Water Drought Quotes & Sayings

It was June in Maharashtra, and the monsoon would not come. The whole district lay panting in the heat, the burning sky clapped tight overhead like the lid of a tandoor oven. Lean goats stumbled down the narrow alleyways, udders hanging slack and dry beneath them; beggars cried for water in every village. Dust-devils swept over baked clay and through the dry weeds, whistling and shrieking. Hot sand blew into the eyes of torpid bullocks as they leaned into the yoke, whips snapping over their bony backs. A single stream crept along the valley floor, shrunken and muddy, and women stood ankle deep in its shallows, beating their laundry against rocks that rippled and danced in the sun. — Arinn Dembo

There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth. — T. S. Eliot

Some decisions, like opening a fire hydrant to put out a fire, are easy to make. Other decisions, like deciding how to best distribute a drought-limited water supply among urban, rural and recreational uses, require careful deliberation. — Ben Nelson

Life moved, as inconstant and fickle as Wind Baby, frolicking, sleeping, weeping, but never truly still. Never solid or finished. Always like water flowing from one place to the next. Seed and fruit. Rain and drought, everything traveled in a gigantic circle, an eternal process of becoming something new. But we rarely saw it. Humans tended to see only frozen moments, not the flow of things. — Kathleen O'Neal Gear

Serious as shit right now, Izzy. You keep looking at me like I'm the last drop of water left over after a long-ass drought and I will take you right here in the doorway. Jesus Christ, I'm so fucking hard right now, I think I really could hammer nails. — Harper Sloan

In response to skyrocketing gas prices, liberals say, practically in unison, 'We can't drill our way out of this crisis.' What does that mean? This is like telling a starving man, 'You can't eat your way out of being hungry!' 'You can't water your way out of drought!' 'You can't sleep your way out of tiredness!' 'You can't drink yourself out of dehydration!' Seriously, what does it mean? Finding more oil isn't going to increase the supply of oil? It is the typical Democratic strategy to babble meaningless slogans, as if they have a plan. Their plan is: the permanent twilight of the human race. — Ann Coulter

With irrigation channels and rivers running dry and municipal water storage dams reaching record lows, California's politicians are getting desperate for solutions to a drought that seemingly has no end. — Marc Levine

Torcida told me a creation story of his people and why they consider Mount Gorongosa sacred. In early times, he said, God lived with his people on the mountain. Humans were giants then and not afraid to ask God for special favors. In a drought they would say, Bring us water. The Creator, growing tired of their constant importuning, moved his residence up to heaven. Still the giant people persisted, reaching up from the mountain. At last, to put them in their place, God decided to make them small. Thereafter life became a great deal more difficult - and so it has been to this day. — Deborah Blum

There's a great drought in my village. People are dying. The price of rice and pulses has rocketed. There is no water anywhere. And here, people are complaining about the rain ... — Renita D'Silva

Here's the advantage of being water: It's forgiving and ever-changing and unpredictable and strong-willed. It's stronger than rock; it can wear it down or move it or break it, or slowly seep through the surface. It can flow around anything and through anything or under or on top. It can change into so many forms. It can be so calm it's invisible, so wild it's uncontainable. It can smother fire with one spray.
But here is the weakness: People with water are susceptible to drought. We can run dry, and when we do, we shrink, until something replenishes us. We rely on others. We need love and support. When we're not fed, we become a bit calloused and cracked, like dry skin. We wither, we wrinkle, and we can disappear inside ruts, until we flow again. — Katie Kacvinsky

Isaiah 58:11 And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy they soul in drought, and make fat they bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not. — Anonymous

[h]ope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. That hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal. — Sofia Samatar

With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried up. No water. The Hopi, and the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what's beyond human power to change, and then to change the human's attitude to be content with the inevitable. - Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns, 1993 — Tony Hillerman

Since chemical fertilizer burns out the soil organic matter, other farmers struggle with tilth, water retention, and basic soil nutrients. The soil gets harder and harder every year as the chemicals burn out the organic matter, which gives the soil its sponginess. One pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water. The best drought protection any farmer can acquire is more soil organic matter. — Joel Salatin

At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and painful moments. Like the ever flowing water of a river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changin cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of the summers and the piercing chill of its winters. But through it all, God walks with us. Never forget that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Right now in this world, a child is dying from an ailment because its family cannot afford to buy charcoal for boiling water.
Right now in this world, a girl is striving to find firewood from trees that no more exist, and water from sources that are poisonous.
Right now in this world, a boy is out fishing in a lake rich with inedible species.
Right now in this world, a mother is drowning in heavy rainfall, to save her belongings.
Right now in this world, a man has lost his dignity because all his eff orts to save have been wiped away to poverty by unforeseen calamities.
Right now in this world, a family is starving because drought has invaded their once fertile land.
Right now in this world, a nation is planning for refugee status due to adverse climate conditions.
Right now in this world, you have a choice to help alleviate environmental problems caused by humankind. — Gloria D. Gonsalves

We want to be God in all the ways that are not the ways of God, in what we hope is indestructible or unmoving. But God is the most fragile, a bare smear of pollen, that scatter of yellow dust from the tree that tumbled over in the storm of my grief and planted itself again. God is the death agony of the frog that cannot find water in the time of the drought we created. God is the scream of the rabbit caught in the fires we set. God is the One whose eyes never close and who hears everything. — Deena Metzger

The food surpluses produced by peasants, coupled with new transportation technology, eventually enabled more and more people to cram together first into large villages, then into towns, and finally into cities, all of them joined together by new kingdoms and commercial networks. Yet in order to take advantage of these new opportunities, food surpluses and improved transportation were not enough. The mere fact that one can feed a thousand people in the same town or a million people in the same kingdom does not guarantee that they can agree how to divide the land and water, how to settle disputes and conflicts, and how to act in times of drought or war. And if no agreement can be reached, strife spreads, even if the storehouses are bulging. It was not food shortages that caused most of history's wars and revolutions. The — Yuval Noah Harari

the river functions more like a fourteen-hundred-mile-long canal. The legal right to use every gallon is owned or claimed by someone - in fact, more than every gallon, since theoretical rights to the Colorado's flow, known to water lawyers as "paper water," greatly exceed its actual flow, known as "wet water." That imbalance has been exacerbated by the drought in the western United States, which began just before the turn of the millennium, but even if the drought ended tomorrow, problems would remain. — David Owen

The well of your soul will not experience the drought until in front of her will appear the moment of eternity to drink from the water of death. — Sorin Cerin

The Great Mother aborts children, and is the dead fetus; breeds pestilence, and is the plague; she makes of the skull something gruesomely compelling, and is all skulls herself. To unveil her is to risk madness, to gaze over the abyss, to lose the way, to remember the repressed trauma. She is the molestor of children, the golem, the bogey-man, the monster in the swamp, the rotting cadaverous zombie who threatens the living. She is progenitor of the devil, the "strange son of chaos." She is the serpent, and Eve, the temptress; she is the femme fatale, the insect in the ointment, the hidden cancer, the chronic sickness, the plague of locusts, the cause of drought, the poisoned water. She uses erotic pleasure as bait to keep the world alive and breeding; she is a gothic monster, who feeds on the blood of the living. — Jordan B. Peterson

You are the light in a dark place. You are the water to my drought. You are everything I never knew existed and everything I wanted all at the same time. — Shelly Crane

For one short wet month early in the next year the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water frothing at the hedges bubbling at the roadside splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower — Gregory Maguire

If the river has a soul, it's a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river's brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen. — Therese Anne Fowler

Desert strategies are useful: In times of drought, pull your resources inward; when water is scarce, find moisture in seeds; to stay strong and supple, send a taproot down deep; run when required, hide when necessary; when hot go underground; do not fear darkness, it's where one comes alive. — Terry Tempest Williams

INDIAN wisdom says our lives are rivers. We are born somewhere small and quiet and we move toward a place we cannot see, but only imagine. Along our journey, people and events flow into us, and we are created of everywhere and everyone we have passed. Each event, each person, changes us in some way. Even in times of drought we are still moving and growing, but it is during seasons of rain that we expand the most - when water flows from all directions, sweeping at terrifying speed, chasing against rocks, spilling over boundaries. These are painful times, but they enable us to carry burdens we could never have thought possible. — Lisa Wingate

It's hard to think of the divide where I grew up as a watershed. The creeks are dry most of the year, rainfall is undependable at best, and folks in one river system are always trying to steal water from another. — Faith A. Colburn

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans
vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming. — Paolo Bacigalupi

There's a lot of research that suggests that organic yields are close or superior to conventional yields depending on factors like climate. In a drought year an organic field of corn will yield more - considerably more - than a conventional field; organic fields hold moisture better so they don't need as much water. It simply isn't true that organic yields are lower than conventional yields. — Michael Pollan

California's drought affects everyone in the state, from farmers to fishermen, business owners to suburban residents, and everyone has a role to play in using precious water resources as wisely and efficiently as possible. — Frances Beinecke

No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor -- to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only once chance to guess what the future years, decades -- even centuries -- will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge. — Hope Jahren

You told me once of the plants that lie dormant through the drought, that wait, half-dead, deep in the earth. The plants that wait for the rain. You said they'd wait for years, if they had to; that they'd almost kill themselves before they grew again. But as soon as those first drops of water fall, those plants begin to stretch and spread their roots. They travel up through the soil and sand to reach the surface. There's a chance for them again. — Lucy Christopher