Waterways Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Waterways. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Mist to mist, drops to drops. For water thou art, and unto water shalt thou return.
Kamand Kojouri
In Seattle we live among the trees and the waterways, and we feel we are rocked gently in the cradle of life. Our winters are not cold and our summers are not hot and we congratulate ourselves for choosing such a spectacular place to rest our heads.
Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once -somewhere- far away in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
So, ninety-five percent of the time." She craned her head back to look up at time. "Ninety-five percent? What's the other five percent?" "Oh, you know, the usual--demons I might kill, runes I need to learn, people who've annoyed me recently, people who've annoyed me not so recently, ducks." "Ducks?" He waved her question away. "All right. Now watch this." He took her shoulders and turned her gently, so they were both facing the same way. A moment later--she wasn't sure how--the walls of the room seemed to melt away around them, and she found herself stepping out onto cobblestones. She gasped, turning to look behind her, and saw only a black wall, windows high up in an old stone building. Rows of similar house lined the canal they stood besides. If she craned her head to the left, she could see in the distance that the canal opened out into a much larger waterway, lined with grand buildings. Everywhere was the smell of water and stone. "Cool, huh?" Jace said proudly. She turned and looked at him. "Ducks?" She said again. A smile tugged the edge of his mouth. "I hate ducks. Don't know hy. I just always have.
Cassandra Clare
What is the matter with these people, these people who won't stop fighting, won't stop hurting each other long enough to see that a body is a thing of beauty, is a miracle of rivers and oceans and islands and continents contained within itself? That the brain is divided into two hemispheres, each symmetrical, each perfect, each with its own system of waterways. These people of war should be shown an x-ray of an intraparenchymal hemorrhage, of a hemorrhage in an eighteen-year-old girl's brain, a girl named Ivy. Take a look at that, people of war. See, you should not hurt each other, and this is why. Without you ever even trying, this is what can happen to your body, your beautiful body, and your brain, your beautiful symmetrical brain, and your heart, and your soul.
Alison McGhee (All Rivers Flow to the Sea)
Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed.
Harlan Ellison
You've got to see Venice," he began. "You've got to see a city of slender towers and white domes, sleeping in the water like a mass of water lilies. You've got to see dark waterways, mysterious threads of shadow, binding all these flowers of stone together.
E. Temple Thurston (The City of Beautiful Nonsense)
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light.
Jack London (White Fang)
Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overschadowed distances. [...] And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness: and Selections from The Congo Diary)
Under the redwood tree my grave was laid, and I beguiled my true love to lie down. The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship. My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy. The winds boomed triumph, our spines seemed overburdened, and our bones groaned like old trees, but a smile like a cobweb was fastened across the mouth of the cave of fate. Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour. Oh, canary, sing out in the thunderstorm, prove your yellow pride. Give me a reason for courage or a way to be brave. But nothing tangible comes to rescue my besieged sanity, and I cannot decipher the code of the eucalyptus thumping on my roof. I am unnerved by the opponents of God, and God is out of earshot. I must spin good ghosts out of my hope to oppose the hordes at my window. If those who look in see me condescend to barricade the door, they will know too much and crowd in to overcome me. The parchment philosopher has no traffic with the night, and no conception of the price of love. With smoky circles of thought he tries to combat the fog, and with anagrams to defeat anatomy. I posture in vain with his weapons, even though I am balmed with his nicotine herbs. Moon, moon, rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort and the hour when I was brave.
Elizabeth Smart (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept)
Dark spruce frowned on either side of the frozen waterway.
Jack London (White Fang)
As the still ocean paths before the shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping nightbirds cried across the air.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
But in fact, the restaurant, with all its glitter, wasn’t nearly as grand as her favorite picnic. When she was fifteen, Tate had boated to her shack one dawn, and, after he’d wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, they cruised inland through a maze of waterways to a forest she’d never seen. They hiked a mile to the edge of a waterlogged meadow where fresh grass sprouted through mud, and there he laid the blanket under ferns as large as umbrellas.
Delia Owens (Where the Crawdads Sing)
Each day we wake up and make myriad choices that affect others. We clothe ourselves with shirts, pants, and shoes that may have been sewn together by women working in factories fourteen-plus hours a day for a nonliving wage; we buy products manufactured in ways the destroy forests, pollute waterways, and poison the air; we wash our hair with shampoos that may have been squeezed into the eyes of conscious rabbits or force-fed to them in quantities that kill; and on and on. As Derrick Jensen has written in his book "The Culture of Make Believe", "It is possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It is possible to commit genocide or ecocide from the comfort of one's living room
Zoe Weil (Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principle for a Better World and Meaningful Life)
Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land.
Jack London (White Fang)
DARK SPRUCE FOREST FROWNED ON EITHER SIDE THE FROZEN WATERWAY. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
Jack London (White Fang)
For cities are museums of time, and to live in them is to be haunted by the places they once were. The waterways that existed before the skyscrapers and freeways are a vanished world that beacons to us. When we catch glimpses of them, the city disappears. Its too-known streets dissolve into unfathomable terrain. It becomes innocent again. We want to unmake the city. To regain a lost paradise.
Gary Kamiya (Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco)
Stop trying to imitate what the sages have done. That's past, and though it might have been appropriate at the time, that time is over. The present is alive. Don't use what's dead as a guide to what's alive.
Lao Tzu (Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching)
However much they may smile at her, the old inhabitants would miss Tillie. Her stories give them something to talk about and to conjecture about, cut off as they are from the restless currents of the world. The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shining waterways. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams.
Willa Cather (The Song of the Lark)
And Francie whispered yeah in agreement. She was proud of that smell. It let her know that nearby was a waterway, which, dirty though it was, joined a river that flowed out to the sea. To her, the stupendous stench suggested far-sailing ships and adventure and she was pleased with the smell.
Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
If we would divert to constructive research even a small fraction of the money spent each year on the development of ever more toxic sprays, we could find ways to use less dangerous materials and to keep poisons out of our waterways. When will the public become sufficiently aware of the facts to demand such action?
Rachel Carson (Silent Spring)
What, in nature," Kit asked, "is the most beautiful thing you've seen? Or the most terrible?" "The Dismals," Giles answered promptly. "A beautiful aberration in the lay of the land--North Alabama. A section mysteriously lowered, strewn with boulders, ferny, mossy, cooler--the vegetation, they say, typical of Canada. There the creek runs clear, but all other Alabama rivers and waterways are muddy with sediment. I even like the name--the Dismals. An eternal place, disjunct with the climate, the time, and its location." "You think being dismal is an attractive association with eternity?" I asked. "It is a cool Eden in the Southern summer heat. What's yours, Una?" "The Kentucky hills in spring. Layers of pink and white--redbud and dogwood." "And you?" Giles asked Kit. "Stars," he said. That was all.
Sena Jeter Naslund (Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer)
Many conscientious environmentalists are repelled by the word "abundance," automatically associating it with irresponsible consumerism and plundering of Earth's resources. In the context of grassroots frustration, insensitive enthusing about the potential for energy abundance usually elicits an annoyed retort. "We have to conserve." The authors believe the human family also has to _choose_. The people we speak with at the recycling depot or organic juice bar are for the most part not looking at the _difference_ between harmony-with-nature technologies and exploitative practices such as mountaintop coal mining. "Destructive" was yesterday's technology of choice. As a result, the words "science and technology" are repugnant to many of the people who passionately care about health, peace, justice and the biosphere. Usually these acquaintances haven't heard about the variety of constructive yet powerful clean energy technologies that have the potential to gradually replace oil and nuclear industries if allowed. Wastewater-into-energy technologies could clean up waterways and other variations solve the problem of polluting feedlots and landfills.
Jeane Manning (Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World)
The angel of God, having secretly Betrothed us one winter day, Watches over our carefree lives With fixed, darkening eyes Because of this we love the sky, Keen air, the fresh wind And the blackening branches Behind the iron fence. Because of this we love the stern Dark city with its many waterways. And we love our partings, And our brief meetings.
Anna Akhmatova (The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova)
Resources, waterways, and climatic zones loom so large in their writings that one can almost forget that people have something to do with the building of cities.
William Cronon (Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West)
My poor boat poked along the waterway with the blinding speed of a manatee.
Pat Conroy (The Water is Wide)
but my mind kept swimming swiftly around through the convoluted waterways of my consciousness, like a restless aquatic organism.
Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat Series, #3))
Anima is walking along the promenade of the waterway that bisects her city, a few early morning barges cruise slowly by
Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)
Antidepressants were swimming in the rivers, and our bloodstreams were just as polluted as the waterways.
Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles)
Whether people are united by navigable waterways or cut off by rugged mountains or other geographical barriers has enormous cultural as well as economic and political significance.
Thomas Sowell (Conquests and Cultures: An International History)
His last word—to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!' "I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. "'The last word he pronounced was—your name.' "I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it—I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether. . . ." Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
It's really just the memory of a river. All Southern California waterways have become like phantom limbs. We might feel that they're still there, but it's just an illusion cast in cement.
Jarrod Shusterman (Dry)
apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
The undocumented community in Flint has been affected by the water crisis in disturbingly specific ways. Flyers announcing toxic levels of lead in the Flint waterways were published entirely in English, and when canvassers went door-to-door to tell residents to stop drinking tap water, undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (The Undocumented Americans)
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
Know others by knowing yourself. Overcome others by overcoming yourself. Understanding what is enough is enough. Presence is perseverance. Coming to stillness is forging ahead. Find life by accepting death.
Lao Tzu (Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching)
Am a is walking along the promenade of the waterway that bisects her city, a few early morning barges cruise slowly by. This is not about feeling something or about speaking words this is about being together.
Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)
Look. Forget how smart you think you are. Stop wanting everything, as though there is something out there that will cure or fix you. Just make things happen by allowing them to happen Then everything will turn out alright.
Lao Tzu (Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching)
Lake Michigan’s definitely moody. It’s not just bi-polar, but beyond schizophrenic. It’s dozens of surrounding lakes and waterways never know what to expect on a day to day basis. She is awesome at calm and awesome at dangerous.
Yasmina Haque (The Soulmate Prophecy: Book One - The Birth)
Measure yourself the way you measure others. Measure others the way you measure your village. Measure your village the way you measure your country. Measure your country the way you measure the Tao. And measure the Tao by what is in you.
Lao Tzu (Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching)
What has Capitalism resolved? It has solved no problems. It has looted the world. It has left us with all this poverty. It has created lifestyles and models of consumerism that are incompatible with reality. It has poisoned the waterways. Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, Seas, the Atmosphere, the Earth. It has produced an incredible waste of resources. I always cite one example; imagine every person in China owned a Car, or aspired to own a Car. Everyone of the 1.1 Billion people in China, or that everyone of the 800 million people in India wished to own a Car, this method, this lifestyle, and Africa did the same, and nearly 450 million Latin Americans did the same. How long would Oil last? How long would Natural Gas last? How long would natural resources last? What would be left of the Ozone layer? What would be left of Oxygen on Earth? What would happen with Carbon Dioxide? And all these phenomenon that are changing the ecology of our world, they are changing Earth, they are making life on our Planet more and more difficult all the time. What model has Capitalism given the world to follow? An example for societies to emulate? Shouldn’t we focus on more rational things, like the education of the whole population? Nutrition, health, a respectable lodging, an elevated culture? Would you say capitalism, with it’s blind laws, it’s selfishness as a fundamental principle, has given us something to emulate? Has it shown us a path forward? Is humanity going to travel on the course charted thus far? There may be talk of a crisis in socialism, but, today, there is an even greater crises in capitalism, with no end in sight.
Fidel Castro
Congress was forced to take action, passing the Clean Water Act in 1972. Gradually the state of America’s waterways improved, to the point where they now hardly ever catch fire. In a rare example of a happy ending in this book, people actually did what they needed to do to make things better, and hahaha, there’s absolutely no chance that the Trump administration would ever attempt to overturn clean water standards because they’re worried industries aren’t allowed to pollute rivers enough. [Puts finger to ear.] Oh, I’m being told that’s exactly what they’ve done.
Tom Phillips (Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up)
there is method at work here, method of a fanatic order and perseverance: each groove in the rock leads to a natural channel of some kind, every channel to a ditch and gulch and ravine, each larger waterway to a canyon bottom or broad wash leading in turn to the Colorado River and the sea.
Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness)
Haida got quite talkative when it came to music [...] but Tsukuru barely listened. Instead, a picture of Shiro performing the piece, a mental image, vivid and three-dimensional, welled up in his mind. As if those beautiful moments were steadily swimming back, through a waterway, against the legitimate press of time.
Haruki Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage)
I Can Also Paint Around the time that he reached the unnerving milestone of turning thirty, Leonardo da Vinci wrote a letter to the ruler of Milan listing the reasons he should be given a job. He had been moderately successful as a painter in Florence, but he had trouble finishing his commissions and was searching for new horizons. In the first ten paragraphs, he touted his engineering skills, including his ability to design bridges, waterways, cannons, armored vehicles, and public buildings. Only in the eleventh paragraph, at the end, did he add that he was also an artist. “Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible,” he wrote.
Walter Isaacson (Leonardo Da Vinci)
To think of food as a weapon, or of a weapon as food, may give an illusory security and wealth to a few, but it strikes directly at the life of all. The concept of food-as-weapon is not surprisingly the doctrine of a Department of Agriculture that is being used as an instrument of foreign political and economic speculation. This militarizing of food is the greatest threat so far raised against the farmland and the farm communities of this country. If present attitudes continue, we may expect government policies that will encourage the destruction, by overuse, of farmland. This, of course, has already begun. To answer the official call for more production -- evidently to be used to bait or bribe foreign countries -- farmers are plowing their waterways and permanent pastures; lands that ought to remain in grass are being planted in row crops. Contour plowing, crop rotation, and other conservation measures seem to have gone out of favor or fashion in official circles and are practices less and less on the farm. This exclusive emphasis on production will accelerate the mechanization and chemicalization of farming, increase the price of land, increase overhead and operating costs, and thereby further diminish the farm population. Thus the tendency, if not the intention, of Mr. Butz confusion of farming and war, is to complete the deliverance of American agriculture into the hands of corporations.
Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture)
Keep sharpening, and the knife becomes useless.
Lao Tzu (Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching)
mirror,
Lao Tzu (Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching)
Local waterways had long been contaminated from many sources. But in 1987, the state at last issued a seafood advisory for Bayou d'Inde, the Calcasieu Ship Channel, and the estuary to the Gulf of Mexico. ... From net to plate—fishermen, grocery stores, trucking companies, and restaurant workers—all were furious at the government officials who had declared the seafood advisory.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
But, you see, the water-going dinosaur likes to eat people. It’s envisioned that it might swim through the newly acquired waterways, due to the ice melting and find its way to warmer waters and make its way to our civilization. Then, much like an old Japanese monster movie, start tearing down cities and eating fleeing citizens, stomping pedestrians, and receiving an air strike.
Jonathan Maberry (Limbus, Inc. - Book II)
spaces beneath our feet, in the fractures and voids in the rock, in caverns and fissures and channels, there are waterways as numerous, as meandering, as circuitous, as anything aboveground. The beginning of the Thames is not the beginning—or, rather, it is only to us that it seems like a beginning. In fact Trewsbury Mead might not be the beginning in any case. There are those who say it’s the wrong place. The not-even-the-beginning is not here but elsewhere, at a place called Seven Springs, which is the source of the Churn, a river that joins the Thames at Cricklade. And who is to say? The Thames that goes north, south, east, and west to finally go east, that seeps to one side and the other as it moves forwards, that goes slow as it goes fast, that evaporates into the sky while meandering to the sea, is more about motion than about beginnings. If it has a beginning, it is located in a dark, inaccessible place. Better study where it goes than where it came from.
Diane Setterfield (Once Upon a River)
I can live with that.” Each morning they rose at dawn and, while Tate percolated coffee, Kya fried corn fritters in Ma’s old iron skillet—blackened and dented—or stirred grits and eggs as sunrise eased over the lagoon. The heron posing one-legged in the mist. They cruised estuaries, waded waterways, and slipped through narrow streams, collecting feathers and amoebas. In the evenings, they drifted in her old boat until sunset, then swam naked in moonlight or loved in beds of cool ferns.
Delia Owens (Where the Crawdads Sing)
So much dung, filth, and entrails of dead beasts and other corruptions is cast into ditches, rivers and other waterways, and many other places, within about and near to the cities, boroughs and towns of the realm… that the air is greatly corrupted and infected and many maladies and other intolerable diseases do daily happen…’64 They ordered fines of £20 to be levied on all those who had not remedied the situation within a year, and passed the responsibility for keeping the streets clean to local officers.
Ian Mortimer (Henry IV: The Righteous King)
try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.
Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts)
The instant of petrified violence that sometimes foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of trailing fern which were strung round the porch like party lanterns appeared illuminated by a faint green inward flame. A damp breeze, tuning in the boles of waterways, carried the fresh mixed scent of rain, of pine and June flowers blooming in far-off fields. The cabin door swung open, banged closed, and there came the muffled rattle of the Landing's window-shutters being drawn.
Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms)
A man hungry for knowledge gains something every day. A man who already knows loses something every day. strips down to the essence strips down the essence to nothing, and leaves nothing unknown. To rule, let go. Let people go; let yourself go; let the empire go. Anarchy is the only art of rulership.
Lao Tzu (Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching)
What I'm teaching you is easy to understand. Perhaps you're thinking too hard. What I'm teaching you is easy to put into practice. Perhaps you should relax. What I'm teaching you has a source, but you're expecting a result. You want the precious jade; I offer only homespun cloth. Which will keep you warm?
Lao Tzu (Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching)
Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily.
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
The Christiania “free state” is a quarter in Copenhagen, Denmark, that has been squatted since 1971. Its 850 inhabitants are autonomous within their 85 acres. They have been taking out their own trash for over thirty years. The fact that they receive about one million visitors a year makes their achievement all the more impressive. The streets, buildings, restaurants, public toilets, and public showers are all reasonably clean — especially for hippies! The body of water that runs through Christiania is not the cleanest, but considering that Christiania is tree-covered and automobile free one suspects most of the pollution comes from the surrounding city that shares the waterway.
Peter Gelderloos (Anarchy Works (Annotated))
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
Jack London
The intriguing history of American applied toponymy includes a few notoriously unpopular sweeping decisions a year after President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. Harrison acted at the behest of several government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was responsible for mapping the nation's coastline, harbors, and coastal waterways. Troubled by inconsistencies in spelling, board members voted to replace centre with center, drop the ugh from names ending in orough, and shorten the suffix burgh to burg. Overnight, Centreview (in Mississippi) became Centerview, Isleborough (in Maine) became Isleboro, and Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania) lost its final h and a lot of civic pride. The city was chartered in 1816 as Pittsburg, but the Post Office Department added the extra letter sometime later. Although both spellings were used locally and the shorter version had been the official name, many Pittsburghers complained bitterly about the cost of reprinting stationery and repainting signs. Making the spelling consistent with Harrisburg, they argued, was hardly a good reason for truncating the Iron City's moniker--although Harrisburg was the state capital, it was a smaller and economically less important place. Local officials protested that the board had exceeded its authority. The twenty-year crusade to restore the final h bore fruit in 1911, when the board reversed itself--but only for Pittsburgh. In 1916 the board reaffirmed its blanket change of centre, borough, and burgh as well as its right to make exceptions for Pittsburgh and other places with an entrenched local usage.
Mark Monmonier (From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame)
She nearly slipped on an icy rock, but he caught her, his shoepacks sure on the frozen ground. He led her up a shaded path to a limestone wall, where they squeezed through an opening like a loophole. On the other side, the earth fell away, and it seemed they stepped into open sky. She gave a little gasp, not of fear, but of awe. He turned to take her in, pressing his back against the cold cliff and drawing her in front of him. She looked down and found the toes of her boots in midair with only her heels on the ledge. But he had one hard arm around her, grounding her. His breath was warm against her cold cheek. “I wanted to show you Cherokee territory, not just tell you about it.” She followed the sweep of his arm south, his finger pointing to distant snow-dusted mountains and a wide opal river. Small puffs of smoke revealed few campfires or cabins. The land lay before them like a disheveled white coverlet, uninhabited and without end, broken by more mountains and wending waterways. The unspoiled beauty of it took her breath. For a moment he relaxed his hold on her. With a cry, she reached for him again, fearing she might fall into nothingness. “Careful,” he murmured, steadying her. “Trust me.” She shut her eyes tight as his arms settled around her, anchoring her to the side of the cliff. Frightened as she was, she felt a tingling from her bare head to her feet. ’Twas altogether bewildering and frightening . . . yet pleasing. Gingerly, as if doing a slow dance, he led her off the ledge onto safe ground, where he released her and turned toward the stallion grazing on a tuft of grass. His smile was tight. “We should return—soon, before your father thinks I took you captive.” Reluctantly she walked behind him, framing every part of him in her mind in those few, unguarded moments before he mounted.
Laura Frantz (Courting Morrow Little)
Always, sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rain and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilaccoloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it “the new thing” or “the new thing in the river,” and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled. I
V.S. Naipaul (A Bend in the River)
There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.
Salman Rushdie (Shalimar the Clown)
In that moment Ned felt a swelling, a ripping expansion, a hugeness that rang through him for the length of his life, a feeling that was sometimes rivalled but never quite matched. Not at weddings, not at births, not at funerals. Not when he worked his way north to Longreach, where he finally saw Toby again, finding him cocky, funny and largely unchanged. Not during good seasons or bad. Not when he was alone on cold waterways, not when he was in the grip of people he loved. Not as he poured dirt into graves, not as he watched his children, then his grandchildren, play. Not on the white sands of hidden beaches. Not in the shade of ancient trees, in whose canopies he imagined he could see the darting of cream-brown quolls. Not on rocky mountain roofs. Not in the presence of whales, not while viewing fine ships. Not at the scent of Huon pine. Not as Callie's last breath eased out of her, in their house overlooking kanamaluka, the eastern sun warming her face right up to the final moments of her life. Not at his ninetieth birthday, surrounded by his family and what was left of his friends, as he felt both powerfully loved and profoundly alone. Not even then, at the very end of his life, did he feel it again, although he always remembered it: this hugeness of feeling. This undamming of a whole summer's fear, this half-sickening lurch to joy. (pp.225-6)
Robbie Arnott (Limberlost)
One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.
Jason Rebello (Red Earth Diaries: A Migrant Couple's Backpacking Adventure in Australia)
The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.
Wallace J. Nichols (Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do)
The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must have touched the waves and spattered them—the dolphins circling deeper and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy. In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing stiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle. Sandra’s veils were swirled about her. “I will give you my copy,” said Jacob. “Here. Will you keep it?” (The book was the poems of Donne.) Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark. Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns—Paris—Constantinople—London—were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might be distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled. The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another. The English sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passed into it from the grass–rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blew in at Betty Flanders’s bedroom window, and the widow lady, raising herself slightly on her elbow, sighed like one who realizes, but would fain ward off a little longer—oh, a little longer!—the oppression of eternity. But to return to Jacob and Sandra. They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The columns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on them year after year; and of that what remains?
Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)
We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn’t travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. Outsiders ridiculed us and thought us stupid; teachers forbade our children to speak French on the school grounds. Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year. Much of this we did to ourselves in the same way that a drunk like me will destroy a gift, one that is irreplaceable and extended by a divine hand. Our roadsides are littered with trash, our rain ditches layered with it, our waterways dumping grounds for automobile tires and couches and building material. While we trivialize the implications of our drive-through daiquiri windows and the seediness of our politicians and recite our self-congratulatory mantra, laissez les bons temps rouler, the southern rim of the state hovers on the edge of oblivion, a diminishing, heartbreaking strip of green lace that eventually will be available only in photographs.
James Lee Burke (The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22))
The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop. The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi. The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.) Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the engine that drives almost all of this activity is snow. This means that the bulk of the Colorado’s discharge tends to come down in one headlong rush. Throughout the autumn and the winter, the river might trickle through the canyonlands of southern Utah at a mere three thousand cubic feet per second. With the melt-out in late May and early June, however, the river’s flow can undergo spectacular bursts of change. In the space of a week, the level can easily surge to 30,000 cfs, and a few days after that it can once again rocket up, surpassing 100,000 cfs. Few rivers on earth can match such manic swings from benign trickle to insane torrent. But the story doesn’t end there, because these savage transitions are exacerbated by yet another unusual phenomenon, one that is a direct outgrowth of the region’s unusual climate and terrain. On
Kevin Fedarko
What exogenous causes are shifting the allocation of moral intuitions away from community, authority, and purity and toward fairness, autonomy, and rationality? One obvious force is geographic and social mobility. People are no longer confined to the small worlds of family, village, and tribe, in which conformity and solidarity are essential to daily life, and ostracism and exile are a form of social death. They can seek their fortunes in other circles, which expose them to alternative worldviews and lead them into a more ecumenical morality, which gravitates to the rights of individuals rather than chauvinistic veneration of the group. By the same token, open societies, where talent, ambition, or luck can dislodge people from the station in which they were born, are less likely to see an Authority Ranking as an inviolable law of nature, and more likely to see it as a historical artifact or a legacy of injustice. When diverse individuals mingle, engage in commerce, and find themselves on professional or social teams that cooperate to attain a superordinate goal, their intuitions of purity can be diluted. One example, mentioned in chapter 7, is the greater tolerance of homosexuality among people who personally know homosexuals. Haidt observes that when one zooms in on an electoral map of the United States, from the coarse division into red and blue states to a finer-grained division into red and blue counties, one finds that the blue counties, representing the regions that voted for the more liberal presidential candidate, cluster along the coasts and major waterways. Before the advent of jet airplanes and interstate highways, these were the places where people and their ideas most easily mixed. That early advantage installed them as hubs of transportation, commerce, media, research, and education, and they continue to be pluralistic—and liberal—zones today. Though American political liberalism is by no means the same as classical liberalism, the two overlap in their weighting of the moral spheres. The micro-geography of liberalism suggests that the moral trend away from community, authority, and purity is indeed an effect of mobility and cosmopolitanism.202
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
These prophetic verses certainly would apply to the United States. Twenty-two of our states have ports or harbors through which flow the world’s goods for America’s consumption. There are over 400 coastal and inland ports throughout the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau has identified two hundred and forty national trading partners of the United States using those ports. Some of the largest U.S. ports are located on inland waterways, including Houston, Texas; Mobile, Alabama; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Portland, Oregon. The port city farthest from the ocean, Fairmont, West Virginia, is 2,085 miles from the sea via an inland waterway. America is truly a nation dwelling on many waters.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
We need the implementation of the Smart Waterways Grid across India to harness 1,500 BCM of floodwater and connect the rivers and catchment areas as a single plane. The grid will receive 1,500 BCM of floodwater and act as a water grid so that water can be released to any deficient place and replenished during flood. It would act as a 15,000 kilometres-long national reservoir. It would be able to provide drinking water to 600 million people, irrigation to 150 million acres of land, and generate 60,000 MW of power. Due to ground water recharge, it would also save 4,000 MW of power. Each state can implement this mission with an outlay of approximately 50,000 crores with annual budgetary support, central government assistance, public-private consortia and with support from the World Bank in a BOOT (Build, Operate, Own and Transfer) based PPP model and this can be realized within 2020. Apart from this, an Integrated Water Resource Management system is also required to revive water bodies and tanks and build farm ponds and checkdams across India as well as increase irrigation infrastructure and groundwater potential, thereby enhancing the safe drinking water resources of the nation.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
Make no mistake – this practice sullies the Clean Water Act, enacted to protect such waterways from pollution. As Chapter 2 explained, Congress specifically established a national policy to eliminate all pollution into the nation’s navigable waters by 1985. The Senate Report stated that “[t]he use of any river, lake, stream or ocean as a waste treatment system is unacceptable.” Subject to EPA’s section 402 jurisdiction, the Coeur Alaska mine could not discharge into the lake.
Mary Christina Wood (Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age)
Washington had dreamed of Potomac River navigation long before independence made it a patriotic cause. Not only could such a waterway improve access to his frontier holdings, it would channel western trade through the mouth of the Potomac near his Mount Vernon plantation. Both would increase his wealth.
Edward J. Larson (The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783–1789)
In three-quarters of all countries, industrial waste is simply released into their water systems. America’s not that much better—40 percent of our own waterways are deemed unsafe for swimming or fishing. Pretty scary. If we gloss over this, stay numb to this, our immediate future is at grave risk.
Tom O'Bryan (You Can Fix Your Brain: Just 1 Hour a Week to the Best Memory, Productivity, and Sleep You've Ever Had)
president, Hannibal Hamlin. The William Badger's history helps illuminate a fascinating period of mid-nineteenth-century maritime activity, when sturdy square-rigged sailing ships canvassed the oceans and U.S. coastal waterways. In the days before digital electronics,
Peter Kurtz (Bluejackets in the Blubber Room: A Biography of the William Badger, 1828-1865)
Beyond the apartment’s walls, in the night sky of his closed eyes, little lights charted the streets and broad avenues, the apartments and clubs of late revelers, the tall towers, where five or six guys he knew, guys only a few years ahead of him, would be toiling, even at this hour, in their big chairs, the vast windows of their offices overlooking the city, overlooking the planet with its mines and wells, its fields and great waterways, as they steered Earth’s course by the graphs and instruments of their predecessors’ devising into the hidden future.
Deborah Eisenberg (Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories)
The plastic we throw away in a single year could circle the earth four times. Out of the 320 million metric tonnes of new plastic mass-produced each year 1 – almost all from oil – eight million tonnes leak into the world’s oceans and waterways. That is the equivalent of a truckload of plastic being upturned and shaken out straight into the sea every minute of every day. Every minute of every day, one million plastic bottles are used.2 Imagine each of those bottles, a quarter filled with oil; the amount of oil needed to make the bottle in the first place.
Lucy Siegle (Turning the Tide on Plastic: How Humanity (And You) Can Make Our Globe Clean Again)
In the bottoms, reeds grew thick and green in rain-swollen waterways; low, shrubby willows populated a patchwork of sandy islands; and other water-hardy stuff grew in such profusion that only the most wretched fugitives were to be found there. Merely to dwell in such a place was to confess oneself an outlaw or a witch. The valleys and ravines that drained into it were choked with trees, generally too small and mean to be of interest to any, save charcoal burners. The
Neal Stephenson (The Mongoliad)
Eyllwe, she’d heard, had taken the brunt of it. Though their king had yielded his power to the King of Adarlan, Eyllwe soldiers still could be found fighting in the rebel groups that plagued Adarlan’s forces. But the land itself was too vital for Adarlan to abandon. Eyllwe boasted two of the most prosperous cities on the continent; its territory—rich in farmland, waterways, and forests—was a crucial vein in trade routes. Now, it seemed, Adarlan had decided that it might make money off its people, too.
Sarah J. Maas (The Assassin's Blade (Throne of Glass, #0.1-0.5))
By that time Willy’s skin was nearly its normal fair hue again. “There’s a shoemaker over in Piddington named Clarke Nichols,” he said. “He has such good business he needs a second apprentice.” “Shoemaker?” said Willy, with more interest than the trade deserved. He had been idle too long. The Northampton area was known for shoemaking. Everything was there for the trade: abundant hides from livestock in the lush pastures, friendly waterways for easy transportation, oaks for the tanning process, and lastly, tradition. The same King Charles that Cromwell had defeated in nearby hills had earlier pummeled the walls of Northampton for making shoes for Cromwell’s army. “I’ve been to see Clarke Nichols,” continued Willy’s father. “He seems a Godly man. The pastor there says he is good churchman. Nichols even has a small library that you might profit from, Willy.” “So
Sam Wellman (William Carey)
the river Ankh, a waterway so muddy that it looks as if it is flowing upside down.
Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms (Discworld, #15))
It is gloomy, especially in the rain, the waterways with mist rising off them, memories of past visits here and earlier loves-- ghost smudges barely glimpsed, dripping alleys, steps dissolving into water, old ladies behind curtains, eating off trays, lives that have themselves become riddles. Then it changes overnight. The salt breezes open one's nostrils to delight, the tourists are suddenly not so dowdy and badly dressed. The canals glitter that famous jade green. The motoscafi fly their tricolor pennants bravely, and the sky is once again that cerulean blue the painters loved.
Richard Tillinghast
Most people won't bat an eyelid when they hear about PFAS in rainwater. Why? Because they will tell you that they drink bottled water. That's when you tell them that rainwater waters their flowers, their vegetables, their livestock, our waterways and rivers. We eat the vegetables. We consume the livestock. We fry the fish and swim in the waterways & oceans. Rainwater goes everywhere and douses everything in moisture. It's already in our blood streams and in our lungs and even if you tried to stop breathing & ingesting it, we couldn't because it's everywhere. A half life of 3-4 years may not be a long period of time, but how do you stop what you can't?
Anthony T. Hincks
started calling him by his formal name out of respect for his father. But, by that time, everyone was so used to the nickname that it didn’t seem right to call him anything else. Now, he only used his formal name when he signed business documents, but everyone called him Ben. When his mother married Troy Carlson three years after his father died, people outside of their circle assumed that Ben's last name was Carlson, as well. This mistake became a benefit when Ben became an adult because it gave him a certain level of anonymity that he used when he travelled. After he turned his attention back to the business at hand, he checked in along with the rest of the party and used his assumed last name as he handed over a company credit card. Over the years he discovered that to check into hotels using his real name usually led to trouble. Benjamin Stanford III was quickly becoming something of a local celebrity in the Seattle area and most of the West Coast even though he tried to keep a low profile. Ever since he took over the helm of the family business from his mother, who ran it after his father died, he had invested heavily into researching and developing cleaner solutions for the waterways, as well as, expanding the other areas of biochemical uses in manufacturing for which the company was originally known. These investments paid off, and the once small company grew to become a world leader in research, which made him an even richer man than he was when he took over. That also led to him being named one of Seattle's most eligible bachelors by Seattle Magazine three years ago. Before that, his personal life was relatively uneventful, and
Eleanor Webb (The Job Offer)
Canals are made of flat water, and flat water is difficult stuff to get hold of. It is expensive. You use locks to keep it flat when you go up hills. Sometimes, you have to take the water under hills in tunnels in order to preserve its flatness. Canals were not cheap to build.
Ian Marchant (Parallel Lines: Or, Journeys on the Railway of Dreams)
Revelers in green stumbled from pub to pub as I drove away yesterday from springtime in Washington, a collage of the organic and the man-made--- redbud and sidewalk, dogwood and car. Small trees in the easement showed feathery pink blossoms. I've left the delicacy of spring for a hot, sodden green, the cruise control carrying me south through Virginia and the Carolinas, Georgia, and farther on toward the place where Florida's panhandle curves in and resort beaches fade into a coastline of dense and mangrove and fingerling waterways. Slightly inland from the Gulf sits my hometown of Tenetkee, where the water transitions slowly to land.
Virginia Hartman (The Marsh Queen)
Seems we’re in an interglacial period, and in the summer season, the ice pulls right back to expose some land and waterways we haven’t seen in many centuries. We had a brief melt lasting a few decades in the mid 1800s as well,
Greig Beck (Lemuria (Mysterious Island, #1))
That's where we're at, and the wolves are at the door.
Ryan Holden (Murder on the Waterway: The case of the Kanaima Demon (The Detective Reynolds Series))
Counties provided the primary building blocks for legislative districts for most of the nation’s history and in less populated areas people still identify with counties, so to the extent possible counties should be kept whole in districting plans. Even when the need to minimize population deviations makes it impossible to avoid splitting counties, mapmakers should strive to avoid districts that connect far-flung pieces of geography by means of touch points, waterways, or narrow necks since those designs make it difficult for voters to know what district they live in. In more compact districts, voters are more likely to know the name of their legislator. Moreover, campaigning is easier in compact
Charles S. Bullock III (Redistricting: The Most Political Activity in America)