Maritime Stories Quotes

The three cardinal tenets of rum drinking in Newfoundland. The first of these is that as soon as a bottle is placed on a table it must be opened. This is done to "let the air get at it and carry off the black vapors." The second tenet is that a bottle, once opened, must never be restoppered, because of the belief that it will then go bad. No bottle of rum has ever gone bad in Newfoundland, but none has ever been restoppered, so there is no way of knowing whether this belief is reasonable. The final tenet is that an open bottle must be drunk as rapidly as possible "before all to-good goes out of it. ~ Farley Mowat

Pier 5 in Brooklyn was within a short walking distance from the subway station and in the distance the masts and funnel of my new ship could be seen. The S/S African Sun was a C-4 cargo ship built in 1942, for the war effort. Not even 15 years old, the ship looked as good as new. Farrell Lines took good care of their ships and it showed. There was always a lot of activity prior to departure and this time was no exception. We were expected to depart prior to dusk and there were things to do.
I got into my working uniform and leaving my sea bag on my bunk headed for the bridge. When I passed the open door of the Captain's room he summoned me in. "Welcome aboard Mr. Mate. I've heard good things about you!" We talked briefly about his expectations. Introducing himself as Captain Brian, he seemed friendly enough and I felt that I got off to a good start.
As the ship's Third Officer, most frequently known as the Third Mate, my first order of business was to place my license into the frame alongside those of the other deck officers. I must admit that doing so gave me a certain feeling of pride and belonging. With only an hour to go before our scheduled departure I called the engine room and gave them permission to jack over the engine; a term used to engage the engine, so as to slowly turn the screw or propeller. ~ Hank Bracker

The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
where they were wont to do:
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools -
We were a ghastly crew. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We've all heard the stories. It's just that some people don't want to believe them. 'He shall rise from the green' doesn't have to mean coming from the Blood Forest or Ruthgar. It could mean he starts out drafting green. One of the first glimmers of Breaker's magical genius showed whyen he went green golem in the Battle of Garriston - he'd never even heard of going green golem. He intuited it on the spot. His will was so strong, he drafted a green that stopped musket balls, Teia. 'He shall kill gods and kings'? He already done both. 'He'll be an outsider'? How much more outsider can you be than a mixed-blood bastard from Tyrea? Each of those things offend the luxiats, and all of them together make their blood boil - as it makes them furious that a Lightbringer would be necessary to put their worship right - but hasn't Orholam's work always offended those in power? I won't put myself on the wrong side of Orholam. 'In the darkest hour, when the abominations come the sores of Big Jasper, when Hope himself has died, then shall he bring the holy light and banish darkness.' 'Hope himself,' Teia. That's Gavin Guile. He's dead. our darkest hour is coming. We have to pick a side. ~ Brent Weeks

KIDS IN DISTRESSED FAMILIES ARE GREAT repositories of silence and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not to be told. ~ Mary Karr

I'm telling you stories. Trust me. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I disliked singing in English and neither liked the story nor the character of Cressida. ~ Walter Legge

What I love about film scoring is that all the answers are in the story. You just need to get in tune with the story and realize it musically. ~ Joseph Trapanese

Many storytellers with possibly more potential than Shakespeare, even though I have not read much of him, could not hit much fame because they treated their stories like their wives. Rather than limiting the emotion only to flirting with their stories, they married them, thus limiting their chances of experimenting. ~ Pawan Mishra

In a weird, twisted way, Nita almost felt like Kovit's and her stories were opposite facets on the same diamond. Different, sure, but similar in some fundamental ways. It made Nita feel . . . weird. Squiggly, not-quite empathy, but sort of fear-empathy . . . something. Nita couldn't put it into words. ~ Rebecca Schaeffer

A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims
these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.
We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.
And we certainly wouldn't write about it. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories. ~ Natalie Goldberg

Haiti is the best cure against melancholy; it is also the most creative place for me to be. My productivity has increased enormously since I moved to Haiti. That's where I write my stories, develop my ideas and write nonstop, so it's a productive time, not a sleepy time. ~ Jorgen Leth

And must not all stories of brave lives and long endeavours and weary watching for the ideal so end, until all be ended?
I cannot tell you whether he found what he sought. I have told you that he sought it. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The problem I have with haters is that they see my glory, but they don't know my story ... ~ Maya Angelou

Life is about accumulating a group of stories so rich and interesting that they'll serve you well beyond the time that whatever career you have has ended. That's what this day-to-day shit is really about. The accumulation of amazing stories and having the bruises to show for them. ~ Jason Myers

None of this ends tonight. This was a taste. This was a start. We keep going and we go together. We lean on people and we invite people to lean on us. We ask honest questions and we give honest answers. We ask for help, because we know that it's okay to ask for help.

Above all else, we choose to stay. We choose to fight the darkness and the sadness, to fight the questions and the lies and the myth of all that's missing. There is much not missing. We choose to stay, because we are all stories still going. Because there is still some time for things to turn around, time to be surprised and time for change. We stay because no one else ca play your part.

Life is worth living. We'll see you tomorrow. ~ Jamie Tworkowski

When you're telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it's like an impressionistic painting - you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece. ~ Christopher Moore

The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished. ~ Paul Murray

I know plenty of people with kids in elite, private schools and had heard many stories. I have drifted into the homes of some of those very wealthy families in New York and am fascinated with the dynamic and how much freedom the children are given. ~ Jane Green

Unfortunately, not all stories end positively. ~ Max Von Sydow

I know from my own experience as a parent that parents probably teach most powerfully not through their words but through their deeds. And my parents taught me through the stories of their lives. And I don't take any credit for the things that they did or the things that they experienced, but they made a great impression on me. ~ Samuel Alito

Lot of stories in deceit, how characters deceive other people, but most of all, I think, how they deceive themselves. We're not as tricky as we think we are. ~ Peter Orner

Did you know that writing stories down kills them?
Of course it does, words aren't meant to be stiff, unchanging things. ~ N.K. Jemisin

The characters in my stories all have quite loud lives in my head. It's a relief to get them on the page. Often they come from people I've noticed or overheard - but that is only a part of them. It's only by writing that I discover who these people really are. ~ Rachel Joyce

Whether a project is large or small, it doesn't matter much to me as long as I feel I can serve the story as best as possible. ~ James Ponsoldt

His [Jesus'] historians, having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground. ~ Thomas Paine

I had been working on this series called 'Everything Dies,' and it was basically me doing non-fiction essays, responding to religion and stuff like that, and I really got into this ideas of telling factual stories via comics. ~ Box Brown

Actors, we like stories, we like storytelling, we love being a part of the story, and if you give us a story that's interesting then we'll want to do it. ~ Aaron Stanford

While the stories are fiction, the journey is real. ~ C.J. Peterson

Mother did not spend all her time in paying dull calls to dull ladies, and sitting dully at home waiting for dull ladies to pay calls to her. She was almost always there, ready to play with the children, and read to them, and help them to do their home-lessons. Besides this she used to write stories for them while they were at school, and read them aloud after tea, and she always made up funny pieces of poetry for their birthdays and for other great occasions, such as the christening of the new kittens, or the refurnishing of the doll's house, or the time when they were getting over the mumps. ~ E. Nesbit

Scars tell stories of who we are and what we did. A person without marks hasn't done anything. ~ Kevin J. Anderson

Dreaming and hoping won't produce a piece of work; only writing, rewriting and rewriting (if necessary)- a devoted translation of thoughts and dreams into words on paper will result in a story. ~ Roberta Gellis

Politics always change. Stories never do. ~ Stephen King

Abortion occurs so frequently in my stories. Abortion sort of synthesizes both sex and death. To have sex and death placed as close to one another as possible is always a goal of mine. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Villains often more the story along while the heros react to the villains, so the villain becomes the engine of the story. ~ Michael Scott

When writers are self-conscious about themselves as writers they often keep a great distance from their characters, sounding as if they were writing encyclopedia entries instead of stories. Their hesitancy about physical and psychological intimacy can be a barrier to vital fiction. Conversely, a narration that makes readers hear the characters' heavy breathing and smell their emotional anguish diminishes distance. Readers feel so close to the characters that, for those magical moments, they become those characters. ~ Jerome Stern

When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

It is important for leaders to know their stories; to get them straight; to communicate them effectively, particularly to those who are in the thrall of rival stories; and, above all, to embody in their lives the stories that they tell. ~ Howard E. Gardner

The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

I grew up in a family of storytellers, but Google has destroyed us because you can fact-check everything. We'd always like the stories to be a little better than they were. ~ George Clooney

They weren't true stories; they were better than that. ~ Alice Hoffman

'Anna Karenina' is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. It's gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, it's the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, some of which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate super-person who rules the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is "underneath" rather than "above" everything, and he (or it) plays the world from inside. One might say that if religion is the opium of the people, the Hindus have the inside dope. What is more, no Hindu can realize that he is God in disguise without seeing at the same time that this is true of everyone and everything else. In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. ~ Alan W. Watts

And I know there are plenty of other "colored" things I could do besides telling my stories or going to Shirley Boon's meetings- the mass meetings in town, the marches in Birmingham, the voting rallies upstate. But truth is, I don't care that much about voting. I don't care about eating at a counter with white people. What I care about is, if in ten years, a white lady will call my girls dirty and accuse them of stealing the silver. ~ Kathryn Stockett

The power that comes from knowing the facts of history is dwarfed by the power that comes from being able to shape the stories about how that history is written and told. ~ Annie Leonard

Even if a story has nothing to do with my life, if I can recognise something of myself in the character and think, 'Oh yeah, that's what I'd do ... ' Yeah, that's what I look for. ~ Tom Hanks

Us writers all like each other and want to write stories with each other; we're having a good time. ~ Charles Soule