“Waves are the voices of tides. Tides are life," murmured Niko. "They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean's pulse, and our own heartbeat.”

“It struck me then how much the past - not just the past but history and family - was like the ocean tide. It was always the same ocean, but the waves made it fresh and new each time.”

Aimee Friedman (1979) American writer

“Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

“One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

“Moons waxed and waned, the lilacs bloomed and died,
In the broad river ebbed and flowed the tide,
Ships went to sea, and ships came home from sea,
And the slow years sailed by and ceased to be.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

“Mother's life flowed radiant. Flourescent-tipped waves on incoming tides.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“Turning the tide, you are on the incoming wave.
Turning the tide, you know you are nobody's slave.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

“Polarity is a fact of life. We cannot always be in one polarity and be healthy. We need movement and we need stillness. The ocean tide must come into shore and it must recede away from shore. Things must intensify and then they must relax.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

“We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

“Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.”

John Steinbeck book Tortilla Flat