Leigh Hunt Quotes

I love to watch the movement of light on water, and I love to play in rivers and lakes, swimming or canoeing. I am fascinated by people who work with water - fishermen, boatmen - and by a way of life that is dominated by water.

Like most people, I find watching the lazy and quiet underwater realm of a big aquarium exceptionally calming.

Everyone loves to fly, and flying underwater is even better than flying in air because there are things around you.

Because of the Thames I have always loved inland waterways - water in general, water sounds - there's music in water. Brooks babbling, fountains splashing. Weirs, waterfalls; tumbling, gushing.

All my clear-eyed fish, Golden, or rainbow-sided, or purplish, Vermilion-tail'd, or finn'd with silvery gauze... My charming rod, my potent river spells.

Once upon a time you were a fish. How do you know? Because I was also a fish. You, too? Sure. A long time ago. Anyway, being a fish, you knew how to swim. You were a great swimmer. A champion swimmer, you were. You loved the water. Why? What do you mean, why? Why did I love the water? Because it was your life! And as we talked, I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. Perhaps that is what it means to be a father-to teach your child to live without you.

So when I cease to be I want to go back...to the sea! Oh for the life of a sardine! That is the life for me!

My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea and my eyes are the color of water.

I closed my eyes and curled my fists around the things I knew for sure: That a scallop has thirty-five eyes, all blue. That a tuna will suffocate if it ever stops swimming. That I was loved. That this time, it was not me who broke

I'm a fish swimming by...catch me if you want me.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.

Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me. Bed in the bush with the stars to see, Bread I dip in the river There's the life for a man like me, There's the life for ever.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails.

Here when the labouring fish does at the foot arrive, And finds that by his strength but vainly he doth strive; His tail takes in his teeth, and bending like a bow, That's to the compass drawn, aloft himself doth throw: Then springing at his height, as doth a little wand, That, bended end to end, and flerted from the hand, Far off itself doth cast. so does the salmon vaut. And if at first he fail, his second sommersault He instantly assays and from his nimble ring, Still yarking never leaves, Until himself he fling Above the streamful top of the surrounded heap.

I learned to look up suddenly from a hatch or feeding frenzy and find myself momentarily removed from solid earth. I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself

I should never make anything of a fisherman. I had not got sufficient imagination

The true fisherman approaches the first day of fishing season with all the sense of wonder and awe of a child approaching Christmas.

It's hard to explaining exactly what happened, but I felt in that moment that the divine, however we may choose to define such a thing, surely dwells as much in the concrete and taxi cabs as it does in the rivers, lakes, and mountains. Grace, I realized, is neither time nor place dependent. All we need is the right soundtrack.

First off, I am 35 years old, I am divorced, and I live in a van down by the river.

The wolf dreads the pitfall, the hawk suspects the snare, and the kite the covered hook.

Has it ever struck you that trout bite best on the Sabbath? God's critters tempting decent men.

Whether we live by the seaside, or by the lakes and rivers, or on the prarie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes, since they are not phenomena confined to certain localities only, but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed. The countless shoals which annually coast the shores of Europe and America are not so interesting to the student of nature as the more fertile law itselffrom which it results that they may be found in water in so many places, in greater or lesser numbers.

I move in the university of the waves.

What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted.

One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea.