We’re all downstream.

—Ecologist’s motto adopted by Margaret & Jim Drescher

There is nothing softer and weaker than water, and yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things. For this reason there is no substitute for it.

—Lao-Tzu

Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to it. People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it. People journey down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every day, need it.

 —Mikhail Gorbachev

All earth’s full rivers can not fill. / The sea that drinking thirsteth still.

—Christina Georgina Rossetti

All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.

—Ecclesiastes 1:7

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

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

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