Key Quotations
Graves: "A whole river is mountain country and hill country and flat
country and swamp and delta country, is rock bottom and sand bottom and weed
bottom and mud bottom, is blue, green, red, clear, brown, wide, narrow, fast,
slow, clean and filthy water, is all the kinds of trees and grasses and all
the breeds of animals and birds and men that pertain and have ever pertained
to its changing shores, is a thousand differing and not compatible things in
between that point where enough of the highland drainlets have trickled together
to form it, and that wide, flat, probably desolate place where it discharges
itself into the salt of the sea." (ch. 1)
Graves: "The point was to be there...The aloneness of it was good."
(ch. 2)
Graves: "Up through the thirties and the war and even till the drouth
of the fifties, individual families still subsisted on some of those little
farms in the valleys and on the flatlands inside the river bends. It was a
hard-scrabble life. Most of them have moved away now, leaving the farms to
lie brushy and neglected, convalescing from a century of abuse." (ch. 4)
Graves: "Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don't storm the natural
world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as 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 monasteries in mountains...Chances for being quiet nowadays
are limited." (ch. 4)
Graves: "A canyon wren was singing there; one always is. They love
high rocks above water, and the wild falling song itself is like a cascade."
(ch. 5)
Graves: "The Brazos belonged to me that afternoon, all of it. It really
did." (ch. 5)
Graves: "I saw my first deer of the trip there in the morning, a medium-sized
buck in the cedars above camp where I went to get wood. He coughed at me before
I saw him, and I ducked down to glimpse him beneath low-hanging branches as
he ran off, flag high. The season would be open in three days, but not for
a lone man with one average stomach." (ch. 6)
Graves: "There is a pessimism about land which, after it has been with
you a long time, becomes merely factual. Men increase; country suffers. Though
I sign up with organizations that oppose the process, I sign without great
hope." (ch. 6)
Juan Ramon Jimenez: "In solitude one finds only what he carries there
with him." (ch. 7)
Graves: "Your spare cry of 'Simplify, simplify!' rings more alien generation
by generation." (ch. 7)
Graves: "Some days load themselves with questions whose answers have
died, and maybe never mattered hugely." (ch. 7)
Graves: "I went into the ser sta gro. They're institutional in that
part of the world; some for variation label themselves 'gro mkt sta,' or 'gro
sta,' or whatnot. Practically every countryman below a certain level of prosperity
seems to yearn bitterly to own and run one." (ch. 7)
Graves: "We don't know much about solitude these days, nor do we want
to. A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness, and that to
seek it is perversion. Maybe so. Man is a colonial creature and owes most
of his good fortune to his ability to stand his fellows' feet on his corns
and the musk of their armpits in his nostrils. Company comforts him; those
around him share his dreams and bear the slings and arrows with him." (ch.
7)
Graves: "On the river the wind wasn't strong, but high up it was doing
violence...The wind on the river died, and paddling I began to sweat. It was
the kind of day that usually, in the Texas fall, is full of a kind of waiting;
things are moving, the year is changing, a norther is coming...Winter there
comes in waves, and keeps coming in waves till spring." (ch. 8)
Graves: "Change. Autumn. Maybe -- certainly -- there was melancholy
in it, but it was a good melancholy. I've never been partial to the places
where the four seasons are one." (ch. 9)
Graves: "Under the cold air a rounded roll of fog followed the river's
course exactly down its twists and bends, and when light came the day had
a windless clarity that would have been worth undergoing ten blue northers
to see." (ch. 9)
a man of about fifty: "I've learned to get along with her (Brazos River)
pretty good the way she is. Don't know how I'll like her when she's a lake.
Good bottomland, them fish'll be grazin' on." (ch. 9)
Graves: "A river has few 'views.' It seeks the lowest line of its country,
straight or crooked, and what you see when you travel along it are mostly
river and sky and trees, water and clouds and sun and shore. Things a quarter-mile
away exist for you only because you know they are there; your consciousness
of them is visual only if you walk ashore to see them. For a man who likes
rivers, most of the time that is all right; for a man who seeks solitude,
it's special. But sometimes, too, the shores close in a bit as room walls
will, and you crave more space." (ch. 9)
Graves: "If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most
of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But if, having escaped or not,
he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without
taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink
in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like,
of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies
that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man." (ch. 9)
Graves: "Odd bits and scraps and thoughts and phrases from all your
life and all your reading keep boiling up to view like grains of rice in a
pot on the fire. Sometimes they even make sense." (ch. 10)
Graves: "I lack much zeal for camping, these years...Nor have I passion
for canoeing, as such; both it and the camping are just ways to get somewhere
I want to be, and to stay there for a time." (ch. 10)
Graves: "He (Willett) fixed a noble breakfast -- oatmeal and eggs and
good smoked bacon and fat light biscuits and white gravy and strawberry preserves
and cream so thick that you had to spoon it out of its Mason jar into cereal
and coffee." (ch. 11)
Graves: "It was a poor part of the state. Its people -- those who stayed,
or those who came in because they couldn't afford to go to better land --
shaped themselves to the world of the cedar hills, as people will shape themselves
to country when they have to, and built a stoic economy around it -- chopping
fence posts, herding goats where sufficient hardwoods remained for browse,
still farming a little and disastrously in creek and river bottoms, making
white whisky, running ser sta gros." (ch. 14)
Graves: "The trip's end was visible, but the idea of its ending was
a hard one to get my mind around." (ch. 14)
Graves: "Dimly seen things can be shaped as one wishes and given the
moral one wants them to have." (ch. 15)
Graves: "Were there, you ask, no edifying events along the Brazos?
Was it all gore and bitter gall, blow and counterblow, hate spun out to hate's
only logical end? Didn't a mother somewhere along the river's banks once stroke
a child's head and spark in him a flame to build laws or glory or ease for
his people? Didn't jolly old men beneath live oaks tell one another tales
in which no single droplet of blood sounded its splash? Didn't sober, useful,
decent people build for themselves sober, useful, decent lives, and lead us
soberly, usefully, decently up through the years to that cultural peak upon
which we now find ourselves standing?" (ch. 15)
Graves: "It was good fishing, a little too good. In angling, as in
reading, suspense is a quality worth having." (ch. 16)
Graves: "If we'd kept on killing things at the bloody clip our grandfathers
maintained, there wouldn't be anything left to kill by now." (ch. 16)
Graves: "Each day's fatigue accrues into a drained satisfaction at
night." (ch. 16)
old man Rush: "You art of done heard her skin a man with that tongue."
(ch. 16)
an old man (father-in-law of a friend of Graves): "Listen, boy. When
I was seventeen I was plowin' one day with two mules in a bottomland field
with a railroad levee runnin' right alongside it. It was hot. There was a
slow freight train passin' on the levee. All of a sudden I looked at those
mules' butts, and I looked at that train, and I stopped, and I took my hands
off of those plow handles and walked over and got on that train. And I'm not
goin' back!" (ch. 16)
Deuteronomy: "Defile not therefore the land which ye shall inhabit,
wherein I dwell: for I the Lord dwell among the children of Israel." (ch.
16)
Graves: "After the eighties the Brazos country needed rest. It pulled
up its blanket of scrub oak and cedar and had itself a doze, a long one that
is only now ending as the city money pulls away the blanket...Little Somervell
County at one time had sixteen cotton gins, and where nothing else would grow
they ran cattle, too many of them always, so that the grass went from the
slopes and then the dirt, and the white lime rock showed through and the brush
spread...In the end the country's sleep was one of exhaustion." (ch. 17)
Sam Sowell: "The snake from its looks had been around that country
as long as either of them had, that it had given fair warning and hadn't struck
when it could have, and that by God it had as much right there as Davis Birdsong
or me, Sam Sowell." (ch. 17)
Davis Birdsong: "I growed up where you see them rocks...We didn't have
nothin'. I mean, nothin'...But you know somethin'? We didn't live bad. They
was a garden patch under that artesian well and it'd grow might near anythang."
(ch. 17)
Graves: "Sand...in your ears, your eyes, your bed, your food, your
pipe, your shoes...You adjust to the fact of it, and move your feet slowly
while cooking." (ch. 18)
Graves: "I had a feeling that I could go on forever, if there were
only river enough and time. But there weren't." (ch. 18)
Graves: "What is, is. What was, was. If you're lucky, what was may
also be a part of what is. Not that they often let it be so now." (ch. 18)
Graves: "You could go on forever. You know it...You don't miss anyone
on God's earth's face. You're no more bored with the sameness of your days
and your diet and your tasks than a chickadee is bored, or the Passenger on
the sunny bow, or a catfish; each day has its fullness, bracketed by sleep."
(ch. 18)
Graves: "The river's aloneness was on me and I liked it and was going
to hold onto it while it lasted." (ch. 18)
Graves: "December was a right time for bad weather, and I'd gone about
as far as I needed to go to tell my stretch of the river goodbye. I'd made
the trip and it has been a good one, and now they could flood the whole damned
country if they liked." (ch. 18)
somebody's wife: "All by yourself? You didn't get lonesome?" (ch. 19)
Graves: "Not exactly. I had a dog." (ch. 19)
