Quotes about beach (282 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Percy smiled at her - that sarcastic troublemaker smile that had annoyed her for years but eventually had become endearing. His sea-green eyes were as gorgeous as she remembered. His dark hair was swept to one side, like he'd just come from a walk on the beach. He looked even better than he had six months ago - tanner and taller, leaner and more muscular.

Percy threw his arms around her. They kissed and for a moment nothing else mattered. An asteroid could have hit the planet and wiped out all life, and Annabeth wouldn't have cared.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Life , Smile , Kiss , Sea

“This fall, and this was a very tough decision for me, but this fall I will be taking my talents to South Beach and play with the Miami Heat.”

LeBron James (1984) American basketball player

The King of South Beach: LeBron James will Sign with Miami Heat, Tom D'Angelo, The Palm Beach Post, July 8, 2010 http://www.palmbeachpost.com/sports/heat/the-king-of-south-beach-lebron-james-will-791556.html,
James announcing his decision to leave the hometown Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami.

Decision

“I love walking in the woods, on the trails, along the beaches. I love being part of nature. I love walking alone. It is therapy. One needs to be alone, to recharge one's batteries.”

Grace Kelly (1929–1982) American actress and Princess consort of Monaco

The Milwaukee Sentinel Princess Grace finds relaxation in her gardens Jan. 1, 1981

Love , Nature , Parting

“I once took a ride to the beach in L. A., and all along the shore there were all these so-called jazz places. And I saw these college guys and session players playing this fusion Muzak stuff. It was just a lot of notes, and the more notes they played, the more it kept them from expressing anything. So I came back home and got out my Zeppelin albums.”

Jeff Buckley (1966–1997) American singer, guitarist and songwriter

О музыке

Guy , Home

“I lived in Hollywood and I had all that, the Rolls Royce and the Ferrari and the pad in Beverly Hills. I had the surf board and the Beach Boys and the bishkis and the Neil Diamond and the ramskam and the Jimmy shriffen [ph. ] and the Elvis Presley's best of bestlies and all them guys. The Dean and Martins and the Nancy Sinatras and the cops and sovereigns, "Will you do it to me? I hear you do it good honey" and all that kind of "Will you come up to my house later?" So I went through all that and I seen that was a bigger prison than the one I just got out of and I really didn't care to go back in prison. See, prison doesn't begin and end at the gate. Prison is in the mind. It's locked in one world that's dead and dying, or it's open to a world that's free and alive.”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

NBC interview (1987)

World , Guy , Boy , Housing

“I excused myself as soon as I finished eating, and boy did I stuff myself on that meal. I then walked outside onto the beach. The wine had long since gone to my head, making me feel a sense of dizzy invigoration. I started walking along the shore, taking in the magnificence of the gentle, moonlit ocean. It was so… romantic. I kept walking and walking with no destination in mind. The romance of it all filled me with despair and longing. I wanted a girlfriend to experience that moment with me, but no girl wanted to be my girlfriend. The only thing I could do was imagine how heavenly it would be to have a beautiful girl by my side. It is such a shameful tragedy.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

I ended up walking for two hours, and at the end of it I was crying to myself because I felt so sad.
My Twisted World (2014), Thoughts at 19, Longing

Beauty , Feeling , Imagination , Girl

“My child, let your life come into the world of darkness
like a spark of light, without flicker and pure,
and thank them in silence. You know,
my child, they are cruel in their greed and envy,
their words are disguised knives thirsting for blood.
But do not be afraid, my child, go and stand in their hearts,
and let your gentle eyes fall on them like the forgiving serenity of the night.
My child, let them see your face and so they know it
meaning of all things, let them love and love one another.
Go, at sunrise, open and lift up your heart like a blooming flower,
and at sunset, bend your head and silently complete the worship of the day.
Remember, my child, gods and demons, ghosts and elves are fragments of one,
built by the hand of the abyss.
So, move on, go to the shore of the vast darkness,
there, is the Great Meeting of Children,
there, the sea gives a smile to the beach,
there, sing the waves facing death.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://dailywisdomwords.com/community-poetry/my-child/

God , Light , Silence , Children

“Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

Love , Life , Bird , Sea

“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.”

Henry Beston book The Outermost House

p. 57: Ch. 3 http://books.google.com/books?lr=&id=edhCAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+three+great+elemental+sounds+in+nature+are+the+sound+of+rain+the+sound+of+wind+in+a+primeval+wood+and+the+sound+of+outer+ocean+on+a+beach%22&pg=PA57#v=onepage
The Outermost House, 1928

Beauty , Nature

“There are two kinds of bathing suits, those that are adapted for use in the water, and those that are unfit for use except on dry land. If you are going to swim, wear a water bathing suit. But if you are merely going to play on the beach and pose for your camera friends, you may safely wear the dry land variety.”

Annette Kellerman (1886–1975) Australian swimmer, vaudeville star, film actress and writer

How to Swim (1918), pp. 47–48

Water

“If you are playing bad you are going to lose here, on clay, on ice, or on the beach.”

Rafael Nadal (1986) Spanish tennis player

Preparing to play at the 2006 US Open http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/low/tennis/5295932.stm

“They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.”

Terry Pratchett book Nation

Source: Nation

Cry

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Truth , Lie

“so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again…”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Tattoo , Parting

“On the beach, Roran stood alone, watching them go. Then he threw back his head and uttered a long, aching cry, and the night echoed with the sound of his loss.”

Christopher Paolini book Inheritance

Source: Inheritance

Loss , Cry , Night

“Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

For Wife , love , Good Night , Cute

“My day is done, and I am like a boat drawn on the beach, listening to the dance-music of the tide in the evening.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

Source: Stray Birds

Music , Dance

“One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.”

Neil Young book Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

Source: Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

Men , World , Faith , Travel

“Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Source: Une saison en enfer; Illuminations; et autres textes

Sleep , Country

“She felt… how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Life

“The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

World , Nature , Water

“My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

World , Beauty , Autumn , Nature

“One beach-colored.
One brown.
One Loved.
One Loved a Little Less.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

Love , Color

“I dare not think of the sun-drenched beaches and the stormy skies, and of the joy of painting them in the sea breezes.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Quote in a letter, from Paris 14 June 1869, to family-friend Ferdinand Martin; 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. 7
Boudin felt himself detained in the big city Paris and longed fort the beach
1850s - 1870s

Thinking , Sun , Joy , Painting

“The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural, repellent. I saw the big ships lying in the stream… the home of hardship and hopelessness; the boats passing to and fro; the cries of the sailors at the capstan or falls; the peopled beach; the large hide houses, with their gangs of men; and the Kanakas interspersed everywhere. All, all were gone! Not a vestige to mark where one hide house stood. The oven, too, was gone. I searched for its site, and found, where I thought it should be, a few broken bricks and bits of mortar. I alone was left of all, and how strangely was I here! What changes to me! Where were they all? Why should I care for them — poor Kanakas and sailors, the refuse of civilization, the outlaws and the beachcombers of the Pacific! Time and death seemed to transfigure them. Doubtless nearly all were dead; but how had they died, and where? In hospitals, in fever climes, in dens of vice, or falling from the mast, or dropping exhausted from the wreck "When for a moment, like a drop of rain/He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan/Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown." The lighthearted boys are now hardened middle-aged men, if the seas, rocks, fevers, and the deadlier enemies that beset a sailor's life on shore have spared them; and the then strong men have bowed themselves, and the earth or sea has covered them. How softening is the effect of time! It touches us through the affections. I almost feel as if I were lamenting the passing away of something loved and dear — the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates! Death, change, distance, lend them a character which makes them quite another thing.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Love , Life , Death , Men

“I shall never forget the impression which our first landing on the beach of California make upon me. The sun had just gone down; it was getting dusky; the damp night wind was beginning to blow, and the heavy swell of the Pacific was setting in, and breaking in loud and high "combers" on the beach… we put our oars in the boat, and, leaving one to watch it, walked about the beach to see what we could of the place. The beach is nearly a mile in length between the two points, and of smooth sand… It was growing dark, so that we could just distinguish the dim outlines of the two vessels in the offing; and the great seas were rolling in in regular lines, growing larger and larger as they approached the shore, and hanging over the beach upon which they were to break, when their tops would curl over and turn white with foam, and, being at one extreme of the line, break rapidly to the other, as a child's long card house falls when a card is knocked down at one end.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. book Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast (1840)

Sun , Housing , Sea , Night

“Only a little while ago the oceans seemed unassailable—too big and stable to be hurt by man, too teeming with life to let him ever go hungry. But now we know better. Suddenly, even the myriad creatures of the sea are suffering from human intemperance. The offal of cities circles the world in global currents; beaches are strewn with the cast-off artifacts of men two thousand miles away.”

Archie Carr (1909–1987) American university professor, zoologist, herpetologist, conservationist

[Great reptiles, great enigmas, March 1972, 24–34, http://www.seaturtle.org/PDF/CarrA_1972_Audubon.pdf] (quote from p. 24)

Life , Men , World , Suffering

“There came to the beach a poor exile of Erin,
The dew on his thin robe was heavy and chill;
For his country he sigh'd, when at twilight repairing
To wander alone by the wind-beaten hill.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

The Exile of Erin
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Country

“Well, now I've said it, my son was looking for God. I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow's nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I've seen Him!—and he meant God...”

Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer

Mrs. Venable, Scene One
Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

God

“Here lies, on the small farthest beach,
the Captain of the End.”

Fernando Pessoa book Mensagem

Poem "Bartolomeu Dias", verses 1-2
Message
Original: Jaz aqui, na pequena praia extrema,
o Capitão do Fim.

“Since the dawn of history the negro has owned the continent of Africa - rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail!”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Falsely attributed to Darwin, but actually from The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) by Thomas Dixon, page 134 http://www.freefictionbooks.org/books/c/11773-the-clansman-by-thomas-dixon?start=133.
Misattributed

Lie , World , Dreams , History

“I remember thinking that walking on the beach as a free man is pretty desirable.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Part 3, 1974 - 1979 Victory And Defeat, p. 258
Memoirs (1993)

Thinking

“No amount of money changes what I do between 'action' and 'cut'… Before I got into the industry, I never imagined I'd have anywhere near the money I have now… I don’t need any more. It's not that I don’t want the money, it's just that I would have been really happy sitting on a beach or surfing every morning… I never had money, and I was very happy without it. When I die, my money's not gonna come with me. My movies will live on – for people to judge what I was as a person. I just want to stay curious.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Interview remarks quoted by Honie Stevens, "Squaring the Ledger" https://archive.is/20121206021747/www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22763328-5006011,00.html, The Daily Telegraph, November 18, 2007.

Money , People , Imagination , Change

“On The Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.”

Ava Gardner (1922–1990) American actress

In 1959 during the filming of On the Beach.
This has become a standing joke about Melbourne, but it's almost certainly either apocryphal or a misquotation.
Misattributed

World

“The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary.
You know I didn't think they'd rake through my bins, I didn't expect to be photographed on the beach through long lenses. I never dreamt it would impact my daughter's life negatively, which at times it has.”

Joanne K. Rowling (1965) British novelist, author of the Harry Potter series

As quoted in an interview with Jeremy Paxman, on Newsnight, as quoted in 'Harry is a lot, lot, lot angrier in this book' in The Telegraph (20 June 2003) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/fictionreviews/3596993/Harry-is-a-lot-lot-lot-angrier-in-this-book.html)
2000s

Life , Books , Home , Imagination

“I'm a warrior. I was brought up as a warrior. I didn't have toys, I had weapons. I slept with a wooden sword until I was five. My first books were medieval demonologies with illuminated pages. The first songs I learned were chants to banish demons. I know what brings me peace, and it isn't sandy beaches or chirping birds in rain forests. I want a weapon in my hand and a strategy to win."
"So you're saying what brings you peace is war.”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

"Now you get it."
Jace Herondale and Jordan Kyle, pg. 29
The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

War , Books , Peace , Bird

“The anatomy of self-propelling objects is subject to universal laws. Those of cars and animals are similar in many ways. First of all, there's the stomach. Stomachs are like petrol tanks. It takes energy to move around, and that energy must accompany its user. All self-propelling objects carry provisions with them in a sealed-off space, a stomach or a tank. Self-propelling beach animals like Animaris Percipiere have a stomach too. This consists of recycled plastic bottles containing air that can be pumped up to a high pressure by the wind.”

Theo Jansen (1948) artist

Source: The Great Pretender. (2007), p. 153

Law , Cars , Way , Universe

“When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes, and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up above and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night, it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

New York Times (July 2, 2004)
Context: When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes, and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up above and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night, it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe. Then I think: 'God, I have no importance. Whatever I do or don't do, or what anybody does, is not more important than the grains of sand that I am lying on, or the coconut that I am using for my pillow.' So I really don't think in the long sense.

Lie , Feeling , Star , Night

“One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Variant: One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky.
Source: Gift from the Sea (1955), p. 114

Beauty , Beauty

“I have a large seashell collection which I keep scattered on the beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen it.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

I Have A Pony (1985)

World

“The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

Thinking , Reading

“It’s only the sea,’ said Moomintroll. ‘Every wave that dies on the beach sings a little song to a shell. But you mustn’t go inside because it’s a labyrinth and you may never come out again.”

Tove Jansson book Comet in Moominland

Source: Comet in Moominland

Singing , Sea

“Where's your sense of adventure?"
"Off on a beach somewhere with your sanity?”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Midnight Alley

Sense

“O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.”

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) Scots poet, novelist and literary critic

Books , Flowers , Winter , Summer

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: Living Out Loud

Life , Search , Change , Reading

“I saw thousands of pumpkins last night
come floating in on the tide,
bumping up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Halloween in the sea”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Source: The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster

Sea , Night

“I seek truth and beauty in the transparency of an autumn leaf, in the perfect form of a seashell on the beach, in the curve of a woman's back, in the texture of an ancient tree trunk, but also in the elusive forms of reality.”

Isabel Allende book Portrait in Sepia

Source: Portrait in Sepia

Truth , Beauty , Autumn , Reality

“She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Way , Heart

“The Sneetches got really quite smart on that day. The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches. And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches. That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars and whether they had one, or not, upon thars.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

Source: Sneetches are Sneetches: Learn About Same and Different

Star

“If pinpointing God's presence were really that simple, then he supposed the beaches would be more crowded in the mornings. They would be filled with people on their own quests, instead of people jogging or walking their dogs or fishing in the surf.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Last Song

Source: The Last Song

God , People , Dogs , Fish

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

People , Music , Idea , Thinking

“When you walk on the beach at night, you can say things you can't say in real life.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

Life , Night

“The thing is, you can’t always have the best of everything. Because for a life to be real, you need it all: good and bad, beach and concrete, the familiar and the unknown, big talkers and small towns.”

Sarah Dessen book The Moon and More

Source: The Moon and More

Life

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running -- that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach….”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

Way , Wine , Singing , Happiness

“Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.

Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Love , Sleep , Heart

“Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.”

Pat Conroy book Beach Music

Source: Beach Music

Music

“She grew more and more silent about what really mattered. She curled inside herself like one of those black chimney brushes, the little shellfish you see on the beach, and you touch them, and then go inside and don’t come out.”

Janet Frame (1924–2004) New Zealand author

Source: Owls Do Cry

“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.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Sea

“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.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Book of Tomorrow

Tree , Sea

“A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind.”

Douglas Adams book Mostly Harmless

Source: Mostly Harmless

Housing

“She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.”

William Gibson (1948) American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre

Time

“In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

“In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Men Without Women (short story collection) (1927)
Source: The Complete Short Stories

Time , Heart

“A kiss on the beach when there is a full moon is the closest thing to heaven.”

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (1940) American writer

Kiss

“Amy Cahill didn't believe in omens. But black snow was falling, the earth was rumbling beneath her feet, her brother was meowing, and her uncle Alistair was prancing on the beach in pink pajamas.
She had to admit, the signs were not promising.”

Peter Lerangis book The Viper's Nest

Source: The Viper's Nest

“If I entered a tropical beach, would I end up in Nazi Germany with my highly inconvenient black hair?”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Dreamfever

“And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Way

“Poseidon held out his arms and gave me a hug. I realized, a little embarrassed, that I'd never actually hugged my dad before. He was warm—like a regular human—and he smelled of a salty beach and fresh sea air.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Sea

“Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.”

Loren Eiseley (1907–1977) US philosopher (1907-1977)

Source: The Unexpected Universe

War , Shoe , Time

“It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world… on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

World

“A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach, and drifted back to the sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

Source: The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story

Sea , Madness

“Mr. Peres, you are older than I am. And your voice is genuinely loud. I know that it is because you are, in fact, in a psychology of feeling guilty, thus you better know that I will not sound that loud. And when killing is the case, you know how to kill very well. I know how you killed the children on the beaches, I know how you shot them. Two ex-PMs of your country once told me important things. You have had such prime ministers who said, "When I enter Palestine on a tank, I feel happy — in a different way." You have had PMs who said to me "I feel happy when I am on a tank while entering Palestine." And you give me those numbers. I would release their names, in case some of you might be curious of. I also condemn those who acclaim this cruelty, because I think it is a crime against humanity as well.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

As quoted during a discussion panel at 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in "Turkish PM storms off in Gaza row" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/davos/7859417.stm, BBC (January 29, 2009)

Children , Way , Feeling , Thinking

“As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Universe

“Why not go live on the beach?"
"These things are a way of keeping score. I'm sure you have your own way of keeping score."
I nodded. "I compare the numbers of answers I get to the number of questions I ask."
"And how are you doing with that?”

Lee Child book Gone Tomorrow

"Lifetime average is close to a hundred per cent."

Ch. 65.
Gone Tomorrow (2009)

Way , Question

“I like this place” he said with a grin “I like to sit up here and look down at the beach and think of all the good things I could do with a Luger.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)

Thinking

“In that Renaissance (Cellini, Tintoretto, Titian..) there was an explosion of unique truthfulness, a love of painting and form... Then come the Jesuits and everything is formal; everything has to be taught and learned. It required a revolution for nature to be rediscovered; for Delacroix to paint his beach at Etratat, Corot his roman rubble, Gustave Courbet his forest scenes and his waves. And how miserable slow that revolution was, how many stages it had to go through!... These artists had not yet discovered that nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces. I can tell you, you can do things to the surface.... but by going deep you automatically go to the truth. You feel a healthy need to be truthful. You'd rather strip your canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), pp. 156-157, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Love , Truth , Feeling , Imagination

“Made me a ripper, deliver like a river, content a little more thicker, slicker…and they said
oil and water don't mix, now they all down at the beach washing off the fish.”

Lupe Fiasco (1982) rapper

"Pressure"
Albums, Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor (2006)

Fish , Water

“As morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I turned to follow it.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 13 (closing words)
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

Sea

“As I hear, you are the possessors of one of my favorite paintings 'The children on the beach' and I can tell you that few pictures by me, have so much figures, busy in the subject. Therefore I mean that this picture is an unicum and I hope you will give it a good light and place in your gallery.”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

Israels in his letter to Amercian art-sellers Moulton & Ricketts, 27 June 1910; as cited in Jozef Israëls, 1824 – 1911, ed. Dieuwertje Dekkers; Waanders, Zwolle 1999, p. 188
Quotes of Jozef Israels, after 1900

Children , Hope , Business , Light

“My [artworks] have neither object nor space nor line nor anything – no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. You wouldn’t think of form by the ocean. You can go in if you don’t encounter anything. A world without objects, without interruption, making a work without interruption or obstacle. It is to accept the necessity of this simple, direct going into a field of vision as you could cross and empty beach to look at the ocean.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

her remark in 1966 as quoted by Ann Wilson in 'Linear Webs', Art and Artists 1, no. 7, Oct. 1966, p. 49; as quoted on the Tate exhibition, London June - October 2015 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/agnes-martin/room-guide/room-nine & by Julie Warchol, on Smith College Museum of Art https://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/Collections/Cunningham-Center/Blog-paper-people/Agnes-Martin-On-a-Clear-Daywebsite
1960's

World , Thinking , Light

“Actually, like the vast majority of Australians, I had been born and raised in a city, but in the British imagination at that time the whole of Australia was still the outback, which was somehow equipped with a beach. Later on, this outback beach acquired an Opera House and a row of brick bungalows, one of them occupied by Kylie Minogue.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Source: Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006), p. 165

Imagination , Time , Housing

“The decision to drop the atomic bomb - that wasn't Truman, but sweepstakes winner Penny Holkum of Palm Beach. And for that she received a case of Lucky Strikes and a lifetime supply of sadness.”

John Hodgman book The Areas of My Expertise

April 25, 2006
The Areas of My Expertise (2005), Appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Sadness , Decision

“Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro. Machado de Assis is a South American writer — black father, Portuguese mother — writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Paris Review Interview (1990)

Pleasure , Books , Reading

“I stared down at the object in my lap. A skin-colored sphere the size of a giant beach ball, with breasts on top and a mouth between the breasts. At the bottom were the generous buttocks, a crinkly anus and a vaginal passage containing my rapidly limpening penis. Was this safe?”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 65

Color

“The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive light, there must have been light to enter it.”

Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) Swiss naturalist

Geological Sketches (1870), ch. 2, pp. 31–32 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018968388;view=1up;seq=49

Nature , Light , Sun

“It is not a matter of how many kilograms of meat one has to eat, or of how many times a year someone can go to the beach, or how many pretty things from abroad you might be able to buy with present-day wages. It is a matter of making the individual feel more complete, with much more inner wealth and much more responsibility.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Feeling , Time , Wealth

“A few years ago I got a phone call from a marketing executive who wanted to light up the Moon with the logo of her company. She wanted to know how she might proceed. After slamming down the phone, I called her back and politely explained why it was a bad idea. Other corporate executives have asked me how to put into orbit mile-wide luminous banners with catchy slogans written across them, much like the skywriting or flag-dragging airplanes you see at sports events or over the ocean from a crowded beach. I always threaten to send the light police after them.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Let There Be Dark, Natural History Magazine, October 2002, 2018-24-03 http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2002/10/01/let-there-be-dark,
2000s

Idea , Sport , Light

“We are a solid and united nation, which would rather go down to ruin than admit the domination of the Nazis…If the enemy does try to invade this country, we will fight him in the air and on the sea; we will fight him on the beaches with every weapon we have…We shall be fighting…with the conviction that our cause is the cause of humanity and peace against cruelty and wars; a cause that surely has the blessing of Almighty God.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (30 June 1940), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 449.
Post-Prime Ministerial

God , War , Peace , Fight

“Neil Cavuto: …your campaign has received a $500 campaign donation from a white supremacist in West Palm Beach. And your campaign had indicated you have no intention to return it. What are you going to do with that?
Ron Paul: It is probably already spent. Why give it back to him and use it for bad purposes?
Neil Cavuto: …this Don Black who made the donation, and who ran a site called "Stormfront, White Pride Worldwide," now that you know it, now that you're familiar after the fact, you still would not return it?
Ron Paul: Well, if I spent his money and I took the money that maybe you might have sent to me and donate it back to him, that does not make any sense to me. Why should I give him money to promote his cause?
Neil Cavuto: …Hillary Clinton has had to do this, a number of other candidates have had to do this. Do you think that just is a bad practice?
Ron Paul: I think it is pandering. I think it is playing the political correctness… What about the people who get donations, want to get special interests from the military industrial complex? They put in — they raise, bundle their money, and send millions of dollars in there. And they want to rob the taxpayers. That is the real evil … that buys influence in government. And this is, to me, the corruption that should be corrected… you are missing the whole boat — the whole boat, because it is the immorality of government, it's the special interests in government, it's fighting illegal wars…
Neil Cavuto: All right.
Ron Paul: …and financing, and taxing the people, destroying the people through inflation, and undermining this prosperity of the country.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Your World with Neil Cavuto, FOX News, December 19, 2007 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317536,00.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrRtZaG63o8
2000s, 2006-2009

Money , War , People , Thinking

“The truth is that dinosaurs have always lived with man. They were called dragons for most of human history and man killed most of them. In 1841, a new name "dinosaur" was given to them. It is quite possible that a few are still alive. There have been thousands of sightings of creatures, such as the Loch Ness Monster or the dead dinosaur that washed up on the beach in California in 1925.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: Are you being brainwashed?: Propaganda in science textbooks (2007), pp. 22-23

Truth , History , Dead

“Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea (1955)

Time , Sea

“Ways to combat stress, such as playing golf before a conference call or taking a break on the beach during inventory, are essential.”

Ricardo Semler book The Seven-Day Weekend

The Seven-Day Weekend (2004)

Way

“I've been seeing the waves and the white beach of Grand Isle; the quiet, grassy street of the Chênière Caminada; the old sunny fort at Grand Terre. I've been working with a little more comprehension than a machine, and still feeling like a lost soul.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

The Awakening (1899)

Feeling , Soul

“You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach three and a half billion years ago. You are the blind and arbitrary product of time, chance, and natural forces. You are a mere grab-bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a universe. You are a purely biological entity, different only in degree but not in kind from a microbe, virus, or amoeba. You have no essence beyond your body, and at death you will cease to exist entirely. In short you come from nothing and are going to nowhere.”

Randy Alcorn (1954) American Protestant author

Quoted in Dinesh D'Souza, What's so Great About Christianity (Regnery, 2007), p. 15

Death , Nature , Universe , Chance

“When you write your own lyrics, you tend to be over-analytical. One second everything you do is brilliant, and the next, everything is garbage, and I want to be able to express personal things without being made to feel stupid. One of the first times I remember writing something personal was on tour. I was feeling really freaky and down, and I looked in the mirror and I was wearing a red T-shirt and some baggy tennis shorts. I remember thinking that as bummed as I felt, I looked like some beach kid. And then I came up with that line—’I’m looking California / And feeling Minnesota,’ from the song ‘Outshined’—and as soon as I wrote it down, I thought it was the dumbest thing. But after the record came out and we went on tour, everybody would be screaming along with that particular line when it came up in the song. The was a shock. How could anyone know that that was one of the most personally specific things I had ever written? It was just a tiny line. But somehow, maybe because it was personal, it just pushed that button.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Details Magazine, December 1996 https://pitchfork.com/features/article/10081-chris-cornell-searching-for-solitude/,
Soundgarden Era

Stupidity , Feeling , Thinking , Time

“Passing round Point Conception, and steering easterly, we opened the islands that form, with the mainland, the canal of Santa Barbara. There they are, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa, and there is the beautiful point, Santa Buenaventura; and there lies Santa Barbara on its plain, with its amphitheater of high hills and distant mountains. There is the old white mission with its belfries, and there the town, with its one-story adobe houses, with here and there a two-story wooden house of later build; yet little is it altered — the same repose in the golden sunlight and glorious climate, sheltered by its hills; and then, more remindful than anything else, there roars and tumbles upon the beach the same grand surf of the great Pacific… the same bright-blue ocean, and the surf making just the same monotonous, melancholy roar, and the same dreamy town.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Beauty , Mountain , Distant , Housing

“Each year she taught him the names of the flowers in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not even remember the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn't have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime - the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April - name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He had grown up on endlessness and his mother - in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother… and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistlîg until December 1944. If Morty had come alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning…Didn't matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.”

Philip Roth book Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

War , People , Mountain , Star

“People lose their senses at the beach 'cause the sun beats down too hard. They say things that just don't gel, you know. Well, you've heard this a lot: "Pick up a shell - oh, you can hear the ocean!" You could pick up a bicycle and hear the ocean - you're at the beach. Put the shell down, you'll hear the ocean twice as loud.”

Elayne Boosler (1952) American comedian

Reported in Cader Books, That's Really Funny!: Over 1,000 More Great Jokes from Today's Hottest Comedians (2000), p. 164.

People , Sense , Sun

“Virginal shy lights,
Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows,
When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades
Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,
Of the heavenly woods and glades,
That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within
The wide sea-marshes of Glynn.”

Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) American musician, poet

"The Marshes of Glynn" (1878).
Poetry

Lovers , Light , Sea

“In Vermont, at a state beach, a mother is reprimanded by Authority for allowing her 6 month old daughter to go about without her diapers on. Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing! If we [raise] children up like this it will probably ruin the whole pornography business, not to mention the large segment of the general economy which makes its money by playing on peoples sexual frustrations.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

1969 essay in the Freeman — as quoted in "You Might Very Well Be the Cause of Cancer": Read Bernie Sanders' 1970s-Era Essays http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-freeman-sexual-freedom-fluoride, by Tim Murphy, Mother Jones (6 July 2015)
1970s

Money , Children , People , Business