Coastal Quotes

Like any developing country, it has an inequality of wealth. In the Chinese case, it is particularly [pronounced] by the fact that they decided they couldn't make the whole country move forward simultaneously, so they've started region by region. So the interior regions are much less well off than the coastal regions. And this is certainly a huge challenge, because it produces a flow of populations from the poorer regions to the richer regions. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana ~ Dave Eggers

In coastal waters rich in runoff, plankton can swarm densely, a million in a drop of water. They color the sea brown and green where deltas form from big rivers, or cities dump their sewage. Tiny yet hugely important, plankton govern how well the sea harvests the sun's bounty, and so are the foundation of the ocean's food chain. ~ Gregory Benford

I saw some war heroes ... John Kerry is not a war hero. He couldn't tie the shoes of some of the people in Coastal Division 11. ~ John O'Neill

Her voice was soft and flowing, and though he recognized it as Deep South, it seemed almost a foreign tongue after the coastal Maine cadence he'd grown used to. He wasn't a man to be pleased with having a magnolia blossom tossed on his doorstep. When she opened her eyes and smiled at him, Grant wished fervently he'd never opened the door. ~ Nora Roberts

I'm super sorry I slept so long. You should've nudged me or something.
Several somethings came to mind. ~ Robin Bielman

My granny would come out and stay with us in the winter, and we would listen to the reports from the coastal stations and have a discussion in the middle of Glasgow about what the weather was like in Tiree. ~ Johann Lamont

I live in one of the coastal cities in Southern California, and every so often I like to take a walk down the boardwalk in Venice during the weekends when it is abuzz with lively activity. ~ Al Seckel

I'm bi everything; sexual, coastal, political, controversial. I think if you find your comfortable sexual preference then that's excellent. Everybody knows that I'm a huge fan of gay men and drag queens and would not be who I am today without their help, support and make-up tips. ~ Jessicka

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America's "Wild West" of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father.

New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world's epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa.

Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever.

After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach.

While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced ~ James M. LaRossa Jr.

Wherever forest can develop in a species-appropriate manner, they offer particularly beneficial functions that are legally placed above lumber production in many forest laws. I am talking about respite and recovery. Current discussions between environmental groups and forest users, together with the first encouraging results-such as the forest in Konigsdorf-give hope that in the future forests will continue to live out their hidden lives, and our descendants will still have the opportunity to walk through the trees in wonder. This what this ecosystem achieves: the fullness of life with tens of thousands of species interwoven and interdependent.

And just how important this interconnected global network of forests is to other areas of Nature is made clear by this little story from Japan. Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at the Hokkaido University, discovered that leaves falling into streams and rivers leach acids into the ocean that stimulate growth of plankton, the first and most important building block in the food chain. More fish because of the forest? The researcher encouraged the planting of more trees in coastal areas, which did, in fact, lead to higher yields for fisheries and oyster growers. ~ Peter Wohlleben

Yet, if we accept the solution offered today by this bill to explore and develop for oil on the coastal plain of ANWR, it will be 5 years, at least, and probably closer to 8 before the first barrel of oil flows from that effort. ~ John Olver

I have learned how to plant coastal hay, fertilize and bale it. ~ Janine Turner

There being no direct route to Savannah from Charleston, I followed a zigzagging course that took me through the tidal flatlands of the South Carolina low country. As I approached Savannah, the road narrowed to a two-lane blacktop shaded by tall trees. There was an occasional produce stand by the side of the road and a few cottages set into the foliage, but nothing resembling urban sprawl. The voice on the radio informed me that I had entered a zone called the Coastal Empire. ~ John Berendt

You've got sunscreen on, right?" ...
"You didn't get your back," Zane said, picking up a bottle of sunscreen and pouring some onto his hand.
Her legs almost gave out and her heart pounded in her ears. Zane Hollander was about to go where no man had gone before and lotion her back. ~ Robin Bielman

Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world - access to water, food production, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms ~ Nicholas Stern

Israel of the coastal plain, where eight out of ten Israeli Jews live far removed from the occupied territories, from the fiery Jerusalem, from the religious and nationalistic conflicts, is unknown to the outside world, almost unknown to itself. ~ Amos Oz

For as long as she can remember, telling stories has been her momma's gift to those around her, fables filled with rich, detailed accounts of gods and monsters, of love and curses. She can weave a tale from Spanish moss and moonlight that will make a young girl's heart resonate with yearning or weep with anguish. Her coastal Georgia roots add a dark sweetness to all her narratives, one that stains her stories with sorrow like a drop of molasses dissolving in warm butter. ~ Sara Stark

Andy Anderson has written an autobiography in pictures, a life on the water. Salt is an eloquent modern paean to the strength and beauty of the coastal waters he cares for at a time when that environment is in danger of disappearing. ~ Guy De La Valdene

Superstorm Sandy inflicted havoc and heartache throughout the Northeast, hitting the Big Apple and its surrounding coastal towns hard. ~ Russel Honore

I'm a coastal person. I grew up in Long Island and lived in San Diego. I felt landlocked in Pittsburgh. Psychically, it just wasn't the place for me. ~ Alice McDermott

Basically all the world's computer parts come from the same supply chain that runs from Korea, down through coastal China, over to Taiwan, and down to Malaysia. ~ Thomas Friedman

Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape - -the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder. ~ Jonathan Lethem

It's paradoxical that where people are most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities of the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest ... The explanation is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country. ~ Aravind Adiga

The area occupied by the Christians in Syria and Palestine, called Outremer because of its location beyond the Mediterranean Sea, was a thin coastal strip extending from Armenia in the north to the borders of the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt in the south. By 1109, the Christian territory was divided into four large states: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, extending from Gaza to Beirut; the County of Tripoli, from Beirut to Margat; the Principality of Antioch, from Margat to Alexandria; and the County of Edessa, which stretched northeast all the way to present-day Urfa. These Latin states were governed by noble courts in much the same way as their counterparts in Europe. They were often rocked by dynastic disputes, which, together with the scarcity of available troops and the latent threat of Muslim attack, put the security of the Christian population in a constant state of uncertainty. ~ Barbara Frale

The sea from Dunkirk to Dover during these days of the evacuation looked like any coastal road in England on a bank holiday. It was solid with shipping. ~ Douglas Bader

There was no place else she'd rather be than slow-dancing on a beach with the sexiest, sweetest, most attentive man she'd ever been with. ~ Robin Bielman

Martin would be fifty in four hundred and thirty-seven days, and that reality was beginning to wear on him, like Chinese water torture of coastal erosion. ~ Marshall Thornton

I want you alone," he whispered, gliding a hand around her hip, "on a slow boat to China. Days together, nights ... rocking on the waves. ~ Ophelia London

One of the most elusive things about the white shark is their, uh..." His eyes moved to hers and he held them there.
"Their what?" she asked when he didn't finish, a bit rapt by his expression.
He kept his eyes locked on her.
"Their mating."
"Mating," she repeated, feeling a flutter in her stomach at the way he was looking at her...then suddenly not looking at her.
"We don't know if individual animals spawn in a certain spot every time --- kind of like a human might go to a particular pub if she wants some action. Juan an example, mind you?
She folded her arm, feeling her cheeks heat up. "Pub Uh-huh."
Jeff leaned against the railing, his expression looking smug at her embarrassment. "For all we know, sharks are just, ya know, doing it everywhere."
"Like the Kardasians?" ....
"But who know. Maybe, if we play just the right mood music, you and I will get lucky, Sharona Blaire."
Was he talking about shark reproduction... or human?
And... was he flirting? Earlier, he'd gone cold and hostile when she'd tried to apologize. The man was a ball of contradiction. A very sexy, very nice-smelling contradiction.
"Well." She swallowed, staring in his eyes. "I'm all for getting lucky. ~ Ophelia London

Protecting dozens of major coastal cities from future flooding will be challenging enough-rebuilding major coastal cities destroyed by super-hurricanes will be an almost impossible task. ~ Joseph J. Romm

Today's coastal development along with hurricane amnesia places modern man on a collision course with catastrophe if the lessons of history are ignored. ~ Max Mayfield

Do you ever go out there when it's like this?" she said softly. "When it's almost dark and there's no one else in the water?"
"I do. It's nice being alone out there."
"It doesn't make you feel lonely?"
"The ocean is a great companion. ~ Robin Bielman

I think you look ... very nice. the way he said it, with a slight pause and that sexy accent, made Sharona forget all about jet lag. Instead, she was on high flirt alert. ~ Ophelia London

And so in my mind's eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality - earth becoming fluid as the sea itself. ~ Rachel Carson

For the first five years of my life, I grew up in a log cabin in coastal British Columbia in a very small town, like 300 people, mostly hippies. No running water, no electricity. When I was 12, I changed my name from Dharma to Stewart. At that age, you just want to be normal. ~ Stewart Butterfield

Take off your dress. Leave the pumps on. Lie down with your hands above your head, don't move ... oh sweet sugar snaps! ~ Robin Bielman

I am passionate about making sure that we collectively and proactively preserve all of the world's most iconic coastal and oceanic wild places - those keystone ecosystems that are irreplaceable, breathtakingly beautiful refuges for fish and other marine wildlife. ~ Serge Dedina

If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres - the height of a twenty-storey building - and every coastal city in the world would be inundated. ~ Bill Bryson

(Britain had more than twice as many submarines as Germany but used them mainly for coastal defense, not to stop merchant ships.) ~ Erik Larson

I've had an interesting time adjusting to New York. I'm from California and I'm very much a California girl. I feel lucky to officially say I'm bi-coastal. ~ Taryn Manning

stepping out of the airport into coastal Colombia is like getting bludgeoned with a sack of wet laundry. ~ Brian Kevin

In the rich world, the environmental situation has improved dramatically. In the United States, the most important environmental indicator, particulate air pollution, has been cut by more than half since 1955, rivers and coastal waters have dramatically improved, and forests are increasing. ~ Bjorn Lomborg

I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me. ~ Amy Hempel

Estuaries are coastal bays, harbors, sounds and lagoons, places where rivers meet the sea. ~ Jim Gerlach

In 1955 flying was much more dangerous than it is now, but there was a party atmosphere aboard long flights and everyone enjoyed the ever-flowing drinks and food. Smoking was the norm and it didn't take long before the cabin was full of smoke. The stewardesses were friendly and I can remember some that were very friendly.

I don't remember much about my time in Lisbon because, before I knew it, we were in the air again heading south across the ocean to the vastness of the North African desert. The light yellow sand under us in Morocco and the Spanish Sahara was endless. The fine sand went from the barren coastal surf and endless miles of beautiful beaches, inland as far as the eye could see.

After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post called Casa del Mar. This forgotten part of the world is now in the southern part of Morocco. ~ Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater Two...."

Oman overall has great animal and plant biodiversity because it has mountains, desert, coastal areas and rich coral reefs. ~ Saadi

Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look "right" to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places. ~ Joan Didion

It's reasonable to try for success. Paradoxically, it's also sane to admit defeat. This excels the coming of the end. And when that tide has crested and broken, it recedes from the shore to leave behind something of principle significance. An artefact borne from the lunatic fight. The human struggle. And I can see myself, not too far into the future, with my hair whipping about in the fray of coastal spray, arching low to pick up that wriggling, billion-limbed nautilus, to hold it to my winter-cold ear, to hear what I could hear. ~ Kirk Marshall

I do like the ocean wave, actually. I'm born under the sign of Cancer - the sign of the crab - so I like coastal areas and sunny beaches and such - although not the wide-open and deep seas. ~ Anjelica Huston

You're nervous around me. I don't bite." He turned his head and swept a gaze over her that went from head to toe and back again. "Unless you like that sort of thing. ~ Robin Bielman

The most celebrated pocket borough was Dunwich, a coastal town in Suffolk that had once been a great port - the third biggest in England - but was washed into the sea during a storm in 1286. Despite its conspicuous nonexistence, it was represented in Parliament until 1832 by a succession of privileged nonentities. ~ Bill Bryson

The undisturbed coastal plain is home to a wide variety of plants and animals and is the only wilderness sanctuary in North America that protects a complete range of the arctic ecosystem. ~ Dan Lipinski

The Ocean Health Index is like the thermometer of the ocean. It will allow us to take the temperature to know what is going on at the global level, trying to integrate different impacts, including overfishing, invasive species, coastal development, and climate change. ~ Enric Sala

Funnel

The family story tells, and it was told true,
of my great-grandfather who begat eight
genius children and bought twelve almost-new
grand pianos. He left a considerable estate
when he died. The children honored their
separate arts; two became moderately famous,
three married and fattened their delicate share
of wealth and brilliance. The sixth one was
a concert pianist. She had a notable career
and wore cropped hair and walked like a man,
or so I heard when prying a childhood car
into the hushed talk of the straight Maine clan.
One died a pinafore child, she stays her five
years forever. And here is one that wrote-
I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive
words and scratch out my short marginal notes
and finger my accounts.
back from that great-grandfather I have come
to tidy a country graveyard for his sake,
to chat with the custodian under a yearly sun
and touch a ghost sound where it lies awake.
I like best to think of that Bunyan man
slapping his thighs and trading the yankee sale
for one dozen grand pianos. it fit his plan
of culture to do it big. On this same scale
he built seven arking houses and they still stand.
One, five stories up, straight up like a square
box, still dominates its coastal edge of land.
It is rented cheap in the summer musted air
to sneaker-footed families who pad through
its ro ~ Anne Sexton

Steamboats by this time were becoming a familiar presence on the rivers and coastal waters of America, but not until 1838 did steam-powered ships cross the Atlantic. ~ David McCullough

Zane Hollander stood in profile a few feet away. Sophie's breath caught. Up close, he looked like he'd been carved from the most glorious, most gorgeous stone on the planet. His blond hair was straight, on the longer side and sticking up in GQ messiness. Square jaw, high cheekbones, perfect nose. Then he turned and pierced her with ice-blue eyes that knocked her off-balance.
Literally.
She tripped over her own feet and face-planted right into the sand. ~ Robin Bielman

Eighty-five percent of us in this country, by the way, live in coastal areas, so again, Katrina and Rita were not just about New Orleans. There were a lot of lessons that the nation can learn from us if they just pay attention to the things that are going on down here. ~ Mitch Landrieu

As on Easter Island and at Chaco Canyon, Maya peak population numbers were followed swiftly by political and social collapse. Paralleling the eventual extension of agriculture from Easter Island's coastal lowlands to its uplands, and from the Mimbres floodplain to the hills, Copan's inhabitants also expanded from the floodplain to the more fragile hill slopes, leaving them with a larger population to feed when the agricultural boom in the hills went bust. Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster-reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels. ~ Jared Diamond

A panel at a beautiful annual literary festival in Brazil, held in the almost Utopian coastal town of Parati, found me matched with Fernando Gabeira. This comparison reduced my own limited charisma value to something like zero: Gabeira has excelled at every cultural activity in Brazil. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I should have told you the minute I saw you that you look beautiful. I do love the way you look tonight. ~ Robin Bielman

The Gulf Waterkeepers are our first line of defense against the BP oil disaster. Their incredible knowledge of the marshes, wetlands, beaches and inner-coastal waters make them invaluable first responders. Their commitment makes them critical and effective community leaders. ~ Sophie B. Hawkins

In the grand scheme of things, we share a mutual goal, but I'm not a distraction."
He couldn't help laughing, probably loudly enough to scare a school of hammerheads.
"What?"
"Sharona Blaire." He shook his head, keeping his eyes on the smooth ocean surface. "You've been nothing but the sexiest, most desirable distraction of my life." The admission hung in the air, suspended, and for a painful moment, he regretted being so open ... trusting.
"I guess that means we have something else in common, Jeff Cruz. ~ Ophelia London

Half a century of digging among the ruins of the past had made me painfully familiar with the feet of clay which were buried deeply in the sands of time and which only too often supported the magnificent superstructure of some of the statues erected to our departed gods and half-gods. But, on the other hand, where would we have been - yes, where would we be today - unless occasionally there had been feet of granite, willing and able to carry their owners into the realm of the unknown and find new roads toward progress? The answer was - nowhere at all. We needed those voortrekkers, as our South African cousins used to call them. We needed a few stout hearts to do the pioneering. Without those men and women who trekked ahead of the rest of the crowd and either found new grazing fields or died in the attempt, no one of us would ever have gotten very far. We would have been obliged to stick to the swampy coastal regions, where we had lived and died until then, since the beginning of time, and we would never have known what lay hidden beyond the distant mountain ranges. ~ Hendrik Willem Van Loon

I am beginning to understand that the stream the scientists are studying is not just a little creek. It's a river of energy that moves across regions in great geographic cycles. Here, life and death are only different points on a continuum. The stream flows in a circle through time and space, turning death into life across coastal ecosystems, as it has for more than a million years. But such streams no longer flow in the places where most of us live. ~ Kathleen Moore

Not a lot of attention has been paid to the Asian tiger mosquito, which is another species which we believe can also transmit Zika virus. It has a much broader range. It's found all the way north into coastal areas of Connecticut, Long Island and the New York metro area. ~ Laura Harrington

Over human timescales, however, our disruption of geography will haunt us. Soil lost to erosion, coastal areas claimed by the sea, and mountaintops sacrificed on the altar of capitalism won't be restored in our lifetime. And these alterations will set in motion a cascade of side effects--hydrologic, biological, social, economic, and political--that will define the human agenda for centuries. ~ Marcia Bjornerud

Chief Marilyn Slett, president of Coastal First Nations, is well aware of the forest's importance: "Our leaders understand our well being is connected to the well being of our land and waters...If we use our knowledge and our wisdom to look after [them], they will look after us into the future." The Kichiwa of Sarayaku, Ecuador, see their forest as "the most exalted expression of life itself. ~ Peter Wohlleben

We have a unique opportunity to unite America, urban and rural, coastal and midwestern, red and blue, under the banner of a truly unifying national effort. We can start right now. ~ William J. Clinton

We have the highest graduation rates, the broadest health care access, and the greatest level of home ownership and workforce participation in the country. And we did it all with a small population in a cold state that coastal big shots refer to as fly-over land. ~ Tim Pawlenty

I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. Our hypothesis of Cerion's general pattern required that two predictions be affirmed (or else we were in trouble): this population must disappear by hybridization with mottled shells toward bank-interior coasts and with ribby snails toward the bank-edge. We hiked west toward the bank-interior and easily found hybrids right on the verge of the airport road. We then moved east toward the bank-edge along a disused road with vegetation rising to five feet in the center between the tire paths. We should have found our hybrids but we did not. The Cerion agassizi simply stopped about two hundred yards north of our first ribby Cerion. Then we realized that a pond lay just to our east and that ribby forms, with their coastal preferences, might not favor the western side of the pond. We forded the pond and found a classic hybrid zone between Cerion agassizi and ribby Cerions. (Ribby Cerion had just managed to round the south end of the pond, but had not moved sufficiently north along the west side to establish contact with C. agassizi populations.) I wanted to shout for joy. Then I thought, "But who can I tell; who cares?" And I answered myself, "I don't have to tell anyone. We have just seen and understood something that no one has ever seen and understood before. What more does a man need? ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Sir Guy Campbell's classic account of the formation of the links, beginning with Genesis and moving step by step to the thrilling arrival of 'tilth' on the fingers of coastal land, suggests that such notable features of our planet as dinosaurs, the prairies, the Himalayas, the seagull, the female of the species herself, were accidental by-products of the Almighty's preoccupation with the creation of the Old Course at St. Andrews. ~ Alistair Cooke

Romney Marsh remains one of the last great wildernesses of south-east England. Flat as a desert, and at times just as daunting, it is an odd, occasionally eerie wetland straddling the coastal borders of Kent and Sussex, rich in birds, local folklore and solitary medieval churches. ~ David Hewson

Zane, she breathed, and in the back of his mind, he thought, This woman. I want this woman to say my name on the caress of a kiss a thousand more times. ~ Robin Bielman

Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range ... come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River ... The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting ... forming branches. Then, through bear-berry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce - and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir - ~ Ken Kesey

Montana should come with a surgeon general warning that it's addictive. The sky is big and blue, and the air is always fresh and crisp and scented with pine. There's a frontier spirit, but also a calmness, beauty in the landscape that slows your pulse. ~ Robin Bielman

He softly kissed her lips. I'm going to rock your world tonight, and then I'm going to do it again. Only different. You're going to come undone, Sophie, every which way you can, and i won't stop until you do. ~ Robin Bielman

Southern California is a landscape of edges and contradictions set upon by a variegated human population that at times seems hell bent to leave its destructive footprints from desert to ocean, mountain to flat coastal plain. I have discovered that the sharp divisions and false syntheses of this place reflect the inconsistencies and unexplored edges in my personality, and that as much as I might have longed to live quietly in some less densely populated place, this would never do...When I settled in Malibu I discovered the strong pull of place and began to incorporate landscape as a dominant character in my writing. ~ Penelope Grenoble

a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later? ~ Erik Larson

Coastal sailing as long as it is perfectly safe and easy commands no magic. Overseas expeditions are invariably bound up with ceremonies and ritual. Man resorts to magic only where chance and circumstances are not fully controlled by knowledge. ~ Bronislaw Malinowski

Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people - what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by the mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

I don't spill my drinks on just any man, you know." She touched his cheek. "only dashing shark lovers with pantydropping accents. ~ Ophelia London

His lips crashed against hers. If there had been air in her lungs, she wouldn't have known what to do with it. He kissed her fiercely, making her head spin wilder than a whirlpool, knocking every last puff of breath from her body. ~ Ophelia London

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy's goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. His arms to the shoulders and most of the legs beneath the knee were child's play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six. ~ David Foster Wallace

I like a certain grandeur to a landscape, which both the Arctic and coastal BC have. I like it to be at all times clear that people aren't the dominant fact of a particular geography. ~ Kevin Patterson

Girls fell all over him. Guys bought him beers.
... Women eager to say they've been Zaned. You know there're T-shirts that say I've been ZANED. ~ Robin Bielman

Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality. ~ Steven Pinker

Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it. ~ Lester R. Brown

Another agricultural trend of growing concern is the increased nutrient content of coastal waters resulting from fertilizer runoff in agricultural regions. Augmented by urban sewage discharge in some situations, this results in huge algal blooms, which, as they die and decay, deplete the oxygen content in the water, leading to the death of the fish. ~ Lester R. Brown

The intriguing history of American applied toponymy includes a few notoriously unpopular sweeping decisions a year after President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. Harrison acted at the behest of several government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was responsible for mapping the nation's coastline, harbors, and coastal waterways. Troubled by inconsistencies in spelling, board members voted to replace centre with center, drop the ugh from names ending in orough, and shorten the suffix burgh to burg. Overnight, Centreview (in Mississippi) became Centerview, Isleborough (in Maine) became Isleboro, and Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania) lost its final h and a lot of civic pride. The city was chartered in 1816 as Pittsburg, but the Post Office Department added the extra letter sometime later. Although both spellings were used locally and the shorter version had been the official name, many Pittsburghers complained bitterly about the cost of reprinting stationery and repainting signs. Making the spelling consistent with Harrisburg, they argued, was hardly a good reason for truncating the Iron City's moniker--although Harrisburg was the state capital, it was a smaller and economically less important place. Local officials protested that the board had exceeded its authority. The twenty-year crusade to restore the final h bore fruit in 1911, when the board reversed itself--but only for Pittsburgh. In ~ Mark Monmonier

I was asked to talk to a roomful of undergraduates in a university in a beautiful coastal valley. I talked about place, about the way we often talk about love of place, but seldom how places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer familiarity that allows some portion of our lives to remain collected and coherent.

They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness.

And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite.

The bigness of the world is redemption.

Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

Being able to travel in both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story.....

I told the student that they were at an age when they might begin to choose the places th ~ Rebecca Solnit

The cotton gin made it possible to grow medium- and short-staple cotton commercially, which led to the spread of the cotton plantation from a small coastal area to most of the South. As cotton planting expanded, so did slavery, and slavery's becoming the central institution of the Southern economy was the central precondition of the Civil War. What ~ Nicholas Lemann

I mean it. Aside from the old coastal cities, which in Australia are still very young themselves, what you have is a vast stretch of wilderness, wholly natural, with all the horror that nature brings to the table when she dines."
"You make it sound like we'll barely survive," Clare said.
"Oh, I'm sure we will, at least the journey to Port Darwin. From there we won't have to struggle with anything more lethal than a train carriage, I hope. My point is that this is a young country in an old land. And those who don't walk with respect in the wilderness do have a tendency to get eaten. ~ Sam Starbuck

It is particularly appropriate that we unveil this campaign on this first day of the annual international coastal clean-up effort, ... Beach cleanups are something each of us can do any time of the year. I'm proud to be participating in the cleanup efforts today and I encourage everyone to make the time for these types of activities. ~ Ted Danson

The only clear expression of intellectual dissent from hydraulic despotism occurred in the southern half of the coastal lands of the eastern Mediterranean, called variously Canaan, Palestine, Israel, Judah, and today, Israel again. Here and in a satellite Jewish colony in Iraq, between 800 and 500 B.C., visionaries ("the Prophets") -- namely Amos, Ezekiel, Isaiah (at least two different writers writing under this name), and Jeremiah -- wrote elegant poems calling for social justice in the world and a freer, more open and humanitarian society. ~ Norman F. Cantor

The Italian city-state of Genoa had nominally ruled Corsica for over two centuries, but rarely tried to extend her control beyond the coastal towns into the mountainous interior, where the Corsicans were fiercely independent. In 1755 Corsica's charismatic nationalist leader, Pasquale Paoli, proclaimed an independent republic, a notion that became ~ Andrew Roberts