Ships And The Sea Quotes

When I arrived Dad was at home. He was in the laundry room at the bottom of the house. He turned to me, anger in every movement.

"I picked you some flowers," I said.

He reached out with his hand, took them, and threw them in the large sink.

"Little girls pick flowers," he said.

He was right. And he was probably ashamed of me. Once some of his colleagues had come home and they had seen me on the stairs, with my blond hair quite long, because it was winter, and I was wearing red long johns.

"What a nice girl you've got," one of them said.

"It's a boy," Dad answered. He had smiled, but I knew him well enough to know the comment had not gladdened his heart.

There was my interest in clothes, my crying if I didn't get the shoes I wanted, my crying if it was too cold when we were in the boat on the sea, indeed my crying if he raised his voice in situations when it would have been absolutely normal to raise your voice. Was it so strange he thought: what kind of son have I got here?

I was a mama's boy, he was constantly telling me. I was, too. I longed for her. And no one was happier than I when she moved back for good at the end of the month. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

My big fish must be somewhere. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Was this perhaps life, then? - to have loved one summer in youth and not to have been aware of it until it was over, some sea-wet footprints on the floor and sand in the prints, the fragrance of a woman, soft loving lips in the dusk of a summer night, sea birds; and then nothing more; gone. ~ Halldor Laxness

I have a Bird in spring
Which for myself doth sing -
The spring decoys.
And as the summer nears -
And as the Rose appears,
Robin is gone.
Yet do I not repine
Knowing that Bird of mine
Though flown -
Learneth beyond the sea
Melody new for me
And will return. ~ Emily Dickinson

But kissing Locke never felt the way that kissing Cardan does, like taking a dare to run over knives, like an adrenaline strike of lightning, like the moment when you've swum too far out in the sea and there is no going back, only cold black water closing over your head. ~ Holly Black

Then like a bird, he gingerly landed on a protruding rock inside the monstrous cavern. I looked up at the wet walls teaming with sea life and reeled back feeling like I was going to lose my balance when I felt him reach around and carefully lift me off. He placed me so I could stand on the rock in front of him. His strong arms wrapped tightly around me so I wouldn't fall. We stood in astonishment deafened by the noise of the waves hitting the reef all around us. The warmth of his chest radiated against me. I molded my body up against his, my heart erupting in a flutter that caused my legs to weaken.
"What do you think?" he whispered into my ear. I felt his hot breath against the side of my neck, which caused me to be light-headed as my heart raced even harder.
"Awesome," I whispered, which was all I could get out as I slinked into his chest a little bit more. ~ Brenda Pandos

Some hangovers are so horrific that it seems the whole world rocks and sways around you, the very walls creaking with the motion. Others are relatively mild and it just turns out that in your drunkenness a collection of Vikings have thrown you onto a heap of coiled ropes in their longship and set to sea.
"Oh, you bastards." I cracked open an eye to see a broad sail flapping overhead and gulls wheeling far above me beneath a mackerel sky. ~ Mark Lawrence

Taking care of our families isn't just about putting food on the table today. It's about ensuring that our children and grandchildren will have a habitable world where they can get to know various species of sea turtles. ~ Jane Velez-Mitchell

Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean ... ~ Epeli Hau'ofa

And it came to pass that in the hour of defeat Aragorn came up from the sea and unfurled the standard of Arwen in the battle of the fields of Pelennor, and in that day he was first hailed as king. And at last when all was done he entered into the inheritance of his fathers and received the crown of Gondor and the Sceptre of Arnor; and at midsummer in the year of the Fall of Sauron he took the hand of Arwen Undomiel, and they were wedded in the city of the kings. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Love, is it morning risen or night deceased
That makes the mirth of this triumphant east?
Is it bliss given or bitterness put by
That makes most glad men's hearts at love's high feast?
Grief smiles, joy weeps, that day should live and die.

"Is it with soul's thirst or with body's drouth
That summer yearns out sunward to the south,
With all the flowers that when thy birth drew nigh
Were molten in one rose to make thy mouth?
O love, what care though day should live and die?

"Is the sun glad of all love on earth,
The spirit and sense and work of things and worth?
Is the moon sad because the month must fly
And bring her death that can but bring back birth?
For all these things as day must live and die.

"Love, is it day that makes thee thy delight
Or thou that seest day made out of thy light?
Love, as the sun and sea are thou and I,
Sea without sun dark, sun without sea bright;
The sun is one though day should live and die.

"O which is elder, night or light, who knows?
And life or love, which first of these twain grows?
For life is born of love to wail and cry,
And love is born of life to heal his woes,
And light of night, that day should live and die.

"O sun of heaven above the wordly sea,
O very love, what light is this of thee!
My sea of soul is deep as thou art high,
But all thy light is shed through all of me ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

In the tide pool I was riveted by fat pink sea stars sitting like satisfied gangsters and seemingly unconcerned by their exposure; gulls would peck at them but the sea stars simply grew replacement limbs. ~ Mary Ellen Hannibal

The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. ~ Charles Dickens

Mike stood in-line, waiting for the mealtime muck that passed for lunch at his school canteen. He knew he was getting close to the front now, as he tightly held his tray. Not just because he could see this as you might expect, but because he could smell Margery the school cook's body odour. The children at the front were already holding their breath. You could see a line of pink faces close to him, to red, then purple closest to Margery. Only when they left at the end did they breathe for air and turn back to their normal colour again, like a deep sea diver after a long plunge.

"Margery the Meal Murderer" was her name for most school kids. ~ L.P. Donnelli

What better way to learn about life in the ocean
and how we are changing it
than through stories of blind zombie worms, immortal jellyfish, and unicorns of the sea? The Extreme Life of the Sea is an insightful book that inspires awe and wonder about our ocean, and brilliantly shows us the immense possibilities of life on Earth. ~ Enric Sala

The sky and the sea invevitably meet and become one. Everywhere. Always. ~ Takuji Ichikawa

It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year. ~ Dave Eggers

I guess I work in small ways. It's kind of like this story someone told me, about a guy on the beach in Mexico throwing starfish in the sea. Thousands had washed ashore. Someone asked him why - 'Why are you wasting your time, when there are so many? You can't possibly make a difference.'"
"I know that story! The man threw another one back, and said -"
"'Made a difference to that one!'" Rowan finishes. ~ Kirsten Hubbard

Though the sand may be washed by the sea
And the old will be lost in the new
Well four will not wait for three
For three never waited for two
And though you will not wait for me
I'll wait for you
I'll wait for you
And I'll wait for you ~ Passenger

Though I'm tempted by the call of the sea, I resist.
It can't claim me.
In a way I'm stronger than the waves and I feel good about that. ~ Darren Shan

She said she didn't want rice. She didn't want anything anymore. Not a thing.

But every once in a while she got a faraway look in her eyes and he knew she was thinking of some other place. A better place. "Just once," she told him, "I'd like to look out the window and see the sea. ~ Julie Otsuka

The pinpoint flame of anger and grief becomes a hot needle, then a hot knife.
It melts the frost that binds her lips.
It melts the sea in her eyesss.
(from uncorrected galley) ~ Katherine Catmull

His love of the sea had profound roots: the hardworking artist's desire to rest, his longing to get away from the demanding diversity of phenomena and take shelter in the bosom of simplicity and immensity; a forbidden penchant that was entirely antithetical to his mission and, for that very reason, seductive-a proclivity for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal: for nothingness. ~ Thomas Mann

When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea. ~ Douglas Preston

I glanced out of the window, and it was like turning the page of a photograph album. Those roof-tops and that sea were mine no more. They belonged to yesterday, to the past. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweater than Bird on Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth! ~ Djuna Barnes

Not so fast," Sully said. The entire station went quiet as everyone turned toward him. "Lindsey Norris, I like you, too. I like that you're smart and funny and can remember what everyone in town likes to read. I like that you ride a ridiculous bike to work in terrible weather, and I like that your eyes change color with your moods, like the sea reflects the sky. I like that you adopted a puppy who needed you, and I like the way the wind tangles up your hair when you let it loose, and I do like it loose." Lindsey ~ Jenn McKinlay

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

Many guilty consciences have been created by the slave trade. Europeans know that they carried on the slave trade, and Africans are aware that the trade would have been impossible if certain Africans did not cooperate with slave ships. To ease their guilty consciences, Europeans try to throw the major responsibility for the slave trade on to the Africans. One major author on the slave trade (appropriately titled Sins of Our Fathers) explained how many white people urged him to state that the trade was the responsibility of African chiefs, and that Europeans merely turned up to buy captives- as though without European demand there would have been captives sitting on the beach by the millions! Issues such as those are not the principal concern of this study, but they can be correctly approached only after understanding that Europe became the center of a world-wide system and that it was European capitalism which set slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in motion. Pg. 82 ~ Walter Rodney

These poor, plain men, dwellers upon the lonely sands of Hatteras, took their lives in their hands, and, at the most imminent risk crossed the most tumultuous sea…and all for what? That others might live to see home and friends. ~ Annual Report Of The U.S. Life- Saving Service 1885

She was proud one moment, covetous the next, and then fearful the moment after that. It would always be like this, wouldn't it, being the wife of a man she loved but couldn't trust, whose true motives were as murky as the bottom of the sea? ~ Sherry Thomas

I'm not saying Abbott Computing Services suffered from an acute form of TV demographics, but, how did I get the job? I wasn't under 40. I wasn't anorexic slim. I didn't have a face that would launch a thousand ships, or even a rowboat. Of course, I was a temp, and the young and beautiful wouldn't have to look at me forever." Jo Durbin ~ Norma Huss

SWEETEST IN THE GALE
by
Michelle Valois

After Emily Dickinson

You won't lose your hair, I heard at the start of treatment, and though I didn't, I lost a litany of other lesser and greater luxuries - saliva, stamina, taste buds, my voice - but my hair, during that chilly sojourn in the land of extremity to which I had sailed on a strange and stormy sea, my hair was not taken from me.

Had it been, I would have perched one of those 18th century wigs on my head, such as those worn by the French aristocracy, measuring three, four, even five feet high and stuffed, as they were known to be, with all sorts of things: ribbons, pearls, jewels, flowers, tunes without words, reproductions of great sailing vessels, my soul inside a little bird cage - ornaments selected to satisfy a theme: the signs of the Zodiac (à la Zodiaque) or the discovery of a new vaccine (à l'inoculation) or, as was the case in June of 1782, the first successful hot air balloon flight by the brothers Michel and Etienne Montgolfier.

Regarde, I exclaim to my ladies in waiting, pointing to the sky on that bright afternoon as the balloon, made of linen and paper, rises some 6,000 feet. Later, a duck, then a sheep, and finally a human is carried away. I watch, inspired, hopeful, whispering, lest my doctors overhear: when the storm turns sore, and that little bird escapes her little bird cage and is abashed without reckoning, I will sail away in my balloon, prepared, ~ Michelle Valois

The first thing you have to do is understand what success looks like. And to understand what success looks like you have to understand the intent. If you understand that intent is to make sure the sea lines are secure, then suddenly bombing Kosovo makes sense, because you don't want Serbia to reemerge as a major power. ~ George Friedman