song is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song's sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words. — Boris Pasternak

Love is much like a dam: If you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force and current.
For when those walls come down, then love takes over, and it no longer matters what is possible or impossible; it doesn't even matter whether we can keep the loved one at our side. To love is to lose control. — Paulo Coelho

The summer of 1830 I ... blasted the tunnel through the rock to take water from the dam above the falls for the mill ... In 1831 we lowered the tunnel four feet, and built a new dam across the creek. — Ezra Cornell

To give a recipe for getting a rough idea, in case you want to, I recommend the following procedure. Select a flat ten-acre ploughed field, so sited that all the surface water of the surrounding country drains into it. Now cut a zig-zag slot about four feet deep and three feet wide diagonally across, dam off as much water as you can so as to leave about a hundred yards of squelchy mud; delve out a hole at one side of the slot, then endeavour to live there for a month on bully beef and damp biscuits, whilst a friend has instructions to fire at you with his Winchester every time you put your head above the surface. — Bruce Bairnsfather

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

One may as well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man. — John Muir

And I think that's important, to know how the water's gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself. — Annie Proulx

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight. — Ernest Hemingway,

The good thing about Dennis [ Mathis] is, even though he's a white, he respected that I was doing something quirky with my English. He loved it when I would mix up the Americanisms and say, "That's water over the dam." — Sandra Cisneros