Sailing And The Sea Quotes

The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World. ~ Christopher Columbus

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The sea is as near as we come to another world. ~ Anne Stevenson

I must go down to the sea again, for the call of the running tide, is a wild call and a clear call, that cannot be denied! ~ John Masefield

It's out there at sea that you are really yourself. ~ Vito Dumas

You do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes, that's all. ~ Bernard Moitessier

Would you learn the secret of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers, comprehend its mystery! ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Off Cape Horn there are but two kinds of weather, neither one of them a pleasant kind. ~ John Masefield

The sea drives truth into a man like salt. ~ Hilaire Belloc

A ship is always referred to as 'she' because it costs so much to keep one in paint and powder. ~ Chester W. Nimitz

I want a boat that drinks 6, eats 4, and sleeps 2. ~ Ernest K. Gann

And after two days in civilization we realized we could never stay for long and started to plan our next adventure. ~ Bob Bitchin

Being hove to in a long gale is the most boring way of being terrified I know. ~ Donald Hamilton

I can't wait for the oil wells to run dry, for the last gob of black, sticky muck to come oozing out of some remote well. Then the glory of sail will return. ~ Tristan Jones

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite. ~ Jules Verne

I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began. ~ William Hazlitt

He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten.. ~ Amanda Craig

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens ... air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely. ~ Richard Nelson

A little boy, he can play like he's a fireman or a cop
although fewer and fewer are pretending to be cops, thank God
or a deep-sea diver or a quarterback or a spaceman or a rock 'n roll star or a cowboy, or anything else glamorous and exciting (Author's note: What about a novelist, Jellybean?), and although chances are by the time he's in high school he'll get channeled into safer, duller ambitions, the great truth is, he can be any of those things, realize any of those fantasies, if he has the strength, nerve and sincere desire ... But little girls? Podner, you know that story as well as me. Give 'em doll babies, tea sets and toy stoves. And if they show a hankering for more bodacious playthings, call 'em tomboy, humor 'em for a few years and then slip 'em the bad news ... And the reality is, we got about as much chance of growing up to be cowgirls as Eskimos have got being vegetarians. ~ Tom Robbins

-


Try to keep everything and keep
standing. In the tall grass,
ten thousand shadows. What's past,
all you've been,
will continue its half-life,
a carbon burn searing its way to heaven
through the twisted core of a pine.
At night, memory will roam your skin.
Your dreams will reveal the squirming world
under the lifted stone.
While you sleep, the sea
floods your house, you wake
to silt, long brown weeds
tangled in the sheets. You wake
in the bog, caked with the froth of peat,
stunted as shore pine,
growing a metre a century.

The bog bruised with colour,
muskeg, hardpan, much.
Matted green sphagnum
thick as buffalo fur.
Sinking into, bouyed
by spongy ground;
walking on water.

In time, night after night,
we'll begin to dream of a langsam sea,
waves in slow motion, thickening to sand.
Drenched with satiety we'll be slow
to rise, a metre a century.

Our brown bed is peat,
born of water, flooded,
burning with the smell of earth. ~ Anne Michaels

If a heart could actually swell with warmth, he knew his just had. He was the anchor and she was the beautiful vessel swinging around him drifting on a tropical sea, but he was in danger of dragging, and he knew it. ~ Natasza Waters

Everybody of course, was like this, - depth beyond depth, a universe chorally singing, incalculable, obeying tremendous laws, chemical or divine, of which it was able to give its own consciousness not the faintest inkling… He brushed the dark hair of this universe. He looked into its tranquil black-pooled eyes. Its mouth was humorous and bitter. And this universe would go out and talk inanely to other universes – talking only with some strange minute fraction of its identity, like a vast sea leaving on the shore, for all mention of itself, a single white pebble, meaningless. A universe that contained everything – all things – yet said only one word: 'I.' A music, an infinite symphony, beautifully and majestically conducting itself there in the darkness, but remaining for ever unread and unheard. ~ Conrad Aiken

Headwinds are sore vexations and the more passengers the sorer. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Swirling around my ears, the wind and I whooping at the sea, picking up speed, breathing it all in. An act of loving life. ~ Laurie Nadel

Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hair tangled with the wind
Sun kissed face
Lover of the forest
the sea
the sky
and anything wild and free
She's a gypsy goddess. ~ Melody Lee

The solid earth sways like the treacherous sea beneath the feet of men and spirits alike when the innocent are slain in the name of law, and their wrongs are undone by slandering the pure of heart. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all
too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud
promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on
the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the
quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the
voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the
stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea. ~ James Joyce

Every grain of sand or silt carried out by the rivers and deposited at sea displaces a corresponding amount of water. ~ Rachel Carson

Egypt is a fertile valley of rich river soil, low-lying, warm, monotonous, a slow-flowing river, and beyond the limitless desert. Greece is a country of sparse fertility and keen, cold winters, all hills and mountains sharp cut in stone, where strong men must work hard to get their bread. And while Egypt submitted and suffered and turned her face toward death, Greece resisted and rejoiced and turned full-face to life. For somewhere among those steep stone mountains, in little sheltered valleys where the great hills were ramparts to defend, and men could have security for peace and happy living, something quite new came into the world: the joy of life found expression. Perhaps it was born there, among the shepherds pasturing their flocks where the wild flowers made a glory on the hillside; among the sailors on a sapphire sea washing enchanted islands purple in a luminous air. ~ Edith Hamilton

I am a runaway, lost at sea.
I am a broken bird, yearning to fly free.
I am a sinner, unworthy and unholy.
I am a rose, wilting slowly.
I am a raindrop, touching your cheek.
I am a child who plays hide and seek.
I am nothing, and yet I am everything.
I am contradictions and complexities.
I am a face with a hundred entities.
I am love and I am hate.
I am the voice that cannot communicate.
I am a melody, haunting and sad.
I am a soul that has slowly gone mad.
I am death in a living body.
I am a dangerous opium poppy.
I am rage, running through my veins.
I am pain, bound in chains.
I am isolation, imprisoned in my mind.
I am abandoned and left behind.
I am tenderness, soft and kind.
I am trust, naïve and blind.
I am remorse, shattered and frozen.
I am the path I have not chosen.
I am sadness, drowning in an ocean.
I am faith, yearning for devotion.
I am madness, rebellious and wild.
I am sanity, safely filed.
I am wisdom, cursed and blessed.
I am a name that will burn in your chest. I am a journey, destination unknown.
I am a heart turned to stone.
I am forever alone. ~ Mina Alexia

I loved that kite, that cinnamon hound. We were old friends. I had soared and laughed with that kite. It got me out on the perimeter. I felt I had failed it somehow, and rune too, even though he would've offered the string to Leer, just as I had. Thinking it over I became a bit less angry, and more proud of the kite itself: it had refused to be flown by Leer one moment longer. It broke the line and caught the next gust out of town. A perilous beautiful move, choosing to throw yourself at the future, even if it means one day coming down in the sea. ~ Leif Enger

I couldn't sleep for the longest time. I lay in bed watching the wreaths of sea mist sweep by. At times the mist cleared, and the sea for some distance could be seen in the glare of the lightning, which now came thick and fast, followed by such sudden peals of thunder that the whole sky overhead trembled under the shock of the footsteps of the storm. ~ Bram Stoker

He played the opening bars again, opening a door for her, inviting her to join. She started quietly, almost voiceless, only a thin string of sound weaving herself into his tune, as if her voice were just another string on the guitar between his fingers. She had to be careful, so no one saw the changes on her face. But she didn't want to be careful; she couldn't be careful. He played and she sang to him, and inside her more and more blocks of ice began to melt, cracking and falling into the frozen sea between them. She sang of all the things that were happening to her and him, the world that collapsed over both of them, the things that might be in store, if only they dared to believe it was possible. ~ David Grossman

Far away Tongariro! Green - white thundering Athabasca river of New Zealand! I vowed I would come again down across the Pacific to fish in the swift cold waters of this most beautiful and famous of trout streams. It is something to have striven. It is much to have kept your word. ~ Zane Grey

I fished a little while ago with a man, not in his first youth, who had wasted the flower of his life on business and golf and gardening and motoring and marriage, and had in this way postponed his initiation (to fly fishing) far too long. ~ Arthur Ransome

If I have learned anything this year, it is that I won't ever be ready for what life throws at me. I won't have the right words when it counts; I won't know what to choose when fate itself is staring me down. But now I know I don't always need to have the right answer.

I've learned I can go on waiting for something, sustained by hope and nothing more - or I can put it aside and shrug my shoulders. Bravely accept the fact that I can't keep my heart safe any more than I can stop love from taking everything from me.

I have learned to stop saying yes when I don't mean it - to live as authentically as I know how. To allow the tips of my fingers to skirt the darkness, as long as I remember to keep my eyes fixed on the light. And as one door opens and another closes, I will move forward with the knowledge that unlike so many others, I have another year ahead of me - another shot at making it all the way around the sun, and a chance to get it right this time around. ~ Lang Leav, Sea Of Strangers

The View from Europe And that was Africa: the long line to the south little higher than the Atlantic that defined it. The sea rolled its drums on the shore, broke in white foam, flowers for the hair of the girls. I sipped the wind with my nostrils, and the smell was the smell of fear. Two million- year-old skulls surfaced from soil fathoms, grinning their disdain at the accuracy of the new weapons. And that was Eden indeed: Adam was black and the woman, Eve, was black; and the serpent, master of the click languages, spoke to them sibilantly of how the machine would sound as it waited under the tree of death, offering them nothing but a pretence of life. 1988 ~ R.S. Thomas

This solitary hill has always been dear to me
And this hedge, which prevents me from seeing most of
The endless horizon.
But when I sit and gaze, I imagine, in my thoughts
Endless spaces beyond the hedge,
An all encompassing silence and a deeply profound quiet,
To the point that my heart is almost overwhelmed.
And when I hear the wind rustling through the trees
I compare its voice to the infinite silence.
And eternity occurs to me, and all the ages past,
And the present time, and its sound.
Amidst this immensity my thought drowns:
And to founder in this sea is sweet to me. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

Nothing in all nature is so lovely and so vigorous, so perfectly at home in its environment, as a fish in the sea. Its surroundings give to it a beauty, quality, and power which are not its own. We take it out, and at once a poor, limp dull thing, fit for nothing, is gasping away its life. So the soul, sunk in God, living the life of prayer, is supported, filled, transformed in beauty, by a vitality and a power which are not its own. ~ Evelyn Underhill

I don't pretend to understand the mystery of love, but this time it was more than sex, more than using a woman's body. It was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself. I was lifted out of the dark cell of my own mind, to become part of someone else -- just as I had experienced it that day on the couch in therapy. It was the first step outward to the universe -- beyond the universe -- because in it and with it we merged to recreate and perpetuate the human spirit. Expanding and bursting outward, and contracting and forming inward, it was the rhythm of being -- of breathing, of heartbeat, of day and night -- and the rhythm of our bodies set off an echo in my mind. It was the way it had been back there in that strange vision. The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism. My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance. ~ Daniel Keyes

But you don't come to Palermo to stay in minimalist hotels and eat avocado toast; you come to Palermo to be in Palermo, to drink espressos as dark and thick as crude oil, to eat tangles of toothsome spaghetti bathed in buttery sea urchins, to wander the streets at night, feeling perfectly charmed on one block, slightly concerned on the next. To get lost. After a few days, you learn to turn down one street because it smells like jasmine and honeysuckle in the morning; you learn to avoid another street because in the heat of the afternoon the air is thick with the suggestion of swordfish three days past its prime. ~ Matt Goulding

The world stands out on either side, No wider than the heart is wide. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell. ~ W.B.Yeats

She had changed something in him, absurd as it was. He felt as if his entire world shifted, like a breaking wave reversing the direction of its curl, suddenly foaming and swirling itself back into the sea. ~ Giselle Beaumont

Thou art the Lord who slept upon the pillow,
Thou art the Lord who soothed the furious sea,
What matters beating wind and tossing billow
If only we are in the boat with Thee?
Hold us quiet through the age-long minute
While Thou art silent and the wind is shrill :
Can the boat sink while Thou, dear Lord, are in it;
Can the heart faint that waiteth on Thy will? ~ Amy Carmichael

God made the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings as they are. Is it the province of Mr. Grimes to improve upon the work? ~ Mark Twain

An alternative - and better - definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components: air, sunlight, wind, water, the motion of waves, the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These elements, unlike 20th-century office routines, have been here since before life appeared on this planet, and they will continue long after office routines are gone. They are understood by everyone, not just a small segment of a highly advanced society. When considered on purely logical grounds, they are more real than the extremely transitory lifestyles of the modern civilization the depressed ones want to return to.If this is so, then it follows that those who see sailing as an escape from reality have their understanding of sailing and reality backward. Sailing is not an escape, but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an Earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning.Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, television, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the Earth and the Sun, the wind and the stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

And indeed he had no sooner come to the field than he saw all the toadstools leaning over one way, and that the way he was going; for just as thorn trees all lean away from the sea, so toadstools and every plant that has any touch of mystery, such as foxgloves, mulleins and certain kinds of orchis, when growing anywhere near it, all lean towards Elfland. By this one may know before one has heard a murmur of waves, or before one has guessed an influence of magical things, that one comes, as the case may be, to the sea or the border of Elfland. ~ Lord Dunsany

Catching fish is not a mental game between fish and angler. A 'smart' trout is only smarter than other trout, not smarter than a fisherman. An angler must take the puzzle of the day's conditions, and matching those conditions and his knowledge of the fish come up with a good catch. He competes with a concept, not with a fish's brain. ~ Lee Wulff

I thought of the places I would be leaving, of what they were and what they could become. I pictured trees returning to the bare slopes, fish and whales returning to the bay. I thought of what my children and grandchildren might find here, and of how those who worked the land and sea might prosper if this wild vision were to be realized. ~ George Monbiot

He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea. ~ Herman Melville

Oscar and I are very close, and yet I know that part of him is still withdrawn, even from me. As though part of him was still in another place. Another country. Journeying, perhaps. Or in exile. Across the sea. And I can't be with him, because I haven't got the right sort of passport. ~ Rosamunde Pilcher

Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on the way back to see what I missed, it's often quite a shock), discovered something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new offences after they had arrived in Australia ? I spent a good half hour enjoying this single piece of information. It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British. ~ Douglas Adams

Personal and collective awakening are one and the same - when a raindrop joins the sea, the sea also merges with the raindrop. ~ Dan Millman

Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals. ~ Albert Camus

A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again. ~ John Millington Synge

He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. ~ Ray Bradbury

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm ~ William Shakespeare

Slowly the truth is loading
I'm weighted down with love
Snow lying deep and even
Strung out and dreaming of

Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world

We're threading hope like fire
Down through the desperate blood
Down through the trailing wire
Into the leafless wood

Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
This disappearing world

I'll be sticking right there with it
I'll be by your side
Sailing like a silver bullet
Hit 'em 'tween the eyes
Through the smoke and rising water
Cross the great divide
Baby till it all feels right

Night falling on the city
Sparkling red and gold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world"~David Gray ~ David Gray

It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture of encompass. Of the people of Earth's unfortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madman could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted ... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things ... ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Closer"

Stranded in this spooky town,
Stoplights are swaying and the phone lines are down
Floor is crackling cold,
She took my heart, I think she took my soul
With the moon I run,
Far from the carnage of the fiery sun

Driven by the strangle of vein
Showin' no mercy I do it again
Open up your eyes
You keep on crying, baby I'll bleed you dry
Skies are blinking at me
I see a storm bubbling up from the sea

And it's coming closer [2x]

You shimmy-shook my boat,
Leavin' me stranded all in love on my own
Do you think of me?
Where am I now, baby where do I sleep?
Feels so good but I'm old
2000 years of chasing takin' its toll

And it's coming closer [4x] ~ Kings Of Leon

There is none other like me. There is none other like her. We are unbelievable, impossible. I fly as high as the Heavens which cast me out. I have run out my comet's course: she is the world, I have sought out. Round her I have cast the loop of my orbit, and am held fast and safe; she is my Sea of Tranquility, my Milky Way, bearded with Berenice's Hair. I am a new constellation, pegged out in the sky. I am joy. Complete. For ever. ~ Rosie Garland