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Quotes About Water

I asked him, What do you do? He smiled patiently, The typical American question. In Europe they would ask, What are you doing? Or, What are you doing now? What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire occupation.
~ William Carlos Williams
Love without shadows stirs now beginning to waken as night advances. The descent made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening : which is a reversal of despair. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation— a descent follows, endless and indestructible . Listen! — the pouring water! The dogs and trees conspire to invent a world—gone!
~ William Carlos Williams
The language . words without style! whose scholars (there are none) . or dangling, about whom the water weaves its strands encasing them in a sort of thick lacquer, lodged under its flow . Caught (in mind) beside the water he looks down, listens! But discovers, still, no syllable in the confused uproar: missing the sense (though he tries) untaught but listening, shakes with the intensity of his listening .
~ William Carlos Williams
RIPOSTE Love is like water or the air my townspeople; it cleanses, and dissipates evil gases. It is like poetry too and for the same reasons. Love is so precious my townspeople that if I were you I would have it under lock and key— like the air or the Atlantic or like poetry!
~ William Carlos Williams
My mother is a fish.
~ William Faulkner
And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
~ William Faulkner
It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. That was all I wanted, he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.
~ William Faulkner
Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don't touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones.
~ William Faulkner
I could still see the smoke stack. That's where the water would be, healing out to the sea and the peaceful grottoes.
~ William Faulkner
I had this vague idea that I could be completely happy as an idler, even a beggar, around the water.
~ William Finnegan
Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else.
~ William Finnegan
The sky was a deep gray-blue, banded with the colors of rust seen under water.
~ William Gaddis
History had already done the really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war's ripe detritus, gliding into the man's flat gray field of consciousness like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool
~ William Gibson
He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now, only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental. In
~ William Gibson
Suddenly, pacing by the water, he was overcome with astonishment. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable amount of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
~ William Golding
Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body moved out towards the open sea.
~ William Golding
Suddenly, pacing by the water, he was overcome with astonishment. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
~ William Golding
What are you so afraid oft Fezzik raised his great head and managed to look at them. Getting water up my nose, he whispered. I hate it so much. And then he buried his head again.
~ William Goldman
Sometimes, in my dreams, I see that enormous pit, surrounded, as it is, on all sides by wild trees and bushes. And the noise of the water rises upwards, and blends—in my sleep—with other and lower noises; while, over all, hangs the eternal shroud of spray.
~ William Hope Hodgson
In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.
~ China Mieville
We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to love. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us. This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway.
~ China Mieville
and Lublamai no longer thought of screaming but only of watching as those dark markings rolled and boiled in perfect symetry across the wings like clouds in a night sky above, in water below.
~ China Mieville
Bellis gasped. Everywhere lights where suspended. Globes of cold illumination like frost moons, with no trace of the sepia of the New Crobuzon's gaslamps. The city glowed in the darkening water like a net full of ghostly lights. The outer edges of the city were low buildings in porous stone and coral.
~ China Mieville
We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.
~ China Mieville