Quotes about the sea

page 5

“I have bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea…
Devouring the green azures.”

“Death,
I need my little addiction to you.
need that tiny voice who,
even as I rise from the sea,
all woman, all there,
says kill me, kill me.”

“when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”

“Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans”

“Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence”

“There is no beauty or romance or mystery in the sea except for the men that sail abroad upon it, and those who stay at home and dream of them.”

“No man is an island,' said John Donne. I feel we are all islands -- in a common sea.”

“I will not have a sea creature destroyed, if I can help it. And I can help it.”

“And if my choice is to sit graciously in my best robes and accept the inevitable or to bail a sea with a bucket, give me the bucket.”

“I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.”

“Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.”

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe . . . The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.”

“I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.”

“It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.”

“No miles of level desert, no jagged mountain heights, no sea of endless blue
Neither words nor tears, nor silent fears
will keep me from coming back to you.”

“O what a blessed day that will be when I shall… stand on the shore and look back on the raging seas I have safely passed; when I shall review my pains and sorrows, my fears and tears, and possess the glory which was the end of all!”

“I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.”

“She still felt like a punked-out, faux-leather-wearing, free-thinking Bratz doll in a sea of Pretty Princess of Preppyland Barbies.”

“There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious — painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labour — but besides this there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.”

“The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.”

“How still,
How strangely still
The water is today,
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way.

~ "Sea Calm”

“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

“The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.”

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

“The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea”

“Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.”

“If you put Durant's brains in a thimble full of water they'd look like a ship lost in the middle of the sea.”

“When this is over… we will got to the rainforest, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.”

“Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.”

“Some love comes like the wind off the sea, while others grow slowly from the seeds of friendship and kindness." - Carline”

“Two lost things that had survived the seas and arrived on a coastline. What did they do? They implanted themselves in the sand and grew into trees and lined the beaches. Sometimes a lot can come of being all washed up. You can really grow.”

“The roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains lie between us.”

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”

“When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul.”

“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

“I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.”

“To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.”

“I imagined loading the God of the Sea into a taxi and taking him to the Upper East Side.”

“Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?”

“The boy was standing alone as though the broken glass all around him were a shining sea and he were an island.”

“Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.”

“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”

“If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat's 'purple-stained mouth', or perhaps even of Homer's dangerously wine-dark sea.”

“How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea.... All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.”

“Like a mermaid in sea-weed, she dreams awake, trembling in her soft and chilly nest.”

“Trust your heart if the seas catch fire and live by love though the stars walk backwards.”

“His blue eyes were seas where sorrow sailed.”

“In truth, nothing was the same. She forgot about the stars… and taking notice of the sea. She was no longer filled with all the curiosities of the world and didn’t take much notice of anything… other than how heavy… and awkward the bottle had become.”

“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

“Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it's tuna, but it… it says "Chicken… by the Sea."”

“Gods forbid if she ever broke up with him. She'd never be able to visit the sea again without remembering her broken heart.

Annabeth about Percy”

“I like to think that when I fall,
A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea,
This shelf of books along the wall,
Beside my bed, will mourn for me.”

“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.”

“Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.”

“Long have you timidly waded
Holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea,
Rise again, nod to me, shout,
And laughingly dash with your hair.”

“To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire--
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.”

“There was a single blue line of crayon drawn across every wall in the house. What does it mean? I asked. A pirate needs the sight of the sea, he said and then he pulled his eye patch down and turned and sailed away.”

“He was swimming in a sea of other people’s expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that.”

“Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.”

“Better let it all alone in the depths of her heart and the depths of the sea.”

“I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.”

“I suppose like others
I have come through fire and sword,
love gone wrong,
head-on crashes, drunk at sea,
and I have listened to the simple sound of water running
in tubs
and wished to drown”

“And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.”

“Miracles happen quietly every day - in an operating room, on a stormy sea, in the sudden appearance of a road side stranger. They are rarely tallied. No one keeps score.”

“If you were a mermaid, you said, If you were a mermaid, I was the sea.”

“Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

“I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.”

“I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.”

“Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.”

“Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying… and every day on the balcony of the sea wings open fire is born and everything is blue again like morning.”

“Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare. But if you seek safety, it is on the shore.”

“Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.”

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.”

“Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.”

“They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”

“I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.”

“God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun
became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.”

“Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?"

"Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.”

“Some of us are like the Dead Sea, always taking in but never giving out, because we are not rightly related to the Lord Jesus.”

“The Shell

The sea fills my ear
with sand and with fear.

You may wash out the sand,
but never the sound
of the ghost of the sea
that is haunting me.”

“He sighed and then focused his eyes right on me. It was like drowning, drowning in seas of green. There was nothing in the world except for those eyes.
"I want to kiss you, Rose," he said softly. "And I want you to want me too.”

“I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.”

“I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries. I have discovered, too, that there are fewer idiots at 3000 meters above sea level than down below.”

“There comes a time in a man's life when he hears the call of the sea. If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediately.”

“Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene:

"Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please"

This also became Conrad's epitaph.”

“We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters triumphs challenges impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and LOVE!”

“we can harness the energy of the winds, the seas, the sun. But the day man learns to harness the energy of love, that will be as important as the discovery of fire.”

“He fell off the table like a crab looking for the sea.”

“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”

“Sky and sea, keep harm from me. Earth and fire, bring… my desire.”

“When I paint, the Sea Roars
Others Splash about in the bath”

“All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.”

“I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?”

“But if I hadn't shoved you off the boat back there, you'd be lost at sea now, wouldn't you? We'd all be lost! So thanks to me you're all standing on land."
(Pirates, its a good thing they're idiots)”

“Life is short,
and pleasures few,
and holed the ship,
and drowned the crew,
But O! But O!
How very blue
the sea is!”

“Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.”

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

“How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.”

“A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.”