Porpoise Quotes

A porpoise sounded twenty yards away from us in an explosion of breath, startling us. . . . Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and a fourth porpoise neared the board and we could feel great secret shapes eyeing us from below. I reached out to touch the back of one, its skin the color of jade, but as I reached the porpoise dove and my hand touched moonlight where the dorsal fin had been cutting through the silken waters. The dolphins had obviously smelled the flood tide of boyhood in the sea and heard the hormones singing in the boy0scented water. None of us spoke as the porpoises circled us. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak – and then, as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us, moved south where there were fish to be hunted.
"Each of us would remember that night floating on the waves all during our lives. It was the year before we went to high school when we were poised on the slippery brink between childhood and adulthood, admiring our own daring as we floated free from the vigilance and approval of adult eyes, ruled only by the indifference of stars and fate. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set among us the night of the porpoises. ~ Pat Conroy

And Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Twas now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards groan, and graves give up their dead,
And many a mischievous, enfranchised sprite
Had long since burst his bonds of stone or lead,
And hurried off, with schoolboy-like delight,
To play his pranks near some poor wretch's bed,
Sleeping, perhaps serenely as a porpoise,
Nor dreaming of this fiendish Habeas Corpus. ~ Thomas Ingoldsby

It's queer to think how many little guys there are like that, with more ability than push, sucked in by one wave and hurled out by the next, for every Sammy Glick who slips through and over the waves like a porpoise. ~ Budd Schulberg

I know you do not care much for such revelries, but trust me - this one you will enjoy, Harry. You and I will sit at the high table, eating porpoise and swan, whilst we watch my male kinfolk eating humble pie! ~ Sharon Kay Penman

Something grey surged out of the ship's wake, and Mouana reached for her pistol, then swore softly as she saw it was only a porpoise. The animals were playing in the engine wash, spinning in the air as they arced through the crashing foam. They were not albino, nor rotten, nor tentacled - just porpoises. The sight of the things brought hope back again; whatever mess they were in, at least they weren't in Ocean. ~ Nate Crowley

No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise. ~ Lewis Carroll

A school of porpoises broke the surface of the water twenty feet from where we had sat down[...]Each individual porpoise made a sound slightly different from that of any other, so that the school, all twelve of them, flaring and sliding and dancing so near us, formed a kind of woodwind section on the sea's surface or even a single instrument, something unknown and astonishing to man, a celebration of breath itself, of oxygen and sea water and sunlight. They had the eyes of large dogs and their skin was the loveliest, silkiest green imaginable. ~ Pat Conroy

Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer; I shall grow as fat as a porpoise. ~ Jonathan Swift

... Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak - and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us ... Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch. ~ Pat Conroy

(at age thirteen) I think sharks smile like women dad. Like Jenny's smiling at you right now.
...
But have you ever noticed how porpoises smile like effeminate men? They're bi-sexual, you know. Me, I'd rather have sex with a porpoise than a shark. ~ William Rooney

Molly squeaked and clicked (the clicks were the hardest) something back, which she hoped was "Hello." What she actually said was "My teeth are green," but the porpoise was too polite to point that out. ~ Dave Barry

Leo scratched his head. Well, I dunno about enchiladas- "Enceladus" Piper corrected. Whatever. But Old Potty Face mentioned another name. Porpoise Fear, or something? ~ Rick Riordan

Either way, the whole thing was a pain in the porpoise. ~ Alan Bradley

No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise. ~ Lewis Carroll

I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic. ~ Pat Conroy

Will you walk a little faster?' said a whiting to a snail,
'There's a porpoise close behind us and he's treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle
will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance? ~ Lewis Carroll

He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas. ~ T.H. White

But now 'tis the modern ole Coast Division S.P. and begins at those dead end blocks and at 4:30 the frantic Market Street and Sansome Street commuters as I say come hysterically running for ther 112 to get home on time for the 5:30 televisions Howdy Doody of their gun toting Neal Cassady'd Hopalong childrens. 1.9 miles to 23rd Street, another 1.2 Newcomb, another 1.0 to Paul Avenue and etcetera these being the little piss stops on that 5 miles short run thru 4 tunnels to mighty Bayshore, Bayshore at milepost 5.2 shows you as I say that gigantic valley wall sloping in with sometimes in extinct winter dusks the huge fogs milking furling meerolling in without a sound but as if you could hear the radar hum, the oldfashioned dullmasks mouth of Potato Patch Jack London old scrollwaves crawling in across the gray bleak North Pacific with a wild fleck, a fish, the wall of a cabin, the old arranged wallworks of a sunken ship, the fish swimming in the pelvic bones of old lovers lay tangled ath the bottom of the sea like slugs no longer discernible bone by bone but melted into one squid of time that fog, that terrible and bleak Seattlish fog that potatopatch wise comes bringing messages from Alaska and from the Aleutian mongol, and from the seal, and from the wave, and from the smiling porpoise, that fog at Bayshore you can see waving in and filling in rills and rolling down and making milk on hillsides and you think, "It's hypocricy of men makes these hills grim. ~ Jack Kerouac

My idea of recreation in those busy years, was to leave the porpoise training for an hour or two, round up a bunch of children, and go play at training the ponies. I don't know where I found the strength. ~ Karen Pryor