Discordant Coastline Quotes

The sand was smooth. The damp morning fog had hardened its top layer and the heat of the day had set it so that with every footstep the surface cracked, the crunch almost audible. The heels and balls of their shoes made a path of shallow divots, but it was far easier to walk on than the usual loose and gritty beach.
In minutes, the wind worked to sweep their footprints clean and offer a flat, clear expanse all the way to the ocean where the sand became wet and sparkled invitingly with seawater. ~ Victoria Kahler

The firstdown team for this planet must have had a fixation on animals. Horse, Bear, Eagle. For three days we were creeping down the east coast of Equus over an irregular coastline called the Mane. We've spent the last day making the crossing of a short span of the Middle Sea to a large island called Cat Key. Today we are offloading passengers and freight at Felix, the "major city" of the island. ~ Dan Simmons

The universe is an emanation of mind. As human consciousness evolves in an accelerated spiral, we are being compelled to realize that our minds are manifesting reality to an ever-increasing extent- our collective shadow-projections of wasteful technologies, wars, and weaponry reflect subtler interior regions of our psyche and the discordant deceptions in our intimate relationships. If this interpretation is valid, it forces upon us a concomitant responsibility, a grave burden. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

The current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

The French army had crowned a campaign of extraordinary successes by defeating the Austrians at Jemappes and pressing on to occupy a large swathe of Belgium and threaten Holland. For Britain, this changed everything: a French republic that spread across the North Sea coast meant the entire coastline facing Britain would be in Republican hands. ~ Mike Jay

The success of the dinner depends as much upon the company as the cook. Discordant elements - people invited alphabetically, or to pay off debts - are fatal. ~ Ward McAllister

When we went to Belfast we saw some beautiful countryside and coastlines. ~ Sarah Sutton

Seek to make life henceforth a consecrated thing; that so, when the sunset is nearing, with its murky vapors and lowering skies, the very clouds of sorrow may be fringed with golden light. Thus will the song in the house of your pilgrimage be always the truest harmony. It will be composed of no jarring, discordant notes; but with all its varied tones will form one sustained, life-long melody; dropped for a moment in death, only to be resumed with the angels, and blended with the everlasting cadences of your Father's house. ~ John Ross Macduff

Many couples permit their marriages to become stale and their love to grow cold like old bread or worn-out jokes or cold gravy. These people will do well to reevaluate, to renew their courting, to express their affection, to acknowledge kindness, and to increase their consideration so their marriage again can become beautiful, sweet, and growing. While marriage is difficult, and discordant and frustrated marriages are common, yet real, lasting happiness is possible, and marriage can be more an exultant ecstasy than the human mind can conceive. ~ Spencer W. Kimball

In a relationship, people may be inhabited by discordant personalities. For that reason, it might be convenient for partners if one of both could sometimes be a little hard of hearing, or the other a bit shortsighted. ("Mutual understanding") ~ Erik Pevernagie

And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats
then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water
seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. ~ Elizabeth Strout

No amphibious attack in history has approached this one in size. Along miles of coastline there were hundreds of vessels and small boats afloat and ant-like files of advancing troops ashore. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning ... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn't work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasn't that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. ("Novelty") ~ John Crowley

Things such as illnesses, setbacks, delays, discordant people and upheavals are tickets to paradise. ~ Scott Curran

I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals … Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea. ~ W.G. Sebald

The West believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and experimentation. ~ Carroll Quigley

People who seek psychotherapy for psychological, behavioral or relationship problems tend to experience a wide range of bodily complaints ... The body can express emotional issues a person may have difficulty processing consciously ... I believe that the vast majority of people don't recognize what their bodies are really telling them. The way I see it, our emotions are music and our bodies are instruments that play the discordant tunes. But if we don't know how to read music, we just think the instrument is defective. ~ Charlette Mikulka

A flock of flirting flamingos is pure, passionate, pink pandemonium-a frenetic flamingle-mangle-a discordant discotheque of delirious dancing, flamboyant feathers, and flamingo lingo. ~ Charley Harper

... a family was an act of creation, the piecing together of disparate fragments into one cloth -- often harmonious, occasionally clashing and discordant, but sometimes unexpectedly beautiful and strong. Without contrast, there was no pattern... and each piece... would endure if sewn fast to the others with strong seams -- bonds of love and loyalty, traditions and faith. ~ Jennifer Chiaverini

In his comfortable coffin, face veiled in dark silk, eyes open or closed, Pan Loudermilk lies waiting, a player from a tribe never stilled so much as gathered, potential as potent as a knife in the scabbard, a poem in the mind, a wind that rises as a breeze in the tropics, later to lash the wintry coastline, and smash its boats and sailors on the shore. Or perhaps that is purest make-believe, as a puppet is only a tool, made of wood, and wool, and wire. As we are blood, and fancy, and bites of bone and dream. ~ Kathe Koja

On either side of them the essence of honky tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini golf.

Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red and black striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people, and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic/ arcane rites of summer along Route 1 in Maine. And now all these Americans were gone. ~ Stephen King

In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. ~ Paul R. Ehrlich

As individuals they were each of them fallible, discordant as notes without harmony. But as a band they were something more, something perfect in its own intangible way ~ Nicholas Eames

Seated one day at the organ, I was weary and ill at ease, and my fingers wandered idly over the noisy keys. It seemed the harmonious echo from our discordant life. ~ Adelaide Anne Procter

Frankly, our music has too often been shallow, discordant, or played with a wooden concern for technical correctness but without feeling and passion. ~ Brian D. McLaren

We are all in wires, eventually, reduced to what we said, or didn't say, and what we wrote or didn't write, who loved or didn't love, or loved and lost and never told it except for writing in or to a book. We are all discarded, discordant, confusingly, and so I salute your bravery, book inscriber. Your heart is big enough for both of us, so that there is no room for mockery in me. Anyone willing to strip themselves this bare this fast this way deserves our breathlessness and our hearts' attention. Let's spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation. If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there's nothing here at all. ~ Ander Monson

It is a West zone planet which by an inexplicable and somewhat suspicious freak of topography consists almost entirely of subtropical coastline. By an equally suspicious freak of temporal relastatics, it is nearly always Saturday afternoon just before the beach bars close. No adequate explanation for this has been forthcoming from the dominant life forms on Ursa Minor Beta, who spend most of their time attempting to achieve spiritual enlightenment by running round swimming pools, and inviting Investigation Officials from the Galactic Geo-Temporal Control Board to 'have a nice diurnal anomaly. ~ Douglas Adams

Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements; sickness is the discord of the elements infused into the living body. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm, the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

A great paradox...red states are poorere and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment....The gap in life expectancey between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the U.S. and Nicaragua....And the problem transcends race; an average black in Maryland lives four years longer, earns twice as much, and is twice as likely to have a college degree as a black in Louisiana. And whites in Louisiana are wrose off than whites in Maryland or anywhere else outside Mississippi. Louisiana has suffered many environmental problems too: there are nearly 400 miles of low, flat, subsiding coastline, adn the state loses a football field-size patch of wetland every hour. It is threatened by rising sea levels and severe hurricanes, which the world's top scientists connect to climate change. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

The bothersome noise of religious talk grows irksome when laid upon the living score of discordant behavior. Talkative's ~ John Bunyan

The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Next door to Ethiopia spreading out along the strategic Red Sea coastline is Eritrea, a relatively new country, and a place that few Americans seem to fully understand. ~ Dana Rohrabacher

They were just the ordinary sounds of of people beginning their day, silly raucous, discordant, but they were the most beautiful sounds on earth, the sounds of living people. ~ Karen Maitland

Can you please also give me instructions for dancing?"

"Excuse me?"

"I need instructions for dancing. Like how do I move my body to music in front of other people? Break it down. Step by step."

"Seriously? Dancing isn't one of those things that come with instructions. It's not like putting together Ikea furniture."

"Please help me."

"Well, first of all, this is not the sort of music that will be playing." She motions to the pianist, who is bald and bearded, which I've always found to be a bizarre combination. You would think you would want cranial and mandibular hair consistency.

"No Ravel's Bolero. Got it."

"No classical music, period. They'll probably just play all the crap that's on the radio."

"I amend my original request. I need instructions for dancing to noise."

"You just move your body to the beat. Feel the music." Miney puts her arms up and sways to sounds I do not hear. She closes her eyes, leans on the tips of her toes, and jumps. After approximately ninety seconds, she stops and looks at me. "Your turn."

"I don't think so." Miney doesn't respond. She just waits.

"Fine." I copy her, jump up and down, though I don't actually jump down, which is a misnomer. I let gravity do its job. My sneakers make discordant squeaks along the marble floor.

"No. Stop. You look like you're having a seizure. Think of dancing like having a conversation but ~ Julie Buxbaum

The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves. ~ Julian Barnes

None of the serious maritime incidents I had to deal with as transport minister off the pristine Queensland or Western Australian coastline involved an Australian flagged and crewed vessel. ~ Anthony Albanese

From these fragmented remains, one can glean that sore need drove him to seek the homeland of the Elderlings. His troubles are familiar ones; ships raided his coastline mercilessly. ~ Robin Hobb