Water Quotes

...though by then it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish the acts of God from the endeavors of men. The wind was God; of this they were confident. As were the mountains funneling the wind.But the sand, all that monstrous, infinite sand. Who had latticed the Southwest with a network of aqueducts? Who had drained first Owens Lake then Mono Lake, Mammoth Lake, Lake Havasu and so on, leaving behind wide white smears of dust? Who had diverted the coast's rainwater and sapped the Great Basin of its groundwater? Who had tunneled beneath Lake Mead, installed a gaping outlet at its bottommost point, and drained it like a sink? Who had sucked up the Ogallala Aquifer, the Rio Grande aquifer, the snowpack of the Sierras and the Cascades? If this was God, he went by new names: Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, City of San Diego, City of Phoenix, Arizona Water and Power, New Mexico Water Commission, Las Vegas Housing and Water Authority, Bureau of Land Management, United States Department of the Interior.

~ Claire Vaye Watkins

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Water may be extremely dirty, yet its nature remains clear.

~ Dalai Lama Xiv

Civilization did not come with fire. It came with the discovery of how to use fire to heat water.

~ Laura Anne Gilman

You are the earth, my dear grandson, and just like it takes everything without complaining, so have you shown us today that you will take everything in kind, and there's no greater title than this.

~ Dora Okeyo

And what lights the sun? Its own fire. And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning. The river bobbled him along gently. Burning. The sun and every clock on the earth. It all came together and became a single thing in his mind. After a long time of floating on the land and a short time of floating in the river he knew why he must never burn again in his life.

~ Ray Bradbury

H--‐how did we get in the water?”“You were burning. I needed to do something to cool you. As soon as I carried you in, though, you started flailing around. Scared me,” he added on a whisper.That explained the dream. But it didn’t change what she knew was coming. She pressed her face against his neck and drew in the sweet scent of his skin. Loved the rasp of his stubbly cheek against her flesh.“Why do I get the feeling you’re holding something back?” he asked softly.Because he was smart. And because even in the short amount of time they’d been together, he’d learned more about her than anyone else in her entire life. “I believe in signs. I never did before but…I dreamed about you.”“You did?”She nodded. “I think I have for a while, I just…I didn’t know it was you. But now…”She swallowed hard. “I should have waited for you. It’s the biggest regret I have. I’m sorry I didn’t wait.

~ Elisabeth Naughton

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.

~ C.s. Lewis

That which abides the fire shall become clean. The water of separation shall purify. The Lord is a consuming fire. That which can't abide the fire shall go through water.

~ Andrew Davidson

They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.

~ Hermann Hesse

Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.

~ Truman Capote

Then the vulture swooped down and away, racing the LeTort spring to the Conodoguinet Creek from there to the Susquehanna river and from there to the sea. Same river my ancestors took to reach the places where they hunted and farmed and buried their dead.

~ Michele Mcknight Baker

…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)

~ Mark Nepo

You know it’s a real salvation when Baptists use cold water.

~ Jared Brock

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

Can a broken cisterns hold water?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Water is the most versatile of all elements. It isn't afraid to burn in fire or fade into the sky, it doesn't hesitate to shatter against sharp rocks in rainfall or drown into the dark shroud of the earth. It exists beyond all eginnings and ends. On the surface nothing will shift, but deep in underground silence, water will hide and with soft fingers coax a new channel for itself, until stone gives in and slowly settles around the secret space. Death is water's close companion, and neither of them can be separated from us, for we are made of the versatilitiy of water and the closeness of death. Water doesn't belong to us, be we belong to water: when it has passed through our fingers and pores and bodies, nothing separates us from earth.

~ Emmi Itäranta

And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom, while out of a still lower depth came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Oh fair enough are sky and plain,But I know fairer far:Those are as beautiful againThat in the water are;The pools and rivers wash so cleanThe trees and clouds and air,The like on earth was never seen,And oh that I were there.These are the thoughts I often thinkAs I stand gazing downIn act upon the cressy brinkTo strip and dive and drown;But in the golden-sanded brooksAnd azure meres I spyA silly lad that longs and looks And wishes he were I.

~ A.e. Housman

…have poets write about you as if you are alive. Scientifically, it is absolutely true, you are alive. You have a pulse, the waves, and a metabolism, the food chain. A personality, a character, a consciousness, and a sense of purpose…try this- turn into spray, spin rainbows…wear down entire mountains and dump them in layers…gently surround marina sea grass twice a day, protecting and feeding thousands of crabs, ducks, and geese…fill human eyes with warm salt brine at least once a month… Becoming Water

~ Susan Zwinger

I cry as the laughter inside me drowns and descends into the water with the ghosts of our union.

~ A.p. Sweet

I want to be done with tears, and the day is too beautiful for them anyway. Nevertheless, I consider my tears for a moment, the idea of them, a link to the earth’s ancient origins. I’m comforted by the notion that I carry a bit of the sea within myself wherever I go. It’s nice to think that water is not such an exotic thing after all.

~ Denise Getson

It is hard to make the boat go as fast as you want to. The enemy of course, is resistance of the water, as you have to displace the amount of water equal to the weight of the men and equipment, but that very water is what supports you and that very enemy is your friend. So is life: the very problems you must overcome also support you and make you stronger in overcoming them.

~ George Yeoman Pocock

[Jellyfish] are 97% water or something, so how much are they doing? Just give them another 3% and make them water. It's more useful.

~ Karl Pilkington

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),It's always our self we find in the sea.

~ E.e. Cummings

She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.

~ Holly Black

Ah, well, then you've never stood on a beach as the waves came crashing in, the water stretching out from you until it's beyond sight, moving and blue and alive and so much bigger than even the black beyond seems because the ocean hides what it contains.

~ Patrick Ness

Life in us is like the water in a river.

~ Henry David Thoreau

You can't trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it.

~ W.c. Fields

A pool just isn't the same as the ocean. It has no energy. No life.

~ Linda Gerber

Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

It's unpleasantly like being drunk. What's so unpleasant about being drunk? You ask a glass of water.

~ Douglas Adams

Dip him in the river who loves water.

~ William Blake

The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole. Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus may have drunk it. Cleopatra might have bathed in it. Crazy Horse might have watered his pony with it. Sometimes water was liquid. Sometimes it was rock hard- ice. Sometimes it was soft- snow. Sometimes it was visible but weightless- clouds. And sometimes it was completely invisible- vapor- floating up into the the sky like the soals of dead people. There was nothing like water in the world, Jim said. It made the desert bloom but also turned rich bottomland into swamp. Without it we'd die, but it could also kill us, and that was why we loved it, even craved it, but also feared it. Never take water forgranted, Jim said. Always cherish it. Always beware of it.

~ Jeannette Walls

Water seeks its own level. Look at them. The Tigris, the Euphrates, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Yangtze. The world's great rivers. And every one of them finds its way to the ocean.

~ Alison Mcghee

Where the waters do agree, it is quite wonderful the relief they give.

~ Jane Austen

He was going to take a dive into this lake. He just didn’t know it. Cerise rose, finding footing in the soft mud. The water came up to just below her breasts and her wet shirt stuck to her body. William’s gaze snagged on her chest. Yep, keep looking, Lord Bill. Keeeeeep looking.

~ Ilona Andrews

Praised be my Lord, for our sister water.St. Francis of Assisi,Canticle of the Sun

~ Francis Of Assisi

Father says hot water can be as stimulating as an alcoholic drink and though I never come by one...I can well believe it.

~ Dodie Smith

i know how it makes you feel...peaceful, permanent, unbroken

~ Margaret Stohl