Foul Weather At Sea Quotes

Overhead, the wild huntsman of the storm passed continuously in one blare of mingled noises; screaming wind, straining timber, lashing rope's end, pounding block and bursting sea contributed; and I could have thought there was at times another, a more piercing, a more human note, that dominated all, like the wailing of an angel; I could have thought I knew the angel's name, and that his wings were black. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her - her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that 'It isn't the same for them as it would be for us,' and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her - understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul ~ George Orwell

Do you hear me? Is it ever time for you to understand. I meant I meant that for I never thought you could think you were low. Were lost at the moment when they cut you off. Cut your head out heart brain. It is not I know was not that but to me it was to me. Like I could have seen you in the bright of day. Like the light could have come up from the sea and take you over. Me over. Is there. Forgive that. Forgive that me that I was fallen down. That I was under the weather under the same sky and did not. Not yet. If I took. If I had taken your good right hand I might have pulled you. Up. Pulled the black sea out of us. Saw you. Left you. Is there some truth in that? I went out to the cold. Thought I'd know what to do. Bring you with me. Bring you with. Sad and sad and sad fool me slipping down. Slope hill mountainside. Muck and stones on me. On my feet and rain in my hair. I thought about it but I could not stop. Pushed it further in. Needle and syringe. This will take me out of that. Like it could. As though it might do in any way. Forgive me. Forgive me that that I didn't see. Look out my eyes. That I didn't know what I was doing though I did though I did. Oh do you love me. Can you love me. Do you love me still. My sins. My grievous. Woe my wrong. I went out to him and said do what you will if you want. If you're able will you save me from that. I put a pillow on my face on your face and I said suffocate. It could have been. It could have been that. If I chose if I didn't. If ~ Eimear McBride

Thought I saw you on the beach this morning...Thought I saw you standing on the white strand, your back to the wind. The rain had stopped and there was a brisk clarity in the air. You watched me over your left shoulder, head tucked in coyly. Seabirds flying low in the sky, and the grey-green waves at your foot. A whole panorama thrown up behind you.

I was on the coast road coming back from the shops. I stopped walking once I caught sight of you. You were wearing a reefer jacket with the collar turned up against the weather. It might have been navy, but it looked black in the distance. As did your trousers. As did your shoes. All of you was black except your face and hair. You wore no hat...Never once saw you in Winter clothes, yet there you were as clear as day for a whole moment. Only your eyes were visible above the upturned collar. Your hair was in your eyes. You watched me through those pale strands. And I watched you. Intently.

The man from down the road drove by in his faded red car. He was going the other way, so he didn't offer a lift. He just waved. I waved back. And then I turned to you again, and we looked at each other a little longer. Very calm. Heart barely shifted. Too far away to see your features. No matter. There was salt on your face. Sea salt. It was in your hair. It was on your mouth. It was all over you, as though you gazed at me through ice. And it was all over me. It tingled on my skin.

After a time I moved off, and you ~ Claire Kilroy

Welsh Incident

'But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.'
What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?'
Nothing at all of any things like that.'
What were they, then?'
'All sorts of queer things,
Things never seen or heard or written about,
Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar
Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,
Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,
All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,
All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,
Though all came moving slowly out together.'
Describe just one of them.'
'I am unable.'
What were their colours?'
'Mostly nameless colours,
Colours you'd like to see; but one was puce
Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.
Some had no colour.'
'Tell me, had they legs?'
Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.'
But did these things come out in any order?'
What o'clock was it? What was the day of the week?
Who else was present? How was the weather?'
I was coming to that. It was half-past three
On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.
The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu
On thrity-seven shimmering instruments
Collecting for Caernarvon's (Fever) Hospital Fund.
The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth's mayor addressed ~ Robert Graves

But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through the transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise forever. ~ Herman Melville

Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They mean nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea. They meant less than the marl and the mud and the dry clay of the cliff that were eaten away by the weather, washed away by the sea. It was not just that they would fade: they hardly existed, they did not matter, they would have no impact on this cold dawn, this deserted remote seascape where the water shone in the early light and shocked her with its sullen beauty. It might have been better, she felt, if there had never been people, if this turning of the world, and the glistening sea, and the morning breeze happened without witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love. She stood at the edge of the cliff until the sun came out from behind the black rainclouds, ~ Colm Toibin

The ceaseless rain is falling fast,
And yonder gilded vane,
Immovable for three days past,
Points to the misty main,
It drives me in upon myself
And to the fireside gleams,
To pleasant books that crowd my shelf,
And still more pleasant dreams,
I read whatever bards have sung
Of lands beyond the sea,
And the bright days when I was young
Come thronging back to me.
In fancy I can hear again
The Alpine torrent's roar,
The mule-bells on the hills of Spain,
The sea at Elsinore.
I see the convent's gleaming wall
Rise from its groves of pine,
And towers of old cathedrals tall,
And castles by the Rhine.
I journey on by park and spire,
Beneath centennial trees,
Through fields with poppies all on fire,
And gleams of distant seas.
I fear no more the dust and heat,
No more I feel fatigue,
While journeying with another's feet
O'er many a lengthening league.
Let others traverse sea and land,
And toil through various climes,
I turn the world round with my hand
Reading these poets' rhymes.
From them I learn whatever lies
Beneath each changing zone,
And see, when looking with their eyes,
Better than with mine own. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from "capsizing"! Let us then continue our voyage - each for the other's sake, for a long time yet, a long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas and good winds and above all sun - what I wish for myself, I wish for you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In clear weather the laziest may look across the Bay as far as Plymouth at a glance, or over the Atlantic as far as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids; or if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help hearing the ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. The restless ocean may at any moment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. All the reporters in the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report the news it brings. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Funny sky,' he said, squinting up at the thick-bellied white clouds and the sun shining so hot on them but not breaking through.
'It feels as if there should be a storm,' I said 'but it was like this at haymaking and the weather never properly broke then.'
'If I was at sea I should run for a port,' Ralph said. He was looking towards the horizon where there was a yellow tinge to the sky over the top of the downs. ~ Philippa Gregory

I never saw quite so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life can do: but to a degree, I know it is the same with them all; they are all knocked about, and exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before they reach Admiral Baldwin's age. ~ Jane Austen

In our methodical American life, we still recognize some magic in summer. Most persons at least resign themselves to being decently happy in June. They accept June. They compliment its weather. They complain of the earlier months as cold, and so spend them in the city; and they complain of the later months as hot, and so refrigerate themselves on some barren sea-coast. God offers us yearly a necklace of twelve pearls; most men choose the fairest, label it June, and cast the rest away. ~ Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Why, thou monkey,' said a harpooneer to one of these lads, 'we 've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here.' Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious revery is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. 10
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shrie ~ Herman Melville

It was a bad one, the Winter of 1933. Wading home that night through flames of snow, my toes burning, my ears on fire, the snow swirling around me like a flock of angry nuns, I stopped dead in my tracks. The time had come to take stock. Fair weather or foul, certain forces in the world were at work trying to destroy me. ~ John Fante

I like rainbows.

We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn't a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction…
Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means "straight down," which is a pretty good description of the plunge.
...
…We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the d ~ Tim Cahill

Jamie's face, already drawn and grim, grew somewhat grimmer at this question. The completest of landlubbers, he was not just prone to seasickness, but prostrated by it. He had been violently ill all the way from Inverness to Le Havre, though sea and weather had been quite calm. Now, some six hours later, safe ashore in Jared's warehouse by the quay, there was still a pale tinge to his lips and dark circles beneath his eyes. ~ Diana Gabaldon

In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant - the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. ~ Herman Melville

He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often "came down" handsomely, and Scrooge never did. ~ Charles Dickens

For there are two reasons why human beings face danger calmly: they may have no experience of it, or they may have means to deal with it: thus when in danger at sea people may feel confident about what will happen either because they have no experience of bad weather, or because their experience gives them the means of dealing with it. ~ Aristotle.

It's one of the things I love about the sea, the way you can see weather afar. It's like looking at the future. ~ Carol Birch

Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - the empire "empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan's entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin - as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life ~ Anthony Marra

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying--then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain. ~ James Carlos Blake

Eight Bells: Robert J. Kane '55D died June 3, 2017, in Palm Harbor, Florida. He came to MMA by way of Boston College. Bob or "Killer," as he was affectionately known, was an independent and eccentric soul, enjoying the freedom of life. After a career at sea as an Officer in the U.S. Navy and in the Merchant Marine he retired to an adventurous single life living with his two dogs in a mobile home, which had originally been a "Yellow School Bus." He loved watching the races at Daytona, Florida, telling stories about his interesting deeds about flying groceries to exotic Caribbean Islands, and misdeeds with mysterious ladies he had known. For years he spent his summers touring Canada and his winters appreciating the more temperate weather at Fort De Soto in St. Petersburg, Florida…. Enjoying life in the shadow of the Sunshine Bridge, Bob had an artistic flare, a positive attitude and a quick sense of humor. Not having a family, few people were aware that he became crippled by a hip replacement operation gone bad at the Bay Pines VA Hospital. His condition became so bad that he could hardly get around, but he remained in good spirits until he suffered a totally debilitating stroke. For the past 6 years Bob spent his time at various Florida Assisted Living Facilities, Nursing Homes and Palliative Care Hospitals. His end came when he finally wound up as a terminal patient at the Hospice Facility in Palm Harbor, Florida. Bob was 86 years old when he passed. He will be missed…. ~ Hank Bracker

If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together a ~ Bill Bryson

Ferrying Across is like crossing the sea. When you traverse a strait or make a long crossing of the sea, for a distance of even forty or fifty ri, you use "ferrying." In passing through this human world, too, there are likely many places within the space of a generation that may be called Ferrying Across. On a ship's course, you know where these places are, you know the capacity of the ship and you know the weather patterns well. Though other ships may not venture out, you do so by responding to the conditions of the hour, relying on either a crosswind or a tail wind and, if the wind changes, putting in the oars for two or three ri. With your mind set on arriving at port, you board the ship and ferry across

You should think in terms of Ferrying Across when you pass through society and set your mind on some serious affair.

For the martial arts, Ferrying Across is essential even in the midst of battle. Here you take into account the level of your opponent, judge your own degree of expertise, and, using the principles of the martial arts, ferry across. It is the same for a good mariner ferrying across a sea route. ~ Musashi Miyomoto

Friday beneath the sky, its little postcards of melancholy
Outside each window,
the engines inside the roses at half speed,
The huge page of the sea with its one word despair,
Fuchsia blossoms littered across the deck,
Unblotted tide pools of darkness beneath the ferns ...
And still I go on looking,
match after match in the black air. ~ Charles Wright

Unkar Delta at Mile 73
The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke's description of "raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet." Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified. ~ Ann Zwinger

There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is no created for such measureless. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship's deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

Then the concerts came to an end, the weather turned bad and my girls left Balbec, not all at once, as the swallows leave, but within the same week. ~ Marcel Proust

There's nothing situate under heaven's eye But hath his bond in earth, in sea, in sky. The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls Are their males' subjects and at their controls. Man, more divine, the master of all these, Lord of the wide world and wild wat'ry seas, Indu'd with intellectual sense and souls, Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls, Are masters to their females, and their lords; Then let your will attend on their accords. ~ William Shakespeare

I took a voyage once
it is many years ago, now
to Amsterdam, and the owner, not my good cousin here, but another, took a fancy to go with me; and his wife must needs accompany him, and verily, before that voyage was over, I wished I was dead. I was no longer captain of the ship. My owner was my captain, and his wife was his. We were forever putting into port for fresh bread and meat, milk and eggs, for she could eat none other. If the wind got up but ever so little, we had to run into shelter and anchor until the sea was smooth. The manners of the sailors shocked her. She would scream at night when a rat ran across her, and would lose her appetite if a living creature, of which, as usual, the ship was full, fell from a beam onto her platter. I was tempted, more than once, to run the ship on to a rock and make an end of us all. ~ G.A. Henty

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself. ~ Ellen Ullman

. . . what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist floats lightly on the glare of the horizon. This is the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by vertical ravines. It lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone stretched from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides into the sea, it has not soil enough - it is said - to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were blighted by a curse. The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that it is deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The common folk of the neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains, tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps of shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time had perished in the search. ~ Joseph Conrad

He kissed me wildly, overwhelming me like a giant wave rushing to shore. I was soon lost in the turbulent grasp of his embrace and yet…I knew I was safe. His wild kiss drove me, pushed me, asked me questions I was unwilling to consider. But I was cherished by this dark Poseidon, and though he had the power to crush me utterly, to drown me in the purple depths of his wake, he held me aloft, separate. His passionate kiss changed. It gentled and soothed and entreated. Together we drifted towards a safe harbor. The god of the sea set me down securely on a sandy beach and steadied me as I trembled. Effervescent tingles shot through my limbs delighting me with surges of sparkling sensation like sandy toes tickled by bubbly waves. Finally, the waves moved away and I felt my Poseidon watching me from a distance. We looked at each other knowing we were forever changed by the experience. We both knew that I would always belong to the sea and that I would never be able to part from it and be whole again. ~ Colleen Houck

But there were endless rewards. There was a pervasive sense of adventure, that a surprise was just waiting to be discovered in the next encounter or at the end of the next street. There was the food, of course-even the banal cafe seemed to serve something exquisite-and the artistry with which it was all done, right down to the tiny scenarios in bread and chocolate that were unveiled fortnightly in our boulanger's window. I even came to appreciate-in memory, to bask in-the flirtatious comments made by men in the street, bending every rule in my postfeminist, Anglo-American playbook as I did so, seeing it all as just more joyous street theater in a city that was alive with it, especially in warm weather when everyone was out. I knew that I would remember all of it always, that Paris would be there forever in sharply delineated images,a pack of mental cards to be shuffled through, rearranged, anytime I liked. ~ Penelope Rowlands

Heroes are men who admit to being difficult to live with, who demand extremely high standards in every aspect of their lives, who are natural, effortless leaders, strong men, men with prestige and intelligence, whose faults are likely to be manifestations of strength and power. He is the master of his life; he is in control. Whether his sphere of influence is the boardroom or the mountains, the sea or the stage, the hero dominates it with his personality, his intelligence, and his quick, hard-honed grasp of every situation. A hero can seem arrogant and short-tempered, ruthless, tough, even cruel
he can be quite unlovable at first. ~ Robyn Donald

This case was too full of skewed, slippery parallels, and I couldn't shake the uneasy sense that they were somehow deliberate. Every coincidence felt like a sea-worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code. ~ Tana French

The brooks flow to their lover, the sea, and the flowers smile at the object of their passion, the light. The mist rolls down to its beloved, the valley. And I? In me is what brooks do not know, what flowers do not hear, what the mist does not apprehend. You see me alone in my love, solitary in my yearning. ~ Khalil Gibran

Another, more fluid metaphor for the world of thought gradually suggested itself to him, derived from his former voyages at sea. A philosopher who was trying to consider human understanding in all its aspects would behold beneath him a mass molded in calculable curves, streaked by currents which could be charted, and deeply furrowed by the pressure of winds and the heavy, inert weight of water. It seemed to him that the shapes which the mind assumes are like those great forms, born of undifferentiated water, which assail or replace each other on the surface of the deep; each concept collapses, eventually, to merge with its very opposite, like two waves breaking against each other only to subside into the same single line of white foam. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

When you're young, you don't really know quite what you're aiming at. You're very impulsive and acting on impulse, which is very important and valuable. But you're kind of swimming in a blind sea. When you get older, you have more of a sense of direction. ~ Sinead O'Connor

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

They cannot understand that the figure of a laborer - some furrows in a plowed field, a bit of sand, sea and sky - are serious objects, so difficult but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one's life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them. ~ Brenda Ueland