1. I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
2. I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.
3. We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
4. Little islands are all large prisons; one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.
5. The sea does not like to be restrained.
6. I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.
7. The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.
8. My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me.
9. I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.
It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.
10. Look at that sea, girls–all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn’t enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.
11. She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.
12. We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
13. The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too
14. 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.
15. I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.
16. THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, ‘O sea-starved, hungry sea
17. Hark, now hear the sailors cry,
Smell the sea, and feel the sky,
Let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic.
– Into the Mystic
18. His eyes were the same colour as the sea in a postcard someone sends you when they love you, but not enough to stay.
19. Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
20. The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.
21. Everybody has a little bit of the sun and moon in them. Everybody has a little bit of man, woman, and animal in them. Darks and lights in them. Everyone is part of a connected cosmic system. Part earth and sea, wind and fire, with some salt and dust swimming in them. We have a universe within ourselves that mimics the universe outside. None of us are just black or white, or never wrong and always right. No one. No one exists without polarities. Everybody has good and bad forces working with them, against them, and within them.
PART SUN AND MOON by Suzy Kassem
22. It is better to lock up your heart with a merciless padlock, than to fall in love with someone who doesn’t know what they mean to you.
23. To reach a port we must set sail –
Sail, not tie at anchor
Sail, not drift.
24. 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.
25. There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
26. It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.
27. There was a magic about the sea. People were drawn to it. People wanted to love by it, swim in it, play in it, look at it. It was a living thing that as as unpredictable as a great stage actor: it could be calm and welcoming, opening its arms to embrace it’s audience one moment, but then could explode with its stormy tempers, flinging people around, wanting them out, attacking coastlines, breaking down islands. It had a playful side too, as it enjoyed the crowd, tossed the children about, knocked lilos over, tipped over windsurfers, occasionally gave sailors helping hands; all done with a secret little chuckle
28. There was a single blue line of crayon drawn across every wall in the house. What does it mean? I asked. A pirate needs the sight of the sea, he said and then he pulled his eye patch down and turned and sailed away.
29. Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.
30. He: “Whale you be my valentine?” She: “Dolphinitely.
31. The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
32. Darwin may have been quite correct in his theory that man descended from the apes of the forest, but surely woman rose from the frothy sea, as resplendent as Aphrodite on her scalloped chariot.
33. How foolish to believe we are more powerful than the sea or the sky.
34. A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach, and drifted back to the sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea.
35. They sat on the outcropping of stone and at bread and fruit. Kasta watched the long grass moving around them. The wind pushed it, attacked it, struck it in one place than another. It rose and fell again. It flowed, like water.
“Is this what the sea is like?” Kasta asked, and they both turned to her, surprised. “Does the sea move the way this grass moves?”
“It’s like the sea,” she said.
Giddon’s eyes on her were incredulous.
“What? Is it such a strange thing to say?”
“It’s a strange thing for you to say.” He shook his head. He gathered their bread and fru it, then rose. “The Lienid fighter is filling your mind with romantic notions.
36. Grey rocks, and greyer sea,
And surf along the shore —
And in my heart a name
My lips shall speak no more.
37. I was happy anywhere I could see the ocean.
38. Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.
39. Your daughter, your sister. She is salt to the sea,
40. And I shall watch the ferry boats, and they’ll get high,
On a bluer ocean against tomorrow’s sky,
And I will never grow so old again,
And I will walk and talk, in gardens all wet with rain.
41. Ô, Wanderess, Wanderess
When did you feel your
most euphoric kiss?
Was I the source
of your greatest bliss?
42. I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me.
The sea.
43. There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.
44. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea– do I have to choose between the two?
45. She watched the gap between ship and shore grow to a huge gulf. Perhaps this was a little like dying, the departed no longer visible to the others, yet both still existed, only in different worlds.
46. There comes a time in a man’s life when he hears the call of the sea. If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediately.
47. The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
48. The sea is a desert of waves,
A wilderness of water.
49. The world is a wide place where we stumble like children learning to walk. The world is a bright mosaic where we learn like children to see, where our little blurry eyes strive greedily to take in as much light and love and colour and detail as they can.
The world is a coaxing whisper when the wind lips the trees, when the sea licks the shore, when animals burrow into earth and people look up at the sympathetic stars. The world is an admonishing roar when gales chase rainclouds over the plains and whip up ocean waves, when people crowd into cities or intrude into dazzling jungles.
What right have we to carry our desperate mouths up mountains or into deserts? Do we want to taste rock and sand or do we expect to make impossible poems from space and silence? The vastness at least reminds us how tiny we are, and how much we don’t yet understand. We are mere babes in the universe, all brothers and sisters in the nursery together. We had better learn to play nicely before we’re allowed out….. And we want to go out, don’t we? ….. Into the distant humming welcoming darkness.
50. In still moments by the sea life seems large-drawn and simple. It is there we can see into ourselves.
51. I looked upon the sea, it was to be my grave
52. The use of sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons, forasmuch as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession therof.
53. Vicinity to the sea is desirable, because it is easier to do nothing by the sea than anywhere else, and because bathing and basking on the shore cannot be considered an employment but only an apotheosis of loafing. (“Expiation”)
54. Now the night’s breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.
55. I know about me. I am the moons sister, a tidal child stranded on land. The sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood.
56. There are no whores in Scaithe’s Ebb, or none that consider themselves as such, although there have always been many women who, if pressed, would describe themselves as much-married, with one husband on this ship here every six months, and another husband on that ship, back in port for a month or so every nine months. The mathematics of the thing have always kept most folk satisfied; and if ever it disappoints and a man returns to his wife while one of her other husbands is still in occupancy, why, then there is a fight — and the grog shops to comfort the loser.
The sailors do not mind the arrangement, for they know that this way there will, at the least, be one person who, at the last, will notice when they do not come back from the sea, and will mourn their loss; and their wives content themselves with the certain knowledge that their husbands are also unfaithful, for there is no competing with the sea in a man’s affections, since she is both mother and mistress, and she will wash his corpse also, in time to come, wash it to coral and ivory and pearls.
57. [T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
58. I want to learn how to speak to anyone at any time and make us both feel a little bit better, lighter, richer, with no commitments of ever meeting again. I want to learn how to stand wherever with whoever and still feel stable. I want to learn how to unlock the locks to our minds, my mind, so that when I hear opinions or views that don’t match up with mine, I can still listen and understand. I want to burn up lifeless habits of following maps and to-do lists, concentrated liquids to burn my mind and throat
and I want to go back to the way nature shaped me. I want to learn to go on well with whatever I have in my hands at the moment
in a natural state of mind,
certain like the sea.
I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea.
59. The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities… If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
60. Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
