In the August issue of the Artisan Notebook we are focusing our attention on creating layouts about all of our fun summertime activities. Often what we do in the summer centers around water. We’ve collected a few interesting quotes for you to use to prompt your journaling or title your summer layouts. Enjoy and keep cool!

A pond may lie quiet in a plain; but a lake wants mountains to compass and hold it in.
—Joseph Addison

A river seems a magic thing—a magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself.
—Laura Gilpin The Rio Grande, 1949

The trees reflected in the river . . .they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne

The many-voiced song of the river echoed softly.
—Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, 1951

In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans.
—Pablo Neruda

A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
—Henry David Thoreau

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water—so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.
—Henry David Thoreau

When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.
—Leonardo da Vinci

A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.
—William Wordsworth

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
-Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It

There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you are at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace, even for a day, changes us, reminds us of other rhythms beyond the sound of our own heartbeats.
-Jeff Rennicke, River Days: Travels on Western Rivers, A collection of Essays

Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy.
-Edward Abbey, The Hidden Canyon; A River Journey

I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water. . .has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.
-Rodreck Haig-Brown

It’s hard to see al a river at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn’t a point where you stand. In the beginnings of a river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is always tipping the balance from one stream to another.
-Lynn Noel, Voyages; Canada’s Heritage Rivers