Quotes from River God

Wilbur Smith ·  664 pages

Rating: (28.8K votes)


“I was sitting in the Temple of Karnak on the Nile, as the sun was going down, and I was all alone, and the great Hypostyle Hall was full of shadows and ghosts of the past, and suddenly I heard this little voice saying "my name is Taita, write my story"… and if you believe that you'll believe anything.”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God


“Yet such is the perversity of human nature that I hungered for what I could never have and dreamed of the impossible.”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God


“when it comes to fashion, even the most sensible woman is not to be trusted.”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God


“Out of the chaos and darkness of Nun rose Ammon-Ra, He-Who-Creates-Himself. I watched Ammon-Ra stroke his generative member, masturbating and spurting out his seminal seed in mighty waves that left the silver smear that we know as the Milky Way across the dark void. From this seed were generated Geb and Nut, the earth and the heaven.”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God


“As they slithered up the muddy bank, scores of tiny silver fish that had been feasting on the open wounds were slow to relinquish their hold and were drawn out with the carcasses. Stranded upon the mud-banks, they flopped and quivered like stars that had fallen to earth.”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God



“Sometimes you are garrulous, Taita.’ Pharaoh was less than captivated by my lecture on the palace architecture. ‘Get on”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God


“Taita,’ she called to me, ‘sing with me!’ And when I obeyed she smiled with pleasure. My voice was one of the many reasons that, whenever she was able, she kept me near her; my tenor complemented her lovely soprano to perfection. We sang one of the old peasant love songs that I had taught her, and which was still one of her favourites: My heart flutters up like a wounded quail when I see my beloved’s face and my cheeks bloom like the dawn sky to the sunshine of his smile”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God


“chariots that I would design with”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God


“The fact that I had been on the point of making a similar heroic gesture was quite ignored, and this only increased my irritation.”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God


“She is the epitome of injustice, is my mistress. I never sulk, I am no glutton, and at that time I was barely thirty years of age, although to a fourteen-year-old anyone above twenty is an ancient, and I admit that, when it comes to food, I do have the refined tastes of a connoisseur.”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God



“Nevertheless, I had recommended a diet of bull’s testicles fried in honey and counselled him to find the most beautiful virgin in Egypt and take her to his marriage-bed within a year of the first flowering of her woman’s moon.”
― Wilbur Smith, quote from River God


About the author

Wilbur Smith
Born place: in Kabwe, Zambia
Born date January 9, 1933
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Popular quotes

“The baby closed its mouth, staring at him with hope and small hiccups.

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“Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can’t speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space — none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple of minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that cases I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature — lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.”
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