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
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
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
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
And Thou, vast Ocean! on whose awful face
Time's iron feet can print no ruin trace.
ROBERT MONTGOMERY
The Omnipresence of the Deity
To their inhabitants the sea is every thing. Their hopes and fears, their gains and losses, their joys and sorrows, are linked with it; and the largeness of the ocean has moulded their feelings and their characters. They are in a measure partakers of its immensity and its mystery. The commonest of their men have wrestled with the powers of the air, and the might of wind, and wave, and icy cold. The weakest of their women have felt the hallowing touch of sudden calamity, and of long, lonely, life-and-death, watches.
AMELIA E. BARR
A Daughter of Fife
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 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
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
Ocean into tempest wrought,
To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
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?
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
There is an energy to the ocean in particular, an element of danger that requires a giving over of self, that makes swimming in heavy water a kind of holy communion. I see swimming as a way to get to know a place with an intimacy that I otherwise wouldn't have. To swim in the ocean is to immerse myself in wildness, to feel the way the water rises and falls like breath.
BONNIE TSUI
"In Hawaii, a Swimmer's Communion With the Wild Ocean", New York Times, February 2, 2017
Praise the sea, but keep on land.
GEORGE HERBERT
Jacula Prudentum
The land is dearer for the sea,
The ocean for the shore.
LUCY LARCOM
On the Beach
Waves are the voices of tides. Tides are life.... They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean's pulse, and our own heartbeat.
TAMORA PIERCE
Sandry's Book
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