Shoals Quotes

Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end. ~ Dorothy Parker

A heavenly female with long, russet tresses that drifted over her right shoulder in undulating waves stepped toward him. A bright blue ribbon held her unruly mass of hair. She wore a light blue, snugly fitted shirt that matched the ribbon. It clung to full breasts tapering to a narrow waist. Skin like polished stone with a light kiss from the sun gleamed in the gathering light. Large, round, azure eyes the shade of sea shoals under a noonday summer sun and blanketed with thick lashes assessed him and left him speechless. ~ Aleigha Siron

And descry what shoals and what rocks must be shunned. ~ Herman Melville

I like the city late at night, the blasts of music and the splashes of light cast from bars that are still open, shoals of brightly-dressed clubber, the beeping taxis and the greasy, savoury smell of meat and onions from the burger vans. ~ Mhairi McFarlane

She was decidedly attractive, he saw, but in an ill-natured, ungracious way. Because of his connection with Fitzgerald, Carstairs & Scott, Johnnie had an extensive knowledge of the external appearance and different modes of behavior of a great variety of attractive women: they came up to the office in shoals, with their nails dipped in blood and their faces covered with pale cocoa. And some were charming and simple beneath their masks, and some were complex and arrogant. This girl belonged to the latter type, the type which would ignore or stare surlily at him if he spoke to them, until they learned that the actual money came through him, when their manner sweetened wonderfully. This girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left, and which she would only employ to please when it suited her purpose. They were like bad-tempered street-walkers, without walking the street. ~ Patrick Hamilton

You are leaving port under sealed orders and in a troubled period. You cannot know whither you are going or what you are to do. But why not take the Pilot on board who knows the nature of your sealed orders from the outset, and who will shape your entire voyage accordingly? He knows the shoals and the sand banks, the rocks and the reefs, He will steer you safely into that celestial harbor where your anchor will be cast for eternity. Let His almighty nail-pierced hands hold the wheel, and you will be safe. ~ Peter Marshall

But the point is, when the writer turns to address the reader, he or she must not only speak to me - naively dazzled and wholly enchanted by the complexities of the trickery, and thus all but incapable of any criticism, so that, indeed, he can claim, if he likes, priestly contact with the greater powers that, hurled at him by the muse, travel the parsecs from the Universe's furthest shoals, cleaving stars on the way, to shatter the specific moment and sizzle his brains in their pan, rattle his teeth in their sockets, make his muscles howl against his bones, and to galvanize his pen so the ink bubbles and blisters on the nib (nor would I hear her claim to such as other than a metaphor for the most profound truths of skill, craft, or mathematical and historical conjuration) - but she or he must also speak to my student, for whom it was an okay story, with just so much description. ~ Samuel R. Delany

Badness can be got easily and in shoals; the road to her is smooth, and she lives very near us. But between us and Goodness the gods have placed the sweat of our brows; ~ Hesiod

The south is very focused on family ... the musical heritage of Muscle Shoals especially and the bands from the region. ~ Jason Isbell

By the 1880s, baseball was entrenched in the Cape's sandy soil. Semipro teams, commonplace before World War I, were organized into the first Cape Cod League in 1923 - Orleans joined the four original teams five years later. By 1940, the league had foundered on financial shoals and disbanded. ~ Jane Leavy

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying--then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain. ~ James Carlos Blake

They're all the same, Kyoshi thought. Every single one. Whether they clothe themselves in business or brotherhood or a higher calling only they can see, it doesn't matter. They're one and the same. They look at themselves like forces of nature, as inevitable ends, but they're not. Their depth is as false as the shoals at low tide. They twist the meaning of justice to absolve themselves of conscience. They're humans like us, made of skin and guts and pain. They need to be reminded of that fact. ~ F.C. Yee

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. ~ Anthony Doerr

Beyond the stars you see are other stars, stars beyond stars,' she told him, 'and all are dreams, like shoals of fish in the oceans of the night. ~ Keith Miller

Chance will not do the work. Chance sends the breeze;
But if the pilot slumber at the helm,
The very wind that wafts us tow'rds the port
May dash us on the shoals. The steersman's part
Is vigilance, or blow it rough or smooth. ~ Ben Jonson

Yes, sir, but the Librarian likes bananas, sir."
"Very nourishin' fruit, Mr Stibbons."
"Yes, sir. Although, funnily enough it's not actually a fruit, sir."
"Really?"
"Yes, sir. Botanically, it's a type of fish, sir. According to my theory it's cladistically associated with the Krullian pipefish, sir, which of course is also yellow and goes around in bunches or shoals."
"And lives in trees?"
"Well, not usually, sir. The banana is obviously exploiting a new niche."
"Good heavens, really? It's a funny thing, but I've never much liked bananas and I've always been a bit suspicious of fish, too. That'd explain it. ~ Terry Pratchett

It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals, a word of the same meaning derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root. ~ Mark Kurlansky

I was distracted by the secrets of a new world. In the silence, broken only by the exaggerated oosh shoo of my own breath, I watched shoals of tiny iridescent fish, and larger black-and-white fish, that stared at me with blank, inquisitive faces, and gently swaying anemones filtering the gentle currents of their tiny, unseen haul. I saw distant landscapes twice as brightly colored and varied as they were above land. I saw caves and hollows where unknown creatures lurked, distant shapes that shimmered in the rays of the sun. ~ Jojo Moyes

Just then Patrick finally came out of his rock. He looked around, but SpongeBob and the bubble were gone. "I knew I was dreaming!" SpongeBob was still chasing the bubble. "Bubble, stop! You have to go back and let my friend Patrick see you!" As he passed Shady Shoals Retirement Home, he accidentally dropped his bubble-blowing wand. But SpongeBob didn't stop to pick it up. He chased the bubble all the way to Jellyfish Fields. While trying to grab the bubble, SpongeBob accidentally dropped his bottle of bubbles. He kept chasing it until he was miles away from Bikini Bottom. BAM! Suddenly, SpongeBob found himself facedown on ~ Steven Banks

warning bell on the Shoals for fifty years.' He grinned at my expression. ~ T.D. Griggs

Whether we live by the seaside, or by the lakes and rivers, or on the prarie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes, since they are not phenomena confined to certain localities only, but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed. The countless shoals which annually coast the shores of Europe and America are not so interesting to the student of nature as the more fertile law itselffrom which it results that they may be found in water in so many places, in greater or lesser numbers. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We are coming now to dark shoals in rough waters, to straits so narrow that virtue and wickedness voyage close together and may be at times more difficult than usual to differentiate from each other. ~ Dean Koontz

Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,
And fathers live transmitted in their sons;
Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,
The same their manners, and the same their minds:Till, as erelong successive buds decay,
And insect-shoals successive pass away,
Increasing wants the pregnant parent vex
With the fond wish to form a softer sex.. ~ Erasmus Darwin

Why, thou monkey,' said a harpooneer to one of these lads, 'we 've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here.' Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious revery is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. 10
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shrie ~ Herman Melville

I wonder, sometimes, if the Continentals were like shoals of fish, & the slightest flick of one fish caused dozens of others to follow suit, until the entire shimmering cloud had changed course.

And were the Divinities the sum of this cloud? An embodiment, perhaps, of a national subconscious? Or were they empowered by the thoughts & praises of millions of people, yet also yoked to every one of those thoughts – giant, terrible puppets forced to dance by the strings of millions of puppeteers.

This knowledge, I think, is incredibly dangerous. The Continentals derive so much pride & so much power from having Divine approval … but were they merely hearing the echoes of their own voices, magnified through strange caverns & tunnels? When they spoke to the Divinities, were they speaking to giant reflections of themselves? ~ Robert Jackson Bennett

On its own, being a decent person is no guarantee that you will act well, which brings us back to the one protection we have against demagogues, tricksters, and the madness of crowds, and our surest guide through the uncertain shoals of life: clear and reasoned thinking. Logic will never fail you, unless you're unaware of - or deliberately ignore - the consequences of your deeds. ~ Christopher Paolini

The guys that I played with, Hollis Dixon and the Keynotes - just about all the great musicians from Muscle Shoals.We played fraternity parties and kids' dances. They were called "lead outs" for kids in high school. We played wherever we could - in the down time when you weren't recording, people had to make money. ~ Donnie Fritts

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. ~ David Hume

A lot of parents today are terrified that something they say to their children might make them 'feel bad.' But, hey, if they've done something wrong, they should feel bad. Kids with a sense of responsibility, not entitlement, who know when to experience gratitude and humility, will be better at navigating the social shoals of college. ~ Amy Chua

Girls, I was dead and down
in the Underworld, a shade,
a shadow of my former self, nowhen.
It was a place where language stopped,
a black full stop, a black hole
Where the words had to come to an end.
And end they did there,
last words,
famous or not.
It suited me down to the ground.

So imagine me there,
unavailable,
out of this world,
then picture my face in that place
of Eternal Repose,
in the one place you'd think a girl would be safe
from the kind of a man
who follows her round
writing poems,
hovers about
while she reads them,
calls her His Muse,
and once sulked for a night and a day
because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns.
Just picture my face
when I heard -
Ye Gods -
a familiar knock-knock at Death's door.

Him.
Big O.
Larger than life.
With his lyre
and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize.

Things were different back then.
For the men, verse-wise,
Big O was the boy. Legendary.
The blurb on the back of his books claimed
that animals,
aardvark to zebra,
flocked to his side when he sang,
fish leapt in their shoals
at the sound of his voice,
even the mute, sullen stones at his feet
wept wee, silver tears.

Bollocks. (I'd done all the typing myself,
I should know.)
And given my time all over again,
rest a ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time that go racing by. The bone in her teeth! The spume, the flying spume of Time, cast up on these beaches where old sailors can no longer keep their bones from the restless, the unwearied universe. Where has she gone? My lady, the mate of my soul? Gone across the running tides of Aquarius, of Pisces, of Aries. Gone. Gone in her little boat, her nipples pressed against the black velvet lid, gone, sailing away forever from the star-washed shores, the dry shoals of the habitable worlds. She is her own ship, she is the figurehead of her own ship, and the captain. Bosun, Bosun, put out the launch! Sailmaker, make a sail! She has left us behind. We have left her behind. She is in the past we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail, Captain for the universe is leaving us behind… ~ Gene Wolfe

Classical liberalism was wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, but ~ Noam Chomsky

Thank you to the crows that amass on Vancouver evenings and fly home to the darkness of Burnaby Mountain. Thank you to the brilliance of wet moss and lichen. Thank you to the rays of golden brown light slanting in the cool of a green lake. Thank you to the shoals of glinting fish. Thank you to the sweet gems of salmonberries. Thank you to the decaying leaves for their rich brown smell. Thank you to the slugs and wood lice beneath the leaves. Thank you to to my plant friends who keep me company as I write. I am deeply grateful to share this cycle with you. ~ Hiromi Goto

Up there in my snug sweet tower, I felt I'd made landfall in the shoals of shifting clouds. Far enough from the crowds to relish the crowds. ~ Kathleen Rooney

In my country, terawatt globes are reserved for police helicopter chases and warning sailors of hazardous shoals. This is despite the fact that practically every living creature there can kill you in under three minutes. Our primary spoken language is screaming. ~ David Thorne

But no one can prepare for the worst. The worst doesn't only dash hopes; it tears through everything in ways that are almost meant to hurt, to punish, to shame. Despite my most sobering forecasts, life can still play the cruelest card and scuttle everything - and just when I thought we were sailing past the shoals. ~ Andre Aciman

No one has ever been able to successfully map the coast of sorrow. It is not because of the jagged reefs, the treacherous fogs and shoals. Or because it's prone to ferocious storms and deadly tides that can eat a ship as easily as it can a man in the water.
No one has ever been able to map the coast of sorrow because so much of it is invisible. ~ Jonathan Carroll

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

If colorblindness seems to backfire, is there something that does help our children - and us - navigate the dangerous shoals of race? Yes: talking openly about racial differences and what they might mean. Psychological research shows that cognitive biases in social judgment "can be controlled only through subsequent, deliberate 'mental correction' that takes group status squarely into account. ~ Ian F. Haney-Lopez

Stood off and on during the night, determining not to come to anchor till morning, fearing to meet with shoals; continued our course in the morning; and as the island was found to be six or seven leagues distant, and the tide was against us, it was noon when we arrived there. ~ Christopher Columbus

If there is a place in heaven for Labrador Retrievers (and I trust there is or I won't go) it'll have to have a brook right smack in the middle - a brook with little thin shoals for wading and splashing; a brook with deep, still pools where they can throw themselves headlong from the bank; a brook with lots of small sticks floating that can be retrieved back to shore where they belong; a brook with muskrats and muskrat holes; a brook with green herons and wood ducks; a brook that is never twice the same with surprises that run and swim and fly; a brook that is cold enough to make the man with the dog run like the devil away from his shaking; a brook with a fine spot to get muddy and a sunny spot or two to get dry. ~ Gene Hill

Discoveries that are anticipated are seldom the most valuable ... It's the scientist free to pilot his vessel across hidden shoals into open seas who gives the best value. ~ John Charles Polanyi