“My life is like a stroll upon the beach,
As near the ocean's edge as I can go.”
The Fisher's Boy, Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900
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Henry David Thoreau 385
1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862Related quotes

“They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.”
Sonnet The Odyssey (1879), in Introduction to his translation (with S. H. Butcher) of Homer's Odyssey.
Reported in Cader Books, That's Really Funny!: Over 1,000 More Great Jokes from Today's Hottest Comedians (2000), p. 164.

With a Nantucket Shell, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Gather a shell from the strewn beach / And listen at its lips: they sigh / The same desire and mystery, / The echo of the whole sea's speech", Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Sea Hints; The hollow sea-shell, which for years hath stood / On dusty shelves, when held against the ear / Proclaims its stormy parent, and we hear / The faint, far murmur of the breaking flood. / We hear the sea. The Sea? It is the blood / In our own veins, impetuous and near", Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Sonnet. Sea-shell Murmurs'.


Quote in Boudin's letter to family-friend Ferdinand Martin, from Paris, 12 February 1863; as cited by Colin B. Bailey in The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, publisher, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 11
1850s - 1870s
“The never-ceasing boom of the great ocean as it breaks on the beach, drowns all smaller sounds.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 277.