Drought Quotes

“The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface.

The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust.

The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being.

Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water.

Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life.

The only veil that stands between perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage.

Dare to breach the surface and sink.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Humans and nature can never be friends!
Nature will never hesitate to starve you in the drought, drown you in the rain, burn you in the sun, and kill you with an earthquake, a hurricane or a disease; and as such, nature should always be seen as an enemy not a friend.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“It's so dry the trees are bribing the dogs.”
― Charles Martin, Chasing Fireflies

“Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“I always worried because whenever a drought struck, an accursed storm of blood always followed.”
― Bo-Young Kim, Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 104, May 2015

“There's no radar image for a water crisis. No storm surges, no debris fields - the Tap-Out is as silent as cancer. There's nothing to see, and so the news is treating it like a sidebar.”
― Jarrod Shusterman, Dry

“It is comforting, after finding out that your loved one has just drowned, to estimate the number of times their life was saved by water.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The mighty drought could not decimate our roots

hidden under the soil from years of suffering

We were plants; we learnt to survive!”
― Avijeet Das

“Powell was first of all a scientist with a deep curiosity about nature, and this curiosity motivated his explorations. Because Powell viewed the landscape and waterscape as a scientist, he realized that the arid West couldn't fit into America's Manifest Destiny dreams, and thus he became a pioneering conservationist.”
― Don Lago, The Powell Expedition: New Discoveries about John Wesley Powell's 1869 River Journey

“It's really just the memory of a river. All Southern California waterways have become like phantom limbs. We might feel that they're still there, but it's just an illusion cast in cement.”
― Jarrod Shusterman, Dry

“The earth was thirsty, with the memories of trees long cut, and it’s surface hardened, that long since rain soaked.”
― Meeta Ahluwalia

“There are often many people dying from thirst while many people are running for dear life away from the rain.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Imagine a secure interstate water system capable of transporting large amounts of water from those areas most vulnerable to flooding, to where the water is needed.”
― David Gottstein, A More Perfect Union: Unifying Ideas for a Divided America

“A secure interstate water system would be a massive public works project that would employ perhaps hundreds of thousands of people for at least ten to twenty years.”
― David Gottstein, A More Perfect Union: Unifying Ideas for a Divided America

“A secure interstate water system might do for America what the aqueducts did for Rome.”
― David Gottstein, A More Perfect Union: Unifying Ideas for a Divided America

“Milli Vanilli blamed it on the rain. But I’m a farmer, so I blame it on the drought.”
― Jarod Kintz, Eggs, they’re not just for breakfast

“...though by then it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish the acts of God from the endeavors of men. The wind was God; of this they were confident. As were the mountains funneling the wind.
But the sand, all that monstrous, infinite sand. Who had latticed the Southwest with a network of aqueducts? Who had drained first Owens Lake then Mono Lake, Mammoth Lake, Lake Havasu and so on, leaving behind wide white smears of dust? Who had diverted the coast's rainwater and sapped the Great Basin of its groundwater? Who had tunneled beneath Lake Mead, installed a gaping outlet at its bottommost point, and drained it like a sink? Who had sucked up the Ogallala Aquifer, the Rio Grande aquifer, the snowpack of the Sierras and the Cascades? If this was God, he went by new names: Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, City of San Diego, City of Phoenix, Arizona Water and Power, New Mexico Water Commission, Las Vegas Housing and Water Authority, Bureau of Land Management, United States Department of the Interior.”
― Claire Vaye Watkins

“We tend to take summer's vitality for granted, when in actuality it is just one prolonged drought, or disease, away from decimation.”
― Sue Leaf, The Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake

“Some people drowned in the floods that were caused by the rains for which they have prayed.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The most painful thing about having your loved one killed by water is that you still need their killer to survive.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The fountain of living water never runs dry.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“We were once rain dancers. Why don’t we dance for the rain anymore?”
― Jodi Sky Rogers

“Tayo looked at the long white hairs growing out of the lips like antennas, he got the choking in his throat again, and he cried for all of them, for what he had done.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“He pointed his chin at the springs and around at the narrow canyon. "This is where we come from, see. The sand, this stone, these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers. this earth keeps us going." He took off his hat and wiped his forehead on his shirt. "These dry years you hear some people complaining, you know, about the dust and the wind, and how dry it is. But the wind and the dust, they are part of life too, like the sun and the sky. You don't swear at them. It's people, see. They're the ones. The old people used to say that droughts happen when people forget, when people misbehave.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“Will water become the new gold of the coming age?
Will man lust after the precious commodity in an ever aggressive manner?
Will nature meet man head on and show him who is boss?”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“The autumn had been unseasonably dry, and the vines that had taken up residence on the canal side of the brick wall surrounding the property extended themselves in parched desperation towards the water. Brunetti was struck by the resemblance between the vines, exposed to the sun almost all day, every day, and The Raft of the Medusa. The human limbs in the foreground of the painting, like the vines on the wall, fell weakly towards the water, while the figures behind stretched towards a glimpse of what might be a boat, a speck of land, or yet another swiftly arriving wave, bent on their destruction.
How much worse the vines looked than the men on the raft, even though the accounts of the incident that had inspired the painting spoke of dehydration and starvation.”
― Donna Leon, Give Unto Others

“Their 108-year wait for another title was the longest championship drought in sports. The last time they did win the World Series, in 1908, occurred in the lifetimes of Mark Twain, Florence Nightingale, Geronimo, Winslow Homer, and Joshua Chamberlain, and in a world when the Ottoman Empire still existed but the 19th Amendment, talking motion pictures, electrified traffic lights, and world wars did not.”
― Tom Verducci, The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse

“The whole world is affected by the earth’s rising temperature. We’re raising it further.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya, Our Nepal, Our Pride

“The drought came with the volcano. Street lamps frowned through ash-made dark. Homes turned into hills with chimneys peeking out the summits. We hummed as we trudged through the wreckage, until our hums
turned into songs. We didn’t know what else to do. Tears wouldn’t water the grass. Cries wouldn’t call the birds home.”
― Anne Marie Wells, Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems

“The best of all rains is the rain that comes after the worst of all droughts!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan