OCEAN QUOTES II
quotations about the ocean
A pool just isn't the same as the ocean. It has no energy. No life.
LINDA GERBER
Death by Bikini
After all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body.
GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS
Shantaram
The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky,
Their giant branches toss'd.
FELICIA HEMANS
The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England
I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea -- whether it is to sail or to watch it -- we are going back from whence we came.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
remarks at a dinner for the America's Cup crews, September 14, 1962
I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides.
DEJAN STOJANOVIC
The Shape
Past are three summers since she first beheld
The ocean; all around the child await
Some exclamation of amazement here:
She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased,
Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Gebir
I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I'm touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.
LAUREN DESTEFANO
Wither
I don't think there's much scenery to be seen on the ocean ... It's just plain water all the way over.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
Mollie and the Unwiseman Abroad
Praise the sea, but keep on land.
GEORGE HERBERT
Jacula Prudentum
And Thou, vast Ocean! on whose awful face
Time's iron feet can print no ruin trace.
ROBERT MONTGOMERY
The Omnipresence of the Deity
Crime and the sea have always mixed, pirates ever since there have been ships, law ends with the land, man is nothing out there, a few bubbles as he goes down under the mindless waves.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.
JACKSON PEARCE
Fathomless
Water seeks its own level. Look at them. The Tigris, the Euphrates, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Yangtze. The world's great rivers. And every one of them finds its way to the ocean.
ALISON MCGHEE
All Rivers Flow to the Sea
Ocean into tempest wrought,
To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
We follow and race
In shifting chase,
Over the boundless ocean-space!
Who hath beheld when the race begun?
Who shall behold it run?
BAYARD TAYLOR
The Waves
The ocean, whose tides respond like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves ... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
ADRIENNE RICH
Of Woman Born
And oh! if the wave could speak in any other language than that of its own harsh thunder, how many tales of agony and suffering might it unfold!
PETER WHITTLE
Marina; or, An historical and descriptive account of Southport, Lytham, and Blackpool
More wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days I have watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The White Ship"
But to the lover of nature--and who has the courage to avow himself aught else?--the sea-shore can never be monotonous. The swirl and sweep of ever-shifting waters, the flying mist of foam breaking away into a gray and ghostly distance down the beach, the eternal drone of ocean, mingling itself with one's talk by day and with the light dance-music in the parlors by night--all these are active sources of a passive pleasure. And to lie at length upon the tawny sand, watching, through half-closed eyes, the heaving waves, that mount against a dark blue sky wherein great silvery masses of cloud float idly on, whiter than the sunlit sails that fade and grow and fade along the horizon, while some fair damsel sits close by, reading ancient ballads of a simple metre, or older legends of love and romance--tell me, my eater of the fashionable lotus, is not this a diversion well worth your having?
GEORGE ARNOLD
"Why Thomas Was Discharged", Stories by American Authors
What are the wild waves saying,
Sister, the whole day long,
That ever amid our playing
I hear but their low, lone song?
JOSEPH E. CARPENTER
What Are the Wild Waves Saying?