Canal Barge Quotes

HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper? MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge...

There was a pleasant party of barge people round the fire. You might not have thought it pleasant, but they did; for they were all friends or acquaintances, and they liked the same sort of things, and talked the same sort of talk. This is the real secret of pleasant society.

When I’m rich,” Jesper said behind him. “I’m going somewhere I never have to see snow again. What about you, Wylan?” “I don’t know exactly.” “I think you should buy a golden piano-” “Flute.” “And play concerts on a pleasure barge. You can park it in the canal right outside your father’s house.” “Nina can sing,” Inej put in, “We’ll duet,” Nina amended. “Your father will have to move.” She did have a terrible singing voice. He hated that he knew that, but he couldn’t resist glancing over his shoulder. Nina’s hood had fallen back, and the thick waves of her hair had escaped her collar. Why do I keep doing that? He thought in a rush of frustration. It had happened aboard the ship, too. He’d tell himself to ignore her, and the next thing he knew his eyes would be seeking her out.

Technically the barge’s hull was only partly existent in reality and therefore couldn’t be torn open if it hit a rock. But Kai didn’t want to end up arguing with a barge determined that it had been hulled and needed to sink; the canal was too deep for that.

One afternoon we needed to urge the barge between the narrowing banks of the Romford Canal, my sister and I stationed on opposite sides of the deck yelling directions to The Darter at the wheel. The last hundred yards of the cut were almost fully overgrown. At its end there was a lorry waiting, and two men approached the boat and unloaded the boxes wordlessly,

The Princeton boys, though, found it inconvenient to row among the coal barges and recreational vessels that also made use of the canal, so they got Andrew Carnegie to build them a private lake. For roughly one hundred thousand dollars, about two and a half million in today’s dollars, Carnegie quietly bought up all the properties along a three-mile stretch of the Millstone River, dammed it, and produced a first-class rowing course—shallow, straight, protected, lovely to look at, and quite free of coal barges. For

Kleyweg’s Stads Koffyhuis is a local institution that’s won prizes for its sandwiches (see the trophies above the counter). This is a great spot for an affordable bite, either in the country-cozy interior or out on a canal barge (€7-10 sandwiches and hamburgers, €6-13 savory or sweet pancakes, big €13 salads, Mon-Fri 9:00-20:00, Sat 9:00-18:00, closed Sun, shorter hours off-season, just down the canal from the Old Church at Oude Delft 133, tel. 015/212-4625).

the American journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote after trekking across much of China in 1940. No worse luck could befall a human being than to be born and live there, unless by some golden chance you happened to be born one of the .00000099 percent who had power, money, privilege (and even then, even then). I pitied them all, I saw no tolerable future for them, and I longed to escape away from what I had escaped into: the age-old misery, filth, hopelessness and my own claustrophobia inside that enormous country. Skinny, sweaty rickshaw pullers strained at their large-wheeled contraptions to provide transportation to the rich. The scenes of nearly naked coolies towing barges up canals and rivers, leaning so far against their harnesses as to be almost horizontal to the ground, were an emblem, picturesque and horrible at the same time, of the unrelenting strain of everyday life in China, as were such other standard images as the women with leathery skin barefoot in the muck planting and weeding, the farmers covered in sweat at the foot pumps along fetid canals or carrying their loads of brick or straw on balancing poles slung over their shoulders or moving slowly and patiently behind water buffalo pulling primitive plows. The fly-specked hospitals, the skinny, crippled beggars, the thousands and thousands of villages made of baked mud whose houses, as one visitor described them, were “smoky, with gray walls and black tiled roofs; the inhabitants, wearing the invariable indigo-dyed cloth … moving about their business in an inextricable confusion of scraggy chickens, pigs, dogs, and babies.

Even the narrow canals around the Rialto teemed with floating shops- a small barge piled with jumbled green grapes, a boat heaped with oranges and limes, and another listing under a mountain of melons. I jogged along, drunk on all the colors and smells of the known world: pyramids of blood oranges from Greece, slender green beans from Morocco, sun-ripened cherries from Provence, giant white cabbages from Germany, fat black dates from Constantinople, and shiny purple eggplants from Holland.

Two damsel-flies are on the tall, flowering rush. These are the smallest of the British dragon-flies, and they prey on gnats, July-browns, and other insects. Beside the water-vole grow arrowhead plants, and to the left the great water-plantain. Both have three- petalled flowers. Their roots are deep in mud under the water, and they are growing in the shallows at the canal's edge together with the rushes. The canal passes under a bridge, and you can see how the tow-path also goes under it so that a horse that pulls a barge can pass thereon. On the towpath fishermen are sitting, and one of them has just caught a fish: not too big to be landed with a skilful jerk.

He wakes to blinding light and a shockingly verdant landscape: flooded paddy fields with narrow mud bunds snaking between them, barely containing the water whose still surface mirrors the sky; coconut palms that are as abundant as leaves of grass; tangled cucumber vines on the side of a canal; a lake crowded with canoes; and a stately barge parting the smaller vessels like a processional down a church aisle. His nostrils register jackfruit, dried fish, mango, and water. Even before his brain digests these sights, his body—skin, nerve endings, lungs, heart—recognizes the geography of his birth. He never understood how much it mattered. Every bit of this lush landscape is his; its every atom contains him. On this blessed strip of coast where Malayalam is spoken, the flesh and bones of his ancestors have leached into the soil, made their way into the trees, into the iridescent plumage of the parrots on swaying branches, and dispersed themselves into the breeze. He knows the names of the forty-two rivers running down from the mountains, one thousand two hundred miles of waterways, feeding the rich soil in between, and he is one with every atom of it. I’m the seedling in your hand, he thinks, as he gazes on Muslim women in colorful long-sleeved blouses and mundus, with cloths loosely covering their hair, bent over at the waist like paper creased down the middle, moving as one line through the paddy fields, poking new life into the soil. Whatever is next for me, whatever the story of my life, the roots that must nourish it are here. He feels transformed as though by a religious experience, but it has nothing to do with religion.

Sean Sagan, the main character in my novel, The Last Breath of Sean Sagan came to life while wintering in the Bahamas. Sean walked the beach trail to my rented cabin. He guided me through the writing process.