OCEAN QUOTES III

quotations about the ocean

Ocean quote

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

Tags: Adrienne Rich


Tut! the best thing I know between France and England is the sea.

DOUGLAS JERROLD

Jerrold's Wit


It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.

JACKSON PEARCE

Fathomless


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"

Tags: H. P. Lovecraft


The great depths of the ocean are entirely unknown to us; soundings cannot reach them. What fanes in those remote depths, what beings live twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the waters, what is the organization of the animals we can scarcely conjecture?

JULES VERNE

Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea


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

Tags: George Arnold


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

Tags: John F. Kennedy


Nor is there in the whole range of nature a grander or more magnificent scene than the ocean in a storm, when deep calls unto deep, and its liquid mountains roll and break against each other, when it dashes to pieces, in the wantonness of its power, the strongest, structures which man can rear for the purpose of floating over its billows; then it is that the proudest and bravest tremble and quail at the roaring and thunder of its waters.

PETER WHITTLE

Marina; or, An historical and descriptive account of Southport, Lytham, and Blackpool


The ocean and the wind and the stars and the moon will all teach you many things.

JANE ROBERTS

Emir's Education In The Proper Use of Magical Powers


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


A pool just isn't the same as the ocean. It has no energy. No life.

LINDA GERBER

Death by Bikini


Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.

THOMAS GRAY

Elegy in a Country Churchyard

Tags: Thomas Gray


I turned away from the ocean
as not to fall for its plea
for it used to seduce and consume me
and there was this one night
a few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewells
and just like now I stood waving long after the ship was gone.
But I was younger then and easily fooled
and the ocean was deep and dark and blue
and I took my shoes off to let the water freeze my bones.
I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but still
I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the
difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I had
not yet learned how the task of moving on is as necessary as survival.

CHARLOTTE ERIKSSON

attributed, goodreads


I will mount a long wind some day and break the heavy waves,
And set my cloudy sail straight and bridge the deep, deep sea.

LI BAI

"The Hard Road"

Tags: Li Bai


In front of the ocean, man faces infinity, life, death.

ALAIN CARAYOL

"The sea is not another country", The Eye of Photography, January 28, 2017


It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN

The Silmarillion

Tags: J. R. R. Tolkien


Miles of ocean, and oh, the vastness of it, shadows and salt, fierce dark water filled with alien emptiness and the monsters that lived there. Imagine falling into that water and knowing it was below you, even as you treaded water, desperately trying to remain on the surface; the terror of the realization of what was under you--miles and miles of nothingness and monsters, blackness stretching away everywhere and the sea floor so far below--would tear your mind apart.

CASSANDRA CLARE

Lady Midnight


Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

Thanatopsis

Tags: William Cullen Bryant


The land is dearer for the sea,
The ocean for the shore.

LUCY LARCOM

On the Beach


The ocean is powerful, but not invincible. It is rich, but not inexhaustible. For humans to thrive in the coming centuries, we will have to be smarter about how we approach the 70 percent of our planet the ocean covers.

GARY E. KNELL

"Securing a Bold, Blue, and Prosperous Future for Our Ocean", National Geographic, January 27, 2017