NTRR Favorite 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
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your element in each moment.
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.
"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'."
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 though
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.
"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."
I think it much better that...every man paddle his own canoe
Love many, trust a few, and always paddle your own canoe
Anyone who tells you portaging is fun is either a liar, or
crazy, or maybe both.
Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll go canoeing
-- Henry David Thoreau (? - unconfirmed )
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
"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."
There is nothing that is so aesthetically pleasing and
yet so functional and versatile as the canoe.
The care of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the
human heart.
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments -
there are consequences.
At times on quiet waters one does not speak aloud but
only in whispers, for then all noise is sacrilege.
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.
To stick your hands into the river is to feel the cords that
bind the earth together in one piece.
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.
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.
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
