Raindrops In The Ocean Quotes

No, madam,' I said to the woman in my ESL English. "That's my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much. I am seven. Next year I will be eight. I'm doing fine."...
You believed, like many Vietnamese mothers, that to speak of female genitalia, especially between mothers adn sons, is considered taboo- so when talking about birth, you always mentioned that I had come out of your anus. You would playfully slap my head and say,'This huge noggin nearly tore up my asshole! ~ Ocean Vuong

But for a moment I stay there, suspended above the green swell of the land as though thrown up onto the crest of a wave, seeing for the first time a break in the at horizon. For this the boats crossed the ocean, the wagons climbed the mountain pass. For this the songs were sung with desert all around. This is what is given: the promise there is still a way, if we can find it, the promise we can always be renewed. ~ Kermit Roosevelt III

I bring you the dance. I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionise our entire epoch. Where have I discovered it? By the Pacific Ocean, but the waving pine-forests of Sierra Nevada. I have seen the ideal figure of youthful American dancing over the top of the Rockies. The supreme poet of our country is Walt Whitman. I have discovered the dance that is worthy of the poem of Walt Whitman. I am indeed the spiritual daughter of Walt Whitman. For the children of America I will create a new dance that will express America. I bring to your theatre the vital soul that it lacks, the soul of the dancer. For you know...that the birth of the theatre was the dance, that the first actor was the dancer. He danced and sang. That was the birth of the tragedy, and until the dancer in all his spontaneous great art returns to the theatre, your theatre will not live in its true expression! ~ Isadora Duncan

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean - once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help. ~ Jared Diamond

Why had he committed this terrible sin? Everything in the world was insignificant compared to what he had lost. Everything in the world is insignificant compared to the truth and purity of one small man – even the empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even science itself.
Then he realized that it still wasn't too late. He still had the strength to lift up his head, to remain his mother's son.
And he wasn't going to try to console himself or justify what he had done. He wanted this mean, cowardly act to stand all his life as a reproach; day and night it would be something to bring him back to himself. No, no, no! He didn't want to strive to be a hero – and then preen himself over his courage.
Every hour, every day, year in, year out, he must struggle to be a man, struggle for his right to be pure and kind. He must do this with humility. And if it came to it, he mustn't be afraid even of death; even then he must remain a man.
'Well then, we'll see,' he said to himself. 'Maybe I do have enough strength. Your strength, Mother... ~ Vasily Grossman

Stupid boy,
You can get lost in every book
but you can never forget yourself
the way god forgets
his hands. ~ Ocean Vuong

Like a drop in the ocean, so a single person carries within themselves the universe surrounding them. ~ Terez Virag

Oh, her beauty
the tender maid! Its brilliance gives light like lamps to one travelling in the dark.
She is a pearl hidden in a shell of hair as black as jet,
A pearl for which Thought dives and remains unceasingly in the deeps of that ocean.
He who looks upon her deems her to be a gazelle of the sand-hills, because of her shapely neck and the loveliness of her gestures. ~ Ibn Arabi

A storm was coming; you could feel it in the air, chill wind was cutting through the thickest coat and there was a faint wetness in the air that was touching the skin if turned towards the storm. Mark looked at the sky above the ocean. The sky was getting darker it no longer felt like midday, the storm moved the clock forward and it felt more like the beginnings of sunset. With lightening flashes every few minutes, the sky would light up all of a sudden. It was magnificent, breathtaking and even life taking. ~ Austin V. Songer

Every drop in the ocean counts. ~ Yoko Ono

Each day is an adventure in discovering the meaning of life. It is each little thing that you do that day - whether it be spending time with your friends, running in a cross-country meet or just simply staring at the crashing ocean- that holds the key to discovering the meaning of life. I would rather be out enjoying these things than pondering them. We may never really discover the meaning of life, but the knowledge we gain in our quest to discover it is truly more valuable. ~ Jack Canfield

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization. ~ John Keegan

Grief is an ocean where the waves obey their own rhythm, their own tide, where we are just thrown about to stay afloat as best we can. Where there is in fact no guarantee that we will keep our heads above water. ~ Peter Watson

Rain
To be umbrella'd in the rain is to be singing,
surrounded by nature and at once untouched,
shielded against the force of gales andhailstorms
in my dry alcove of sentience and peace.

But past the amphitheater of raindrops
tree trunks purple against the throttling moss,
marbling into green and grey lichens.
Leaves of grass crouch in a lowered stance, then
stand on end like the hairs of a frightened dog.
The musty smell of earth hangs in the gallows,
emanating decay into the granite, winter light.
Clouds bewail the earth in dogged tears.
Who said there was consolation in rain?

My umbrella is lost in a sudden gust,
leaving me wet, shivering, exposed --
reminding me, once again,
why I hate funerals.
They remind me of what I am
and to what I will return. ~ Beryl Dov

They stood at the bottom of the steps under a light shaped like a caged star, soothing each other with their thoughts as they had done for years and years, since they were swapping lullabies in cradles across an ocean. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

The Golden Court, the country town's elegant inn, was crowded and noisy. The guests, locals and visitors, were mostly engaged in activities typical for their nation or profession. Serious merchants argued with dwarves over the price of goods and credit interest. Less serious merchants pinched the backsides of the girls carrying beer, cabbage and beans. Local nitwits pretended to be well-informed. Harlots were trying to please those who had money while discouraging those who had none. Carters and fishermen drank as if there were no tomorrow. Some seamen were singing a song which celebrated the ocean waves, the courage of captains and the graces of mermaids, the latter graphically and in considerable detail. ~ Andrzej Sapkowski

Buttercups"

When we were children our papas were stout
And colorless as seaweed or the floats
At anchor off New Bedford. We were shut
In gardens where our brassy sailor coats
Made us like black-eyed susans bending out
Into the ocean, Then my teeth were cut:
A levelled broom-pole butt
Was pushed into my thin
And up-turned chin--
There were shod hoofs behind the horseplay. But
I played Napoleon in my attic cell
Until my shouldered broom
Bobbed down the room
With horse and neighing shell.

Recall the shadows the doll-curtains veined
On ancrem Winslow's ponderous plate from blue
China, the breaking of time's haggard tide
On the huge cobwebbed print of Waterloo,
With a cracked smile across the glass. I cried
To see the Emperor's sabered eagle slide
From the clutching grenadier
Staff-officer
With the gold leaf cascading down his side--
A red dragoon, his plough-horse rearing, swayed
Back on his reins to crop
The buttercup
Bursting upon the braid ~ Robert Lowell

The River
Every day the river waits for your reflection;
it's spine ripples, it backwaters arch
rocking the banks in frothy anticipation.
Rills, rindles, runnels stream into rivulets,
industrious like leaf-cutting ants,
carrying every reflection but yours.
The river will wait, of course;
patience is her nature
and the day you arrive
it will capture your terrestrial beauty,
freighting it to the ocean
with the devotion of a sister's prayer. ~ Beryl Dov

But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave. ~ Michael Chabon

The Western industrial complex would not change even if millions of people perished in Africa or India or some other faraway place. The population of the earth increases by millions every month, and such losses would be seen as a little drop in the ocean. But if something serious were to occur in the West, then that would turn upside down the currently held vision of Western people with regard to the impact of modern technology on nature. It would be something that would wake them up and perhaps help to stop this really suicidal course that modern civilization is currently pursuing and that the rest of the world is trying to follow. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Love is giving, love is learning, love is willing to receive love and love in return, love is not only your bloodline, but love is also everywhere. Love is what you make of it, whether it's the birds singing you a personal melody or the waves in the ocean washing away the hate and turning it into unconditional, endless love. Love is the people who would never think of giving up on you. Love is the people who put your broken pieces back together. Love is when the storm comes - and the wind isn't too friendly, but it's here for a purpose as it blows the branches on the trees. The rain is pounding on the daisy in someone's front yard, yet the daisy weathers the storm and needs that extra shower - after the storm, the ground is still moist, there are still puddles of water and the rain still lingers on, but when you look up there is a rainbow of love. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

One sometimes clings tightly to pain, to bitter home-sickness and bitter regret, but one forgets one's guilt; in vain, you might think back to the beginning (who led me this far?). If only you were allowed to accuse once more, turn to others once more, love once more! You plunge into the wide, ocean-like hallucination, you have faith and pray, and forget your dark fear when you gaze into the face of your beloved. But how should one fight it? ~ Annemarie Schwarzenbach

It's a pity if someone ... has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart's ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it. ~ Leonard Cohen

Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama's tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon's Tower of Belem to the Malabar Coast: first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in the period called Discovery-of-India - but how could we be discovered when we were not
covered before? - we were 'not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment', as my distinguished mother had it. ~ Salman Rushdie

Many of my daily preoccupations suggest that I belong more to the world than to God. A little criticism makes me angry, and a little rejection makes me depressed. A little praise raises my spirits, and a little success excites me. It takes very little to raise me up or thrust me down. Often I am like a small boat on the ocean, completely at the mercy of its waves. All the time and energy I spend in keeping some kind of balance and preventing myself from being tipped over and drowning shows that my life is mostly a struggle for survival: not a holy struggle, but an anxious struggle resulting from the mistaken idea that it is the world that defines me. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

He that has no present Christ has a future, dark, chaotic, heaving with its destructive ocean; and over it there goes forever
black-pinioned winging its solitary and hopeless flight, the raven of his anxious thoughts, and finds no place to rest, and comes back again to the desolate ark with its foreboding croak of evil in the present and evil in the future. ~ Alexander MacLaren

Anxiety is debilitating. "What's it like to live with anxiety"? One day your waters are calm, the seagulls are all around, gently landing on your shoreline, then suddenly a mountain falls into your ocean and there are waves shooting out in all directions, the seagulls scatter and leave you all alone, and there is a big hole in the middle of your stomach, where all the water jumped out of! And you can hardly walk or stand up or eat, because, there is a hole on your stomach! Somebody shot you and you can feel it, but no one else can see it. That's exactly what anxiety is like. You're walking around thinking all is well, then you get shot in the stomach with an invisible bullet and bleed out in a way that nobody else understands. ~ C. JoyBell C.

What is more like love than the ocean? You can play in it, drown in it ... it can be clear and bright enough to hurt your eyes, or covered in fog, hidden behind a curve of roads and then suddenly there in full glory. It's waves come like breaths, in and out, body stretched to forever in it's possibilities, and yet it's heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic. ~ Deb Caletti

Understanding the language of eyes now came as naturally to him as swimming in the ocean came to a fish and flying in the sky to a bird! ~ Avijeet Das

But from within the carton, Morty's American flag - which I know is folded there, at the very bottom, in the official way - tells me, "It's against some Jewish law," and so, on into the car he went with the carton, and then he drove it down to the beach, to the boardwalk, which was no longer there. The boardwalk was gone. Good-bye, boardwalk. The ocean had finally carried it away. The Atlantic is a powerful ocean. Death is a terrible thing. That's a doctor I never heard of. Remarkable. Yes, that's the word for it. It was all remarkable. Good-bye, remarkable. Egypt and Greece good-bye, and good-bye, Rome! ~ Philip Roth

I didn't know that would be the last time I'd see him, his neck scar lit blue by the diner's neon marquee. To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn't that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period? ~ Ocean Vuong

Our lips moved together in sync. Push and pull. The ocean and the moon. I ~ Micalea Smeltzer

Ennek realised what an enormous mistake it had been to buy the thing. Miner was stunning. The sweater was high enough on his neck to almost hide the iron collar. He reminded Ennek of ocean waves, white foam over sea green, but Miner was warm and soft, with a shy little smile and a slight blush on his cheeks. Ennek wanted to drown in him. ~ Kim Fielding

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You say 'love' too easily, Kepler."
"No, not rally - please don't call me that. The idea that love has to be a blazing romantic thing of monogamous stability is innately ludicrous. You loved your parents, perhaps, because they were the warmth you could flee to. You loved your first childhood crush with a passion that made your lips tingle, your flesh grow light in their presence. You loved your wife with the steadiness of an ocean against the shore; your lover with the blaze of a shooting star, your best friend with the confidence of a mountain. Love is a many-splendorous thing, as the old song says.... ~ Claire North

People do not want to confront the existential mess that is life. They want to check things off--OK, you're OK. And just because you can talk about your grief, you know," she said, looking sharply at me, "doesn't mean you are in control of it, or that you know what's going on. You are in the ocean. And what you think, what you analyze, that is just the descanting of that ocean. Your mind is an ocean and it has scary things in it. While you may be able to analyze your grief at three p.m., that has nothing to do with how you feel at three a.m., in the dark center of night. ~ Meghan O'Rourke

The Master was exceedingly gracious to university dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations. To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts? ~ Anthony De Mello

There's no scandal involved," she said airily. "I have no connection with you whatsoever. I have nothing to do with you. You are a thimble filled with water next to my ocean. You are a grain of sand to my beach. You are a tiny star in the sky. You're nothing to me. ~ Karen Ranney

And I shall watch the ferry boats, and they'll get high, on a bluer ocean against tomorrow's sky. and i will never grow so old again, and i will walk and talk, in gardens all wet with rain ... ~ Van Morrison