Ship Stuck In A Port Quotes

Good thoughts without actions are like a ship stuck in a port. ~ Debasish Mridha

I was stuck in Port Ticonderoga, proud bastion of the common-and-garden variety button and of lower-priced long johns for the budget-minded shoppers. I would stagnate here, nothing would ever happen to me, I would end up an old-maid like Miss Violence, pitied and derided. This at the bottom was my fear. I wanted to be elsewhere, but I saw no way to get there. Once in a while, I found myself hoping that I would be abducted by white slavers, even though I didn't believe in them. At least it would be a change... ~ Margaret Atwood

A horn sounded in the distance and as Stella turned towards the sea to look at the enormous ship that had produced the sound, her gaze was locked on a scene so beautiful that the picturesque beach paled in comparison. A lifeguard was emerging from the water, his orange trunks stuck to his legs and water dripping from all over him. He shook his head to get rid of some of the water in his hair and Stella felt as if everything started developing in slow motion – tiny drops of water slid from his neck down his broad chest and muscular arms, along a weaving tattoo design on his right shoulder, and continued downwards towards his chest and washboard stomach, finally getting lost in his trunks' waist. A part of another tattoo was peeking over his trunks on his left hip, the other part hidden under them. His golden, tanned skin glistened in the sun and he moved with such grace that a panther would be deemed clumsy next to him. It was a total Baywatch moment. ~ Teodora Kostova

What's wrong?" she began quietly, her large, liquid eyes illuminated with hysteria. She laughed like a loon and said, "Where shall we begin? I'm tired. I'm sore." Her voice began lilting and rising, getting louder with every sentence. Grabbing at her chest, she shouted, "I've got a corset wrapped so tightly over my breasts that I can hardly breathe! I lost both my socks and my shoes! My hands are a pulp of lacerations!" She lifted them up before her, fingers spread, and laughed again. "I've a gash -- a throbbing, bleeding gash on the back of my scalp! And let's not forget to mention that I'm surrounded by men of the most vile, disreputable character imaginable, stuck on board a ship, in the middle of the bloody Atlantic! ~ Gabriela Lawson

Why should I cooperate with you now?"
"Because you're stuck in a ship with four creatively sadistic people who hate your grey guts, and maybe the Jedi and the strill aren't that fond of you either, and all you've got are the clothes you stand in. See how long you last… ~ Karen Traviss

We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

My fantasy football team got mixed up in another fantasy and now they're stuck on a pirate ship with a chick in a Catwoman suit. ~ Dana Gould

People think cruises are for old folk, but they are amazing, as you get to see so many places, and you're never stuck as you're docked in a different port every day. ~ Alan Titchmarsh

Calic!" a male voice shouted.
Analia jumped at the sound. She peeked to see the guard's attention diverted to something inside the other ship.
"What?" the blond guard snapped.
"The last load is stuck!" the other voice yelled. "We can't get it through the doorway! It won't fit!"
"It helps if you're smarter than the door," the blond guard muttered before yelling back, "We got it in there, didn't we? ~ Kiersten Fay

Time would heal the wound that was Frank; the world would continue to spin, to wobble, its axis only slightly skewed, momentarily displaced, by the brief, shuddering existence of one man -one THING - a post-human mutant, a blurred Xerox copy of a human being, the offspring of the waste of technology, the bent shadow of a fallen angel; Frank was all of these things. . . he was the sum of everything dark and sticky, the congealment of all things wrong and dark and foul in this world and every other seedy rathole world in every back-alley universe throughout the vast garbage dump of creation; God rolled the dice and Frank lost. . . he was a spiritual flunkie, a universal pain-in-the-ass, a joy-riding, soul-sucking cosmic punk rolling through time and space and piling up a karmic debt of such immense magnitude so as to invariably glue the particular vehicle of the immediate moment to the basement of possibility - planet earth - and force Frank to RE-ENLIST, endlessly, to return, over and over, to a flawed world somewhere to spend the Warhol-film-loop nights of eternity serving concurrent life sentences roaming the dimly lit hallways of always, stuck in the dense overshoes of physicality, forever, until finally - one would hope there is always a FINALLY - eventually, anyway - God would step in and say ENOUGH ALREADY and grab Frank by the collar of one of his thrift-shop polyester flower-print shirts and hurl him out the back door of the cosmos, expelling the rotten orb into the gr ~ George Mangels

Every experience shapes your writing, being stuck in a car on a lonely bridge, or dancing at a prom, being the it girl on the beach, all of those things influence your life, they influence how you write, and the topics you choose to write about. ~ Maya Angelou

... it's important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on. ~ Nick Hornby

First is our unbreakable rule that every candidate must be a trained trooper, blooded under fire, a veteran of combat drops. No other army in history has stuck to this rule, although some came close. Most great military schools of the past - Saint Cyr, West Point, Sandhurst, Colorado Springs - didn't even pretend to follow it; they accepted civilian boys, trained them, commissioned them, sent them out with no battle experience to command men . . . and sometimes discovered too late that this smart young 'officer' was a fool, a poltroon, or a hysteric. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

When you go through enough dark places, you don't complain about little things. You don't lose your joy because you got stuck in traffic; you don't get offended because a coworker was rude to you. You've been through too much to let that sour you. ~ Joel Osteen

If they bring you down, put you down, keep you down in a can of sardines – my question is the following – why did you let them pack you into a can of sardines – if you are not a sardine – and your boss and other sardines who are sardines don't realize that you are not a sardine? You've been so conditioned to act like a sardine – you think your canned existence is your sole existence – and you can't tell yourself apart from the other sardines that oppress you because you're all stuck together in one big clump […]. If you let them pack you into a sardine can, it's because you are a sardine – just like all the rest – made of salt and oil, scales and tails, slimy and thick. ~ Giannina Braschi

The mystic Al-Ghazali said that the inhabitants of heaven remain forever thirty-three. It reminds me of Iran, stuck in 1976 in the imagination of every exile. Iranians often say that when they visit Tehran or Shiraz or Isfahan, they find even the smallest changes confusing and painful - a beloved corner shop gone to dust, the smell of bread that once filled a street, a rose garden neglected. In their memories, they always change it back. Iran is like an aging parent, they say. ~ Dina Nayeri

I'd like to go back to five years old again. Just sometimes. To be turning over rocks and looking for pill bugs and holding earthworms, playing dolls, erecting forts, digging through dirt for marbles, burrowing in leaf piles, failing at igloo building, when my biggest concern was going to sleep with the lights off. I wish I was five again, before things got hard, before I was forced to grow up way too early and been stuck in this "adult" thing way too long. I wish I could sit in my Grandpa's lap and let him sing me crazy Irish songs and go over the names of the planets. "Gwampa, tell me about Outer Space." ... "Gwampa, sing the Swimming Song."
I wish I could go back there, just for a little while, and pick raspberries by myself in the sun and find secret hideaways and not hurt, not worry, not carry the heavy things. If I could be five years old ... just for a few minutes. Remember what it felt like to be free. That would be something. ~ Jennifer DeLucy

Since the police department is becoming more and more militarized we're stuck in a position where we're reverting to that sort of behaviour that other places still suffer from because they're kept in that post-colonial state of development indefinitely so we can reap the benefits of taking whatever natural resources they have. ~ Immortal Technique

They had shared each other the way good friends can't even after forty years of it. He knew the boy and the boy knew him, because they each had a kind of searchlight in their heads, something they hadn't asked for, something that had just been given.

(Naw, you got a flashlight, he the one with the searchlight.)

And sometimes that light, that shine, seemed like a pretty nice thing. You could pick the horses, or like the boy had said, you could tell your daddy where his trunk was when it turned up missing. But that was only dressing, the sauce on the salad, and down below there was as much bitter vetch in that salad as there was cool cucumber. You could taste pain and death and tears. And now the boy was stuck in that place, and he would go. For the boy. Because, speaking to the boy, they had only been different colors when they used their mouths. So he would go. He would do what he could, because if he didn't, the boy was going to die right inside his head.

But because he was human he could not help a bitter wish that the cup had never been passed his way. ~ Stephen King

I really like to think of each record as its own thing. So, for sure, but I hate the idea of being stuck in anything. Like I want to do a Hawkwind-style record too, or a noise rock record or a hardcore record. Why not, you know? I would just not want to keep heading too far in one direction, without pulling off and going the other way. ~ Ty Segall

I've never had to do anything I didn't believe in. Sometimes that meant being poor and waitressing a while longer, but I've always stuck with it. ~ Linda Kozlowski

Jesus is teaching and wants you to learn. This means you will be stretched. Jesus does not want you stuck in a bonehead English class, which I was for several years. ~ Jonah Books.com

Once I got interested in organized crime, and, specifically, Jewish organized crime, I got very interested in it. I have learned that, like my narrator Hannah, I'm a crime writer in my own peculiar way. Crime with a capital "C" is the subject that I'm stuck with - even Sway is about "crime" in a certain way. The nice thing about crime is that it enables you to deal with some big questioO ~ Zachary Lazar

It's our nature to be free, and until we're stuck in a stressful belief system, we're pretty happy. ~ Byron Katie

One of the things I tell the writers with whom I work is, man, when you finish a draft of a poem, or short story or novel, you make sure you go out and celebrate all night long because whether the world ever notices or not, whether you get it published or not, you did something most people never do: You started, stuck with, and finished a creative work. And that is a triumph. That is something to celebrate. All the stuff that I'm talking about is really from the point of view of trying to create art - and I don't mean to sound highfalutin when I bring the word "art" in. All I mean is, a work that seeks to illuminate truth in whatever way possible. ~ Andre Dubus III

The film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez to the Vieux Port, where sales executives tucked into their platters of fruits de mer, but was only fifty yards deep. For a fortnight the Croisette and its grand hotels willingly became a facade, the largest stage set in the world. Without realizing it, the crowds under the palm trees were extras recruited to play their traditional roles. As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit. ~ J.G. Ballard

I'm stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it but then put it back down not because I am not ready but because they were not ready for my type of fruity flesh. I felt so ripe and sweet - what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people's mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up. ~ Jenny Slate

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip -- and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great tanscendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the sahpe of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that save us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in th ~ David Foster Wallace

Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, "paralysed" as Menon was by Socrates, the model of loved objects, of captivating images, or again converted by an apparition, nothing distinguishing the path of enamoration from the Road to Damascus; subsequently ensnared, held fast, immobilised, nose stuck to the image (the mirror). In that moment when the other's image comes to ravish me for the first time, I am nothing more than the Jesuit Athanasius Kirchner's wonderful Hen: feet tied, the hen went to sleep with her eyes fixed on the chalk line, which was traced not far from her beak; when she was untied, she remained motionless, fascinated, "submitting to her vanquisher," as the Jesuit says (1646); yet, to waken her from her enchantment, to break off the violence of her Image-repertoire (vehemens animalis imaginatio), it was enough to tap her on the wing; she shook herself and began pecking in the dust again. ~ Roland Barthes

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into. ~ Terri Windling

The Lord has put more hardships atop the shoulders of my neighbors - more than I can even fathom coping with. I will strive to find a way to turn pity into admiration, for what use is it to send pity back at the world. Admiration and awe are much more helpful, especially when I find myself feeling like a victim for being stuck in traffic or losing my favorite sweater. Perspective is a blessing. ~ Erica Goros

But do you think our futures are already determined for us?"
"Why are you asking all of this? What's going on?"
I let out a small laugh. "Remember when we were in the hallway?" He nodded. "Well, Thirteen tried telling me that I couldn't escape my fate and that there was no point in fighting the inevitable."
"Do you think it is inevitable?" he asked.
"Me?" I scoffed. "No. Nothing is ever guaranteed. One minor adjustment can alter everything. Nothing is ever set in stone. As of right now, we're all on one path: we're all stuck inside of this hell that we're trying to escape, and it may seem like the outcome has already been determined for us, but it hasn't. The smallest of things could change everything. A death. Deception. Anything could force us to follow another path, and you know what? We determine that path, not fate."
"What path do you see yourself on?" Colton hopped up onto the computer desk, tucking his hands underneath his thighs.
"I see us starting new lives outside of this place, far from McVeigh and his men," I answered honestly. "But I know not all of us will make it out of here. There is still more pain to come our way, but there is also happiness if we allow for it. ~ Nicole Sobon

Forgiveness is a process of giving up the old for something new. Old experiences and memories that we hold on to in anger, resentment, shame, or guilt cloud our spirit mind. The truth is, everything that has happened had to happen. It was a growth experience. There was something you needed to know or learn. If you stay angry, hurt, afraid, ashamed, or guilty, you miss the lesson. You will be stuck in a cloud of pain. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

As I followed the chief waiter with my eyes, I could not help thinking that the garden in which he had gradually blown to be the flower he was, was an arduous place to rise in. It had such a prescriptive, stiff-necked, long-established, solemn, elderly air. I glanced about the room, which had had its sanded floor sanded, no doubt, in exactly the same manner when the chief waiter was a boy - if he ever was a boy, which appeared improbable; and at the shining tables, where I saw myself reflected, in unruffled depths of old mahogany; and at the lamps, without a flaw in their trimming or cleaning; and at the comfortable green curtains, with their pure brass rods, snugly enclosing the boxes; and at the two large coal fires, brightly burning; and at the rows of decanters, burly as if with the consciousness of pipes of expensive old port wine below; and both England and the law appeared to me to be very difficult indeed to be taken by storm. ~ Charles Dickens

Somehow the gusts of wind we rode on in our twenties have landed us somewhere and we have to make this somewhere work. Because you can't turn back the clock. It's too late now to figure out whether you're on the right gust or not. And you don't want people to know you're so stuck, and so scared and think it's too late to get yourself out of this situation. You don't want to fail when everyone else is supposedly thriving. And, you are happy, right? Sometimes you're happy, anyway. And isn't that what happiness is? Fleeting moments, rather than a permanent state of euphoria. And as long as it looks OK on the outside who cares, right? ~ Holly Bourne

No, I didn't. But I was aware that I was embarked on an epic. In the case of the Bradstreet poem, I didn't know. The situation with that poem was this. I invented the stanza in '48 and wrote the first stanza and the first three lines of the second stanza, and then I stuck. I had in mind a poem roughly the same length as another of mine, "The Statue" - about seven or eight stanzas of eight lines each. Then I stuck. I read and read and read and thought and collected notes and sketched for five years until, although I was still in the second stanza, I had a mountain of notes and draftings - no whole stanzas, but passages as long as five lines. The whole poem was written in about two months, after which I was a ruin for two years. When I finally got going, I had this incredible mass of stuff and a very good idea of the shape of the poem, with the exception of one crucial point, which was this. I'll tell you in a minute why and how I got going. The great exception was this: It did not occur to me to have a dialogue between them - to insert bodily Henry into the poem . . . Me, to insert me, in my own person, John Berryman, I, into the poem . . . ~ John Berryman

Rest in peace'. That's not the way these accounts are kept. We don't rest in peace. The life of a good man who has died belongs to the people who cared about him, and ought to, and maybe itself is as much comfort as ought to be asked or offered. And surely the talk of a reunion in Heaven is thin comfort to people who need each other here as much as we do. I ain't saying I don't believe there's a Heaven. I surely hope there is. That surely would pay off a lot of mortgages. But I do say it ain't easy to believe. And even while I hope for it, I've got to admit I'd rather go to Port William. ~ Wendell Berry

We sat within the farm-house old,
Whose windows, looking o'er the bay,
Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold,
An easy entrance, night and day.

Not far away we saw the port,
The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,
The lighthouse, the dismantled fort,
The wooden houses, quaint and brown.

We sat and talked until the night,
Descending, filled the little room;
Our faces faded from the sight,
Our voices only broke the gloom.

We spake of many a vanished scene,
Of what we once had thought and said,
And who was changed, and who was dead;

And all that fills the hearts of friends,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;

The first slight swerving of the heart,
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.

The very tones in why we spake,
Had something strange, I could but mark;
The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rattling in the dark.

Oft died the words upon our lips,
As suddenly, from out the fire
Built of the wreck of stranded ships,
The flames would leap and then expire.

And, as their splendor flashed and failed,
We thought of wrecks upon the main,
Of ships dismasted, that were hailed
And sent no answer back again.

The w ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Everything was changing, that was obvious. The world was so full of music, it seemed we could never run out. 'Twas bliss in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and overworked and underexposed and stuck in a nowhere town was very heaven. It was our time, the first one we had to ourselves. It was a smashing time, and then it ended, because that's what times do. ~ Rob Sheffield

He was silent a moment; then he said, "I want a drink of water."
She almost laughed aloud, because it was such a mundane request that could have been made of anyone, but then she saw the tension in his jaw and lips and realized that, again, he was checking out his condition, and he wanted her with him. She turned to the small Styrofoam pitcher that was kept full of crushed ice, which she used to keep his lips moist. The ice had melted enough that she was able to pour the glass half full of water. She stuck a straw into it and held it to his lips.
Gingerly he sucked the liquid into his mouth and held it for a moment, as if letting it soak into his membranes. Then, slowly, he swallowed, and after a minute he relaxed. "Thank God," he muttered hoarsely. "My throat still feel swollen. I wasn't sure I could swallow, and I sure as hell didn't want that damned tube back."
Behind Jay, Frank turned a smothered laugh into a cough.
"Anything else?" she asked.
"Yes. Kiss me. ~ Linda Howard

Iceland sets a world-record. The United Nations asked people from all over the world a series of questions. Iceland stuck out on one thing. When we were asked what do we believe, 90% said, 'ourselves'. I think I'm in that group. If I get into trouble, there's no God or Allah to sort me out. I have to do it myself. ~ Bjork

Everything stops in her and sinks into silence. She drives slowly, foggy pictures painted in her mind. She has to open a window, but how will she withstand the rush of air? She can hardly breathe. She is frozen around a fragment embedded inside her. Only her heart is suddenly full of life, the only part of her that beats in excitement and goes out to Shaul, goes out limping, goes out hunchbacked, with Band-Aids stuck all over it, but goes out. ~ David Grossman