Image: sequoiabrigadecamp.org
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CANOEING QUOTES
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Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing- absolutely nothing- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
-- Water Rat From Wind in the Willows
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You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your element in each moment.
-- Henry David Thoreau
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Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time. -- Sir J. Lubbock
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"Even at the very bottom of the river, I didn't think to myself, `is this a hearty joke or the merest accident'. I just thought, `it's wet'." -- Eeyore
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Christopher Robin came down from the Forest to the Bridge, feeling all sunny and careless, and just as if twice nineteen didn't matter a bit, as it didn't on such a happy afternoon, and he thought that if he stood on the bottom rail of the bridge, and leant over, and watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him, then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known.
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"It's little Anxious," he said to himself, "to be a Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water. Christopher Robin and Pooh could escape by Climbing Trees, and Kanga could escape by Jumping, and Rabbit could escape by Burrowing, and Owl could escape by Flying, and Eeyore could escape by - by making a Loud Noise Until Rescued, and here am I, surrounded by water and I can't do anything." -- Piglet
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I think it much better that...every man paddle his own canoe -- Settlers in Canada
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Love many, trust a few, and always paddle your own canoe -- Bumper Sticker
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Anyone who tells you portaging is fun is either a liar, or crazy, or maybe both. -- Bill Mason
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Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll go canoeing -- Henry David Thoreau (? - unconfirmed )
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What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other travel. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature. -- Pierre Elliott Trudeau
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"The first thing you must learn about canoeing is that the canoe is not a lifeless, inanimate object: it feels very much alive, alive with the life of the river. Life is transmitted to the canoe by currents of air and the water upon which it rides. The behaviour and temperament of a canoe is dependent upon the elements: from the slightest breeze to a raging storm, from the smallest ripple to a towering wave, or from a meandering stream to a thundering rapid. Anyone can handle a canoe in a quiet millpond, but in a rapids a canoe is like a wild stallion. It must be kept on a tight rein. The canoeist must take the canoe where he or she wants it to go, not where it wants to go. Given the chance, the canoe will dump you overboard and continue on down the river by itself." -- Bill Mason
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There is nothing that is so aesthetically pleasing and yet so functional and versatile as the canoe. -- Bill Mason
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The care of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart. -- Tanaka Shozo
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In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments - there are consequences. -- R. G. Ingersoll
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At times on quiet waters one does not speak aloud but only in whispers, for then all noise is sacrilege. -- Sigurd F. Olson
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Wilderness can be appreciated only by contrast, and solitude understood only when we have been without it. We cannot separate ourselves from society, comradeship, sharing and love. Unless we can contribute something from wilderness experience, derive some solace or peace to share with others, then the real purpose is defeated. -- Sigurd F. Olson
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To stick your hands into the river is to feel the cords that bind the earth together in one piece. -- Barry Lopez
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All the water that ever has been or ever will be is here now. It sits, it runs, it rises as mist. It evaporates and falls again as rain or snow. You cannot pollute a drop of water anywhere without eventually poisoning some distant place. -- Michael Furtman
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The song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it, you must first live here for a long time, and then you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then of a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over the rimrocks , sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries. -- Aldo Leopold
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Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever :
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny, nonny.
-- William Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing
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