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John Graves Quotes

Most autumns, the water is low from the long dry summer, and you have to get out from time to time and wade, leading or dragging your boat through trickling shallows from one pool to the long channel-twisted pool below,

Most autumns, the water is low from the long dry summer, and you have to get out from time to time and wade, leading or dragging your boat through trickling shallows from one pool to the long channel-twisted pool below, hanging up occasionally on shuddering bars of quicksand, making six or eight miles in a day's lazy work, but if you go to the river at all, you tend not to mind. You are not in a hurry there; you learned long since not to be.

John Graves
Summer, Autumn, Rivers
John Graves (1960). “Goodbye to a river: a narrative”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

If you are lucky and reverent, and hush for a moment the doubts in your head, sometimes God will whisper in your ear.

John Graves
Doubt, Lucky, Ears

You notice. And noticing, you live.

John Graves
Life, Live Life, Noticing You
John Graves (2016). “From a Limestone Ledge: Some Essays and Other Ruminations about Country Life in Texas”, p.163, University of Texas Press

Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don't storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things--sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in the mountains. . . . Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited.

John Graves
Morning, Land, Silence
John Graves (1960). “Goodbye to a river: a narrative”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

I would be annoyed if I were any more in tune with modern sensibilities. I was shaped differently. The world in which I grew up was Texan and Southern, and it had many, many failings. I think I've gotten rid of most of the bad things in myself from that earlier age, but I don't adjust to the way things are progressing now.

John Graves
Thinking, Annoyed, Southern

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