Let the rain kiss you. / Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. / Let the rain sing you a lullaby. / The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk. / The rain makes running pools in the gutter. / The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night — / And I love the rain.

—Langston Hughes

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

—John Updike

Don’t throw away the old bucket until you know whether the new one holds water.

 —Swedish proverb

In a mucked up lovely river, I cast my little fly. / I look at that river and smell it, and it makes me wanna cry. / Oh, to clean our dirty planet, there’s a noble wish, / and I’m puttin’ my shoulder to the wheel / ‘cause I wanna catch some fish.

—Greg Brown

Filthy water cannot be washed.                  —West African proverb

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book — a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

—Mark Twain

A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself.

—Laura Gilpin

Eventually all things merge into one and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

—Norman Maclean

We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.

—David Brower

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll! / Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; / Man marks the earth with ruin — his control / Stops with the shore.

—Lord Byron

From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface, and he is free.

—Jacques Cousteau