Sea quotations

Page 3

◆ I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

- Ana?s Nin99

◆ Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.

- Jo? Bousquet98

◆ It takes just one wave to capsize a boat, and one more to take it down.

- Federico Chini98

◆ If the private life of the sea could ever be transposed onto paper, it would talk not about rivers or rain or glaciers or of molecules of oxygen and hydrogen, but of the millions of encounters its waters have shared with creatures of another nature.

- Federico Chini98

◆ I never saw quite so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life can do: but to a degree, I know it is the same with them all; they are all knocked about, and exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before they reach Admiral Baldwin's age.

- Jane Austen98

◆ Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where other Howths grumbled to greet them. Swollen spumeless tide. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys.

- Jamie O'Neill98

◆ I am in awe of the perpetual tumult of the sea. I am moved by the still place on the horizon where the sky begins. I am stirred by the soaring and dipping fields that make the landscape into a rumpled green counterpane. I thought I would never have such powerful feelings again. I thought I would live through the rest of my life having experiences, and thoughts, but I never thought I would again feel deeply-- I was convinced that my wounds had healed and become thick scars, essentially numb.

- Katharine Weber98

◆ With this idea, being a man with long experience of the sea (and they certainly have a great advantage over other men in any sort of task)...

- Garcilaso de la Vega98

◆ Everyone has their own boat, it's a matter of pulling it out of the sand, and putting it in the water. But further, you can anchor the boat in fear when the storms rage, and go nowhere, let it drift aimlessly on its own or you can let God be the navigator and guide you on a journey in a way that is right for you.

- Anthony Liccione98

◆ And finally the two of them plunged into the dark sea, a sea like a pack of wolves, and they dove around the boat trying to find young Reiter's body, with no success, until they had to come up for air, and before they dove again, they asked the men on the boat whether the brat had surfaced. And then, under the weight of the negative response, they disappeared once more among the dark waves like forest beasts and one of the men who hadn't been in before joined them, and it was he who some fifteen feet down spotted the body of young Reiter floating like uprooted seaweed, upward, a brilliant white in the underwater space, and it was he who grabbed the body under the arms and brought him up, and also he who made the young Reiter vomit all the water he had swallowed.

- Roberto Bola?o98

◆ The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

- Ross Macdonald98

◆ The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

- Eugene O'Neill98

◆ The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness

- Virginia Woolf98

◆ There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

- Thomas Mann98

◆ How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?

- Sebastian Junger98