Canoe and Kayaking Quotes

What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other travel. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature. -- Pierre Elliott Trudeau

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 colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river. -- Roderick Haig-Brown

You know you are a kayaker when you can't go over a bridge without looking for water under it. - Unknown

To have some parts flowing free again...with deer grazing on its banks... ducks and geese raising their young in the backwaters...eddies and twists and turns for canoeists...
and fishing opportunities such as Lewis and Clark enjoyed... would be the finest possible tribute to the men of the Expedition, and a priceless gift for our children. -- Undaunted Courage by Historian Stephen Ambrose

Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills, fears. People stare into the moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire. What is it that draws and holds us? The rivers' reflections of our lives and experiences are endless. - Ed Fite, Oklahoma Scenic Rivers Commission Administrator and Save the Illinois River, Inc. Vice President.