Creek Quotes

1. "The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return form the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth. Ailinon, alleluia!"
Author: Annie Dillard

2. "In a dry wind like this, snow and ice can pass directly into the air as a gas without having first melted to water. This process is called sublimation; tonight the snow in the yard and the ice in the creek sublime."
Author: Annie Dillard

3. "The Battle Creek, Michigan, headquarters of Kellogg's looks like a spaceship built to look like a pyramid that was then hastily converted into a public library during a period of intergalactic peace."
Author: B.J. Novak

4. "Wind now Sweeping over my Bare BackI wish I could wrap up the glitter star-green of this moment and hand it to you like an angel gift.Give you the heat lightning flying in jagged silence over the distant mountains. And the smell of September prairie grass and the even fainter scent of October pine now descending . . .Give you the invisible sage wind whisking past your cheeks. And the cricket quartets and frog symphonies that play near the creek's edge.To collect these sensations like a scientist of the soul and give them to you in their finest hour of coincidence and destiny."
Author: Carew Papritz

5. "His biceps bulged as he walked the trunk to the edge of the creek.A girl can still admire, can't she? Even those who can't afford to go in the store can still window-shop. Right?It was like watching Hercules in action. I sucked in an appreciative breath and had to keep repeating the words, "He's not for me, he's not for me, he's not for me," to strengthen my resolve."
Author: Colleen Houck

6. "I grew up on the edge of a national park in Canada - timberwolves, creeks, snow drifts."
Author: Dan Aykroyd

7. "And the wind falls silent, and the birds fall silent, and the wild cherry trees no longer shiver and creek."
Author: Daniel Arsand

8. "Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone."
Author: Daniel Woodrell

9. "This is my heart on CRACK." Robin when she sees Creek"
Author: Diane J. Reed

10. "...and seriously, Emily, what do you think this is, Chicago? As if there's a place in Sterling Creek that could be considered truly dangerous."
Author: Elissa Janine Hoole

11. "But it's the eyes that hold me captive, empty of concentric creek ripples and breezy tree branches playing the sky like my bow plays my violin."
Author: Emily Murdoch

12. "When men were ready to marry, look out. Their evolution busted out all over. They nabbed the closest female hanging out near their caves, anyone who looked like she would clean his woolly mammoth tunics down by the creek, keep his fires burning, bear his children, and tote his brood around on a fur-clad hip."
Author: Gale Martin

13. "If everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world.  If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the way up to now, and that's what the old storytellers have been telling us, including the Creek Indians who told this story along with every other tribe on earth."
Author: Gerald Hausman

14. "But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do"
Author: Jack Kerouac

15. "Then the sun broke above the crest of the hills and the entire countryside looked soaked in blood, the arroyos deep in shadow, the cones of dead volcanoes stark and biscuit-colored against the sky. I could smell pinion trees, wet sage, woodsmoke, cattle in the pastures, and creek water that had melted from snow. I could smell the way the country probably was when it was only a dream in the mind of God."
Author: James Lee Burke

16. "They all seemed hungry, happy, and healthy enough in their buzzing—oh the days were hot, and the noise of bees filled the air that was dusty with pollen and sun haze, and there were tiny black flies stuck to one another crowded by the creek and a creek stink rising from the deep pool under the willow tree where a wheat sack of new kittens had been drowned, and their tiny terrible struggling had shot like an electric current through the confusion of muddy water and up the arm of the person who had tied the stone around the mouth of the sack and thrust it into the water; and the culprit had not been able to brush away the current; it penetrated her body and made her heart beat with fear and pity. I was the culprit."
Author: Janet Frame

17. "Once again, Jake held Lily's hand tight as they made their way across the creek, loud and swollen, the morning mist rising over it like a ghost."
Author: Jeffrey Stepakoff

18. "French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer than God and traveled in his very own Pullman car, and Emmie Hubbard of the Uncas Road, who painted the most beautiful pictures when she was drunk and burned them in her woodstove when she was sober, were all ten times more interesting to me than Milton's devil or Austen's boy-crazy girls or that twitchy fool of Poe's who couldn't think of any place better to bury a body than under his own damn floor."
Author: Jennifer Donnelly

19. "He's confused. It's a classic love triangle... like Peyton, Lucas and Brooke on One Tree Hill. Or Joey, Dawson and Pacey on Dawson's Creek. Even Bella, Edward and Jacob in Twilight, although none of you is a vampire or a werewolf."
Author: Jennifer Jabaley

20. "Cross the creek on the stepping stones of your failures."
Author: Jerry Spinelli

21. "Preserving a river or a creek can bring a lot of revenue."
Author: Jim Fowler

22. "I don't want to save a creek for the creek's sake, but what's in it for human beings."
Author: Jim Fowler

23. "Perhaps swimming was dancing under the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and bluegills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread."
Author: Jim Harrison

24. "The man reached into his coat and pulled out a wallet containing an ID card. "Agent Dwight, FBI. Miss Baker, I need you to come with me. You're in danger here.""In danger?" Robin said. "In danger from what?""Not from what. From who," Agent Dwight said, and glanced over at Creek. "You're in danger from him. He's going to kill you, Miss Baker. At least he is going to try."Robin turned to Creek. "You bastard," she said. "You never said anything about killing me when we made the date.""
Author: John Scalzi

25. "When Debbie was fourteen, she felt "impressed by the Lord" to marry Ray Blackmore, the community leader. Debbie asked her father to share her divine impression with Prophet LeRoy Johnson, who would periodically travel to Bountiful from Short Creek to perform various religious duties. Because Debbie was lithe and beautiful, Uncle Roy approved of the match. A year later the prophet returned to Canada and married her to the ailing fifty-seven-year-old Blackmore. As his sixth wife, Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore's thirty-one kids, most of whom were older than she was. And because he happened to be the father of Debbie's own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a step grandmother to herself."
Author: Jon Krakauer

26. "The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great river."
Author: Joseph Conrad

27. "In the dry places, men begin to dream, wrote Wright Morris, who grew up north of here, in Nebraska. Where rivers run sand, something in man begins to flow. I thought I knew exactly what he meant. The sandy beds of dry creeks unfurl evocatively into the beckoning distance, inscribing their faint script over the land. They entice the exploring spirit."
Author: Julene Bair

28. "We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me."
Author: Katherine Paterson

29. "Even when I encountered racism outside Salmon Creek, it usually rolled off me. The worst of it often came from rednecks whipping past in rusted pickups. I looked at them and I looked at me-class leader, track star, straight-A student- and their slurs about dirty Indians and drunk Indians and dumb Indians were laughable.Mom says crap like that comes from people who´ve accomplished so little in lifethat they feel the need to lift themselves above someone, anyone. So they pick skin color or religion or sexual orientation and say, "Well, I might not be much, but at least I´m not a ..." I´d look at those guys, and see the truth of her words."
Author: Kelley Armstrong

30. "We sat in silence for a while. I gazed through the window at the night sky, wondering idly at all that space, all that blackness, all that nothing, and as I sat there looking up at the emptiness I began thinking about the creek, the hills, the woods, the water... how everything goes around and around and never really changes. How life recycles everything it uses. How the end product of one process becomes the starting point of another, how each generation of living things depends on the chemicals released by the generations that have proceeded it... I don't know why I was thinking about it. It just seemed to occur to me."
Author: Kevin Brooks

31. "Dry creekglimpsed by lightning"
Author: Kobayashi Issa

32. "I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is 'Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' by Ambrose Bierce."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

33. "But, if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son."
Author: Larry McMurtry

34. "She's shed her skinsand plasma jeans, gets around in 2Kretro gear like the frock she wears today;a loose, white elegy to what's been lost.Already she's flowing back into herselfthe way a river flows to fill a creek bed.But some hard layer has washed awayand left her softer, more interested."
Author: Lisa Jacobson

35. "On the farm, in our first-floor bedroom, my sister and I were sheltered in the essence of normal. We were not hidden, but unseen. The orange farmhouse was our castle, our kingdom the fields around, and the shallow creek that bisected our property the sea we crossed to find adventure."
Author: Lori Lansens

36. "Boredom reigns on all levels. The rain is a welcome change. I have seen the pond swell and the creek surge. I press my palm against the glass, imagining the drops on my skin, imagining where they started out, where they will go, feeling them like a river, rushing, combining, becoming something greater than how they started out."
Author: Mary E. Pearson

37. "Up the still, glistening beaches,Up the creeks we will hie,Over banks of bright seaweedThe ebb-tide leaves dry.We will gaze, from the sand-hills,At the white, sleeping town;At the church on the hill-side—And then come back down.Singing: "There dwells a loved one,But cruel is she!She left lonely for everThe kings of the sea.(from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')"
Author: Matthew Arnold

38. "You take one last look and think it would have been something to climb that silo and peek out the window before the interstate plowed through. To see the land unbroken. You are compelled, of course, to consider how the Ojibwe felt, returning to the campsites at Cotter Creek one day only to hear the sound of sawing and the lowing of oxen. Life will circle around on you. Also visible from the silo window is a gigantic billboard pointed at the interstate and advertising a casino owned by the Ojibwe. The billboard says, WINNERS, 24/7."
Author: Michael Perry

39. "'Dawson's Creek' was my introduction to the industry. It put some money in my pocket and it put me in the position I wanted to be in, where I could audition for projects that I wanted to be a part of. I didn't find it creatively fulfilling in any way though."
Author: Michael Pitt

40. "The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge, and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the grass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the Earth, to grow it again with the roots toward heaven."
Author: Michael Shaara

41. "No, I mean with us. Do you think we would have made it?"It took a moment for her to answer. "I don't know, Noah. I really don't, and you don't either. We're not the same people we were then.We've changed. Both of us."She paused. He didn't respond, and in the silence she looked towards the creek. She went on. "But yes, Noah, I think we would have. At least, I'd like to think we would have."
Author: Nicholas Sparks

42. "But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why they don't eat the peppermint saprophytes sprouting along the creek; or she visualizes the approach to the cabin, its large windows, the fuchsias in front of it where Anna's hummingbirds always hover with dirty green plumage and jeweled throats. Sometimes she thinks about her dream, the one in which her mother wakes up with no hands. The cabin smells of oil paint, but also of pine. The painter's touch is sexual and not sexual, as she herself is....When the memory of that time came to her, it was touched by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her life. It lay in her memory like one piece of broken tile, salmon-coloured or the deep green of wet leaves, beautiful in itself but unusable in the design she was making"
Author: Robert Hass

43. "...the headwaters of Shit Creek are a cruel and treacherous expanse."
Author: Roger Zelazny

44. "I entered into Dawson's Creek to do a couple of episodes. They weren't sure about my role in the beginning, but then the chemistry kind of worked."
Author: Sasha Alexander

45. "What, in nature," Kit asked, "is the most beautiful thing you've seen? Or the most terrible?""The Dismals," Giles answered promptly. "A beautiful aberration in the lay of the land--North Alabama. A section mysteriously lowered, strewn with boulders, ferny, mossy, cooler--the vegetation, they say, typical of Canada. There the creek runs clear, but all other Alabama rivers and waterways are muddy with sediment. I even like the name--the Dismals. An eternal place, disjunct with the climate, the time, and its location.""You think being dismal is an attractive association with eternity?" I asked."It is a cool Eden in the Southern summer heat. What's yours, Una?""The Kentucky hills in spring. Layers of pink and white--redbud and dogwood.""And you?" Giles asked Kit."Stars," he said. That was all."
Author: Sena Jeter Naslund

46. "To watch the dawn emerge from the night undoubtedly gives a heavenly feeling! The fresh sun rays entwine with the dark horizon and peep out of the creek with tranquil grin."
Author: Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal

47. "The Line makes itself felt,-- thro' some Energy unknown, ever are we haunted by that Edge so precise, so near. In the Dark, one never knows. Of course I am seeking the Warrior Path, imagining myself as heroick Scout. We all feel it Looming, even when we're awake, out there ahead someplace, the way you come to feel a River or Creek ahead, before anything else,-- sound, sky, vegetation,-- may have announced it. Perhaps 'tis the very deep sub-audible Hum of its Traffic that we feel with an equally undiscover'd part of the Sensorium,-- does it lie but over the next Ridge? the one after that? We have mileage Estimates from Rangers and Runners, yet for as long as its Distance from the Post Mark'd West remains unmeasur'd, nor is yet recorded as Fact, may it remain, a-shimmer, among the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

48. "If the creek predates the city deep in time, then is it right to identify the creek solely with the city? The city has forgotten the creek, as it's forgotten those who walk its side, but the creek didn't need to be known all that long time before the city ever was. Maybe now Hogan's Creek is too steeped in history to claim an independence grounded in prehistory, because the city has too deeply poisoned it for far too long. Then again, there was all that time the creek flowed and had no name. Without a name you belong solely to yourself."
Author: Tim Gilmore

49. "Even today, the memory of Ribbon Creek influences the way new recruits are handled—not with kid gloves, but with respect for their safety and dignity. This too is part of the Marine ethos: to take care of their brother and sister Marines."
Author: Tom Clancy

50. "Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, beach because they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight. But the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country's edge - an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless."
Author: Toni Morrison

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