Canyon Quotes

“If you have not touched the rocky wall of a canyon. If you have not heard a rushing river pound over cobblestones. If you have not seen a native trout rise in a crystalline pool beneath a shattering riffle, or a golden eagle spread its wings and cover you in shadow. If you have not seen the tree line recede to the top of a bare crested mountain. If you have not looked into a pair of wild eyes and seen your own reflection. Please, for the good of your soul, travel west.”
― Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness

“As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.”
― Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon

“I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil I’d like to be. I guess I’d like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserved as the track of some lug-soled creature locked in the sandstone- how did it walk, what did it eat, and did it love sunshine?”
― Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon

“Rim

are there horizons
where there is no horizontal

where mountains fold space,
hold distance up?

embedded in a canyon
our heads tilt instinctively.

here earth meets sky,
we can reach it; the rim

does not shimmer and recede.

we lean into diagonal lives,
relieved of right angles

eyes, arms, hearts drawn
upward, vectored to ridgelines

keenly aware of the slant
of time, its shape and substance;

it is a wedge; it moves
along ray-stroked slopes;

we pass into it,
are passed over.”
― Laurelyn Whitt

“I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity.”
― Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon

“It seemed everything that had ever lived and died in this world had passed through here, had left its indelible imprint.”
― Sarah Ockler, The Book of Broken Hearts

“It’s all about perspective... From the top of the canyon, the river looks like a snake and from the bottom of the canyon, it looks like a cascading body of jewel-blue water.”
― L.A. Golding, Lerkus: A Journey to End All Suffering

“Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perple xing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one’s life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie… Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics…”
― Barry López, Crossing Open Ground

“The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper’s seven stars speed in different directions.”
― Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon

“The question haunted me, and the real answer came, as answers often do, not in the canyon but at an unlikely time and in an unexpected place, flying over the canyon at thirty thousand feet on my way to be a grandmother. My mind on other things, intending only to glance out, the exquisite smallness and delicacy of the river took me completely by surprise. In the hazy light of early morning, the canyon lay shrouded, the river flecked with glints of silver, reduced to a thin line of memory, blurred by a sudden realization that clouded my vision. The astonishing sense of connection with that river and canyon caught me completely unaware, and in a breath I understood the intense, protective loyalty so many people feel for the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. It has to do with truth and beauty and love of this earth, the artifacts of a lifetime and the descant of a canyon wren at dawn.”
― Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon

“Flash after flash across the horizon:
Tourists trying to take the Grand Canyon
By night. They don’t know
Every last shot will turn out black.

It takes Rothko sixty years to arrive
At the rim of his canyon.
He goes there only after dark.
As he stands at the railing, his pupils open
Like a camera shutter at the slowest speed.

He has to be patient. He has to lean
Far over the railing
To see the color as of darkness:
Purple, numb brown, mud-red, mauve
-an abyss of bruises.
At first, you’d think it was black on black
Something you son’t want to look at, he says

As he waits,
The colors vibrate in the chasm
Like voices:
You there with the eyes,
Bring back something from
The brink of nothing
to make us see.”
― Chana Bloch

“Canyon touched her shoulder." Don't give up on Leif so easily. He's a Metcalfe. We know the right road, even if it takes us a while to travel it. And we'll find your daughter, one way or another.”
― Ronie Kendig, Soul Raging

“I once saw a canyon shaped like a swimming bird. Was it a duck? Well, I quacked and it quacked back.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“Thomas Moran Paints

This place gets inside you with its soft reds
And tans. You can feel the lithe sweep of brushes
Inside your head. Your empty hands moving
From side to side involuntarily. It is like seeing
An angel’s brilliancy for the first time and trying
To describe it to your own soul in a language
Of the eye your heart can understand
The light is always different here getting darker
Near the river paler near the rim. But it is
The way the canyon breathes warm air rising
Cool air settling that makes the colors vibrant
Gives them luster. I can pile and scrape paint
On a canvas forever and miss the one rare
Note that hides in the throat of a canyon wren
But I can dream that bird within me and capture
It on silk where its song will bring this magical
Secret landscape into my art on its wings.”
― Daniel William(s)

“Sunrise, Grand Canyon

We stand on the edge, the fall
Into depth, the ascent

Of light revelatory, the canyon walls moving
Up out of

Shadow, lit
Colors of the layers cutting

Down through darkness, sunrise as it
Passes a

Precipitate of the river, its burnt tangerine
Flare brief, jagged

Bleeding above the far rim for a split
Second I have imagined

You here with me, watching day’s onslaught
Standing in your bones-they seem

Implied in the record almost
By chance- fossil remains held

In abundance in the walls, exposed
By freeze and thaw, beautiful like a theory stating

Who we are is
Carried forward by the x

Chromosome down the matrilineal line
Recessive and riverine, you like

Me aberrant and bittersweet...
Riding the high

Colorado Plateau as the opposing
Continental plates force it over

A mile upward without buckling, smooth
Tensed, muscular fundament, your bones

Yet to be wrapped around mine-
This will come later, when I return

To your place and time...
The geologic cross section

Of the canyon
Dropping

From where I stand, hundreds
millions of shades of terra cotta, of copper

Manganese and rust, the many varieties of stone-
Silt, sand, and slate, even “green

River rock...” my body voicing its immense
Genetic imperatives, human

geology falling away
Into a

Depth i am still unprepared for
The canyon cutting down to

The great unconformity, a layer
So named by the lack

Of any fossil evidence to hypothesize
About and date such

A remote time by, at last no possible
Retrospective certainties...


John Barton”
― Rick Kempa, Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon

“Suicide is as easy as stepping into the beautiful Grand Canyon.”
― Steven Magee

“Some people are like
echoes in a canyon,
repeating tales of yesterday...

Others are like constellations,
their stories written in the stars,
waiting to be discovered..!!”
― Monika Ajay Kaul

“Silence might build cathedrals," a whisper echoed through the canyon, "but only dialogue paints their windows with sun.”
― Huzefa Nalkheda wala

“You don’t build the bridge after you cross the canyon, for if you do there will be neither bridge nor crossing. However, the canyon will remain.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough