Quotes about sand
page 2

Muhammad Ali photo

“It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

As quoted in "Ali's Quotes" at BBC Sport : Boxing (17 January 2007)

Orson Scott Card photo
Charles Bukowski photo
Sarah Dessen photo

“it wasn't the mountain ahead that wears you out, but the grain of sand in your shoe”

Karen White (1964) American writer

Source: The Beach Trees

Paulo Coelho photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Ted Hughes photo

“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.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Source: The Mermaid's Purse: poems by Ted Hughes

John Ashbery photo
Jonathan Safran Foer photo
Francesca Lia Block photo

“But be careful; sand is already broken but glass breaks. The shoes are for dancing, not running away.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Source: The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold

John Steinbeck photo
David Foster Wallace photo
Francesca Lia Block photo
Robert W. Service photo
Joanne Harris photo
Markus Zusak photo
Ella Wheeler Wilcox photo

“All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

Love
Poetry quotes, New Thought Pastels (1913)

Maya Angelou photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
William Faulkner photo
Matthew Arnold photo

“Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

St. 3
The Forsaken Merman (1849)

Mike Oldfield photo
Bill Nye photo

“The Earth is just a speck of sand in the universe. And there's no cavalry coming over the hill to rescue it.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, Nye: We must all save the Earth, The Madison Courier, Madison, Indiana, February 21, 2009, Pat Whitney]

Margaret Sanger photo
Berthe Morisot photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo
Brion Gysin photo
Leigh Hunt photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Alexander Smith photo

“Some books are drenchèd sands
On which a great soul’s wealth lies all in heaps,
Like a wrecked argosy.”

Alexander Smith (1829–1867) Scottish poet and essayist

Scene 2.
A Life Drama and other Poems (1853)

Vincent Van Gogh photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Pat Condell photo
John Fante photo
Vitruvius photo
Lin Yutang photo
Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo
Nathaniel Hawthorne photo
Federico García Lorca photo

“I will not see it!

Tell the moon to come,
for I do not want to see the blood
of Ignacio on the sand.

I will not see it!”

<p>¡Que no quiero verla!</p><p>Dile a la luna que venga,
que no quiero ver la sangre
de Ignacio sobre la arena.</p><p>¡Que no quiero verla!</p>
Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935)

Nguyen Khanh photo
Eduardo Torroja photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Ahad Ha'am photo

“We who live abroad are accustomed to believe that almost all Eretz Yisrael is now uninhabited desert and whoever wishes can buy land there as he pleases. But this is not true. It is very difficult to find in the land [ha'aretz] cultivated fields that are not used for planting. Only those sand fields or stone mountains that would require the investment of hard labor and great expense to make them good for planting remain uncultivated and that's because the Arabs do not like working too much in the present for a distant future. Therefore, it is very difficult to find good land for cattle. And not only peasants, but also rich landowners, are not selling good land so easily…We who live abroad are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all wild desert people who, like donkeys, neither see nor understand what is happening around them. But this is a grave mistake. The Arab, like all the Semites, is sharp minded and shrewd. All the townships of Syria and Eretz Yisrael are full of Arab merchants who know how to exploit the masses and keep track of everyone with whom they deal – the same as in Europe. The Arabs, especially the urban elite, see and understand what we are doing and what we wish to do on the land, but they keep quiet and pretend not to notice anything. For now, they do not consider our actions as presenting a future danger to them. … But, if the time comes that our people's life in Eretz Yisrael will develop to a point where we are taking their place, either slightly or significantly, the natives are not going to just step aside so easily.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Wrestling with Zion, pp. 14-15.

John Dewey photo
Bob Dylan photo

“I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Shot of Love (1981), Every Grain Of Sand
Variant: "I am hanging in the balance of a perfect, finished plan" (The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3)

Halldór Laxness photo
Reginald Heber photo
Mike Oldfield photo

“The ultimate "causes of price" - to use a Classical term - lie deeply embedded in the psychology and techniques of mankind and his environment, and are as manifold as the sands of the sea. All economic analysis is an attempt to classify these manifold causes, to sort them out into categories of discourse that our limited minds can handle, and so to perceive the unity of structural relationship which both unites and separates the manifoldness. Our concepts of "" and "supply" are such broad categories. In whatever sense they are used, they are not ultimate determinants of anything, but they are convenient channels through which we can classify and describe the effects of the multitude of determinants of the system of economic magnitude.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1944) " A Liquidity Preference Theory of Market Prices http://cas.umkc.edu/econ/economics/faculty/wray/631Wray/Week%207/Boulding.pdf". In: Economica, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 42 (May, 1944), pp. 55-63.
C. Brown (2003) " Toward a reconcilement of endogenous money and liquidity preference http://www.clt.astate.edu/crbrown/brownjpke.pdf" in: Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Winter 2003–4, Vol. 26, No. 2. 323 commented on this article, saying: "Boulding (1944) argued that if liquidity preference were divorced from the "demand for money," the former could come into its own as a theory of financial asset pricing. According to this view, rising liquidity preference or a "wave of bearish sentiment" is manifest in a shift from certain asset categories, specifically, those that are characterized by high capital uncertainty (that is, uncertainty about the future value of the asset as a result of market revaluation) to assets such as commercial paper or giltedged securities."
1940s

Margaret Sanger photo
Philip Roth photo

“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.”

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Sidney Lanier photo
Thomas Bailey Aldrich photo

“All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I?”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) American poet, novelist, editor

Leaves From a Notebook, Ponkapog Papers (1903) p. 29.

Gideon Mantell photo
Paula Modersohn-Becker photo

“Today I painted my first plain air portrait at the clay pit, a little blond and blue-eyed girl. The way the little thing stood in the yellow sand was simply beautiful – a bright and shimmering thing to see. It made my heart leap. Painting people is indeed more beautiful than painting a landscape. I suppose you can notice that I am dead-tired, after this long day of hard work, cant you? But inside I am so peaceful and happy..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

in a letter to her mother, from Worpswede, August 1897; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker, The Letters and Journals by Paula Modersohn-Becker, eds. Günter Busch, Liselotte von Reinken, Arthur S. Wensinger, Carole Clew Hoey - Northwestern University Press, 1998, p. 79
1897

John Muir photo

“"The water in music the oar forsakes." The air in music the wing forsakes. All things move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, from Yosemite Valley (September 1874); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 11: On Widening Currents <!-- Terry Gifford, LLO, page 203 -->
(Presumably paraphrasing from the poem Woodnotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Come learn with me the fatal song / Which knits the world in music strong / … / and the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake / The wood is wiser far than thou".)
(Turlock: Town where Muir changed from railroad to foot travel in this particular journey from Oakland, California, to Yosemite Valley.)
1870s

John Fante photo

“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”

Ask the Dust (1939)

Gideon Mantell photo
George William Curtis photo

“A few years after the Constitution was adopted Alexander Hamilton said to Josiah Quincy that he thought the Union might endure for thirty years. He feared the centrifugal force of the system. The danger, he said, would proceed from the States, not from the national government. But Hamilton seems not to have considered that the vital necessity which had always united the colonies from the first New England league against the Indians, and which, in his own time, forced the people of the country from the sands of a confederacy to the rock of union, would become stronger every year and inevitably develop and confirm a nation. Whatever the intention of the fathers in 1787 might have been, whether a league or confederacy or treaty, the conclusion of the children in 1860 might have been predicted. Plant a homogeneous people along the coast of a virgin continent. Let them gradually overspread it to the farther sea, speaking the same language, virtually of the same religious faith, inter- marrying, and cherishing common heroic traditions. Suppose them sweeping from end to end of their vast domain without passports, the physical perils of their increasing extent constantly modified by science, steam, and the telegraph, making Maine and Oregon neighbors, their trade enormous, their prosperity a miracle, their commonwealth of unsurpassed importance in the world, and you may theorize as you will, but you have supposed an imperial nation, which may indeed be a power of evil as well as of good, but which can no more recede into its original elements and local sources than its own Mississippi, pouring broad and resistless into the Gulf, can turn backward to the petty forest springs and rills whence it flows. 'No, no', murmurs the mighty river, 'when you can take the blue out of the sky, when you can steal heat from fire, when you can strip splendor from the morning, then, and not before, may you reclaim your separate drops in me.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

'Yes, yes, my river,' answers the Union, 'you speak for me. I am no more a child, but a man; no longer a confederacy, but a nation. I am no more Virginia, New York, Carolina, or Massachusetts, but the United States of America'.
1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Robert Bloomfield photo
Uhuru Kenyatta photo
J.M. Coetzee photo
George William Curtis photo

“The slavery debate has been really a death-struggle from that moment. Mr. Clay thought not. Mr. Clay was a shrewd politician, but the difference between him and Calhoun was the difference between principle and expediency. Calhoun's sharp, incisive genius has engraved his name, narrow but deep, upon our annals. The fluent and facile talents of Clay in a bold, large hand wrote his name in honey upon many pages. But time is already licking it away. Henry Clay was our great compromiser. That was known, and that was the reason why Mr. Buchanan's story of a bargain with J. Q. Adams always clung to Mr. Clay. He had compromised political policies so long that he had forgotten there is such a thing as political principle, which is simply a name for the moral instincts applied to government. He did not see that when Mr. Calhoun said he should return to the Constitution he took the question with him, and shifted the battle-ground from the low, poisonous marsh of compromise, where the soldiers never know whether they are standing on land or water, to the clear, hard height of principle. Mr. Clay had his omnibus at the door to roll us out of the mire. The Whig party was all right and ready to jump in. The Democratic party was all right. The great slavery question was going to be settled forever. The bushel-basket of national peace and plenty and prosperity was to be heaped up and run over. Mr. Pierce came all the way from the granite hills of New Hampshire, where people are supposed to tell the truth, to an- nounce to a happy country that it was at peace — that its bushel-basket was never so overflowingly full before. And then what? Then the bottom fell out. Then the gentlemen in the national rope -walk at Washington found they had been busily twining a rope of sand to hold the country together. They had been trying to compromise the principles of human justice, not the percentage of a tariff; the instincts of human nature and consequently of all permanent government, and the conscience of the country saw it. Compromises are the sheet-anchor of the Union — are they? As the English said of the battle of Bunker Hill, that two such victories would ruin their army, so two such sheet- anchors as the Compromise of 1850 would drag the Union down out of sight forever.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Gerald of Wales photo

“Giraldus was the youngest of four blood-brothers. And when the three others in their childish games used to build castles and cities and palaces in the sands or mud, as a prelude to their future life, he, as a like prelude, always devoted himself entirely to building churches and to constructing monasteries.”
Qui cum ex fratribus quatuor germanis pariter et uterinis natu minor existeret, tribus aliis nunc castra nunc oppida nunc palatia puerilibus, ut solet haec aetas, praeludiis in sabulo vel pulvere protrahentibus construentibus, modulo suo, solus hic simili praeludio semper ecclesias eligere et monasteria construere tota intentione satagebat.

Gerald of Wales (1146) Medieval clergyman and historian

De Rebus a Se Gestis (Autobiography), chapter 1; translation from James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (eds.) The Portable Medieval Reader ([1949] 1977) p. 344.

Ayn Rand photo
Vitruvius photo
Austin Grossman photo
Dido photo
Isaac Leib Peretz photo

“Jews are likened to sand: tiny grains, dry and scattered, each separate from the other.”

Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright

Reb Nohemkes Myses, 1904, p. 200.

Paracelsus photo
Hester Thrale photo

“A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass.”

Hester Thrale (1741–1821) Welsh author and salon-holder

Letter to Fanny Burney, November 12, 1781; Charlotte Barrett (ed.) Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay (1854) vol. 2, p. 82.

L. Frank Baum photo

“Now we can cross the Shifting Sands.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

Last words, to his wife Maud (6 May 1919), as quoted in Uncovering Lives : The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (1994) by Alan C. Elms, p. 154

John Masefield photo
Abby Sunderland photo

“The winds were blowing from west to east, pushing Abby’s boat toward the rocks as Abby struggled with the autopilots below. If Wild Eyes reached those islands, she wouldn’t run aground, keel in the sand. She would be smashed into pieces.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 111

Vitruvius photo
Anna Akhmatova photo

“The sand as white
as old bones, the pine trees
strangely red where the sun comes down.
I cannot say if it is our love,
or the day, that is ending.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Departures (1964), translated by Michael Cuanach http://web.archive.org/20041217155724/members.tripod.com/~Cuanach/anna.html

Ellsworth Kelly photo
Joan Miró photo

“[to] think, in a certain way, of the power and severity of Romanesque paintings... Go to the beach and make graphic signs in the sand, draw by pissing on the dry ground, design in space by recording the songs of the birds, the sounds of water and wind.... and the chant of insects.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

'Working notes of Miro, 1940 – 1941'; as quoted in: Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 69
1940 - 1960

George Carlin photo
Nick Bostrom photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Mickey Spillane photo
Loreena McKennitt photo
Celia Thaxter photo
Luis de Góngora photo

“Let merchants traverse seas and lands,
For silver mines and golden sands;
Whilst I beside some shadowy rill,
Just where its bubbling fountain swells,
Do sit and gather stones and shells,
And hear the tale the blackbird tells.”

Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) Spanish Baroque lyric poet

Busque muy en hora buena
el mercader nuevos soles;
yo conchas y caracoles
entre la menuda arena,
escuchando a Filomena
sobre el chopo de la fuente.
Letrillas, "Andeme yo caliente", line 24, cited from Robert Jammes (ed.) Letrillas (Madrid: Castalia, 1980) p. 116. Translation from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Poets and Poetry of Europe (New York: C. S. Francis, 1855) p. 695

Orson Scott Card photo
Aleksis Kivi photo

“Grove of Tuoni, grove of night!
There thy bed of sand is light.
Thither my baby I lead.
Mirth and joy each long hour yields
In the Prince of Tuoni's fields
Tending the Tuonela cattle.
Mirth and joy my babe will know,
Lulled to sleep at evening glow
By the pale Tuonela maiden.
Surely joy hours will hold,
Lying in thy cot of gold,
Hearing the nightjar singing.
Grove of Tuoni, grove of peace!
There all strife and passion cease.
Distant the treacherous world.”

Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872) Finnish writer

"Tuonen lehto, öinen lehto! / Siell' on hieno hietakehto, / Sinnepä lapseni saatan. // Siell' on lapsen lysti olla, / Tuonen herran vainiolla / Kaitsea Tuonelan karjaa. // Siell' on lapsen lysti olla, / Illan tullen tuuditella / Helmassa Tuonelan immen. // Onpa kullan lysti olla, / Kultakehdoss' kellahdella, / Kuullella kehräjälintuu. // Tuonen viita, rauhan viita! / Kaukana on vaino, riita, / Kaukana kavala maailma." (Äiti Aleksis Kiven kuvaamana, koonnut Ukko Kivistö, Turussa, kustannusosakeyhtiö Aura 1948)