Quotes About Shore

“You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form.”

— Steven R. Boyett

“Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
- from Thing Language”

— Jack Spicer

“We can ast for comfort and hope and patience and courage ... and we'll git what we ast for. They ain't no gar'ntee thet we ain't go'n have no troubles and ain't go'n die. But shore as frogs croak and cows bellow, God'll forgive us if'n we ast Him to.”

— Olive Ann Burns

“The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.”

— Matthew Arnold

“How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those bottles out into the ocean and so few wash up on shore.”

— John Darnton

“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.”

— Susan Wiggs

“Two waves in the ocean are talking to each other. The front wave tells the second that it's frightened because it is about to crash into the shore and cease to exist. But the second wave shows no fear. It explains to the first: You are frightened because you think you are a wave; I am not frightened because know I am part of the ocean.”

— Daniel Gottlieb

“He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing though each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean-oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.”

— Elizabeth Strout

“So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.”

— Seamus Heaney

“I listened long to your story,
Listened but could not hear.
When you chose to walk that path so overgrown,
I remained alone with my fear.
Cold silence covers the distance,
Stretches from shore to shore.
I follow in my mind your far-off journeying,
But I will walk that path no more.”

— Anne Elisabeth Stengl

“He wishes to be far away, either at sea or on the shore. In between, he realizes, is the most difficult of all places to be.”

— Jane Yolen

“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”

— Ayn Rand

“The level of the Pacific was not twenty feet higher than that of the Atlantic, as had been the accepted view for centuries. Sea level was sea level, the same on both sides. The difference was in the size of their tides. (The tides on the Pacific are tremendous, eighteen to twenty feet, while on the Caribbean there is little or no tide, barely more than a foot. When Balboa stood at last on the Pacific shore, he had seen no rush of lordly breakers, but an ugly brown mud flat reaching away for a mile and more, because he had arrived when the tide was out.)”

— David McCullough

“I am the infinite sea, and all worlds are but grains of sand upon my shore.”

— Kahlil Gibran

“When she was eighteen years old she had almost drowned in the Kennebec River, not because of the pummeling current, but because she couldn't come up with a casual phrase with which to call for rescue. "Help!" was such a cliche. By the time she was willing to scream, she had no breath left, and it was just blind luck that somebody saw her gasping and floundering and pulled her to shore. "Why didn't you say something?" they wanted to know, and she said, "I'm not a screamer." "Jesus," said one of them, "couldn't you have made an exception this one time?" "Apparently not," she said.”

— Jincy Willett

“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore - Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the raven, "Nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

“I have been acutely aware of the noise of the wash. The slow, steady beat of those little waves lapping the shore sounds like the rhythm of an ancient heart. And I know that this place is old, so old time doesn't matter.”

— Kirsty Eagar

“At any given time, there are a lot of million-dollar luxury charter boats cruising around the Mentawai Islands finding the most incredible waves. And yet the people on shore are suffering. The whole scene is wrong. As a surf community, we have to do something.”

— Rob Machado

“I swam across the torrent of my madness, and pulled myself upon the shore of a new and better sanity.”

— Frances Hardinge

“I wouldn't say that I was ever a fan of MTV. I was a guy on MTV. I don't think I was ever in the demographic of people who watch MTV. I never really watched MTV, so I'm definitely not a fan of 'Jersey Shore' or anything.”

— David Giuntoli

“City Point is so beautiful, she says. In the night they cannot see the garbage that litters the beach, the seaweed and driftwood, the condoms that wallow sluggishly on the foam's edge, discarded on the shore like the minuscule loathsome animals of the sea. Yeah, it's something, he says slowly.”

— Norman Mailer

“Anyone who's grown up or lived on the Jersey Shore knows the place is unique.”

— Bruce Springsteen

“True love is the tide that pulls out to sea, but always returns to kiss the shore at sunrise.”

— Shannon L. Alder

“Come, join your kin and lend strength to the weaker ones. Together, together, we journey, back to our beginnings and our endings. Gather, shore-born creatures of the sea, to return to the shores yet again. Bring your dreams of sky and wings; come to share the memories of our lives. Our time is come, our time is come. - She Who Remembers”

— Robin Hobb

“For here rolls the sea, and even here lies the other shore waiting to be reached-yes, here is this everlasting present, not distant, not anywhere else.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

“Heart is sea,
language is shore.
Whatever sea includes,
will hit the shore.”

— Rumi

“Dead calm, then a murmur, a name, a murmured name, in doubt, in fear, in love, in fear, in doubt, wind of winter in the black boughs, cold calm sea whitening whispering to the shore, stealing, hastening, swelling, passing, dying, from naught come, to naught gone”

— Samuel Beckett

“Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don't you think so? Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy that the shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly. For my part, I hate boating and I hate the water ...”

— J. Sheridan Le Fanu

“She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

“I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I'm almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension. I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore. But the view is blocked by the crests of the waves. Sometimes, when conditions are perfect, I can pop up high enough to glimpse it. But then, before I can form any firm impression of what it is I'm seeing, I sink back down of my own weight, and get slapped in the face by another wave." "I feel that way all the time, when I am trying to understand something new," I said. "Then, one day, all of a sudden-" "You just get it," Orolo said.”

— Neal Stephenson

“From your results I have determined that you are one of the strongest Divergent, which I say not to compliment you but to explain my purpose. If I am to develop a simulation that cannot be thwarted by the Divergent mind, I must study the strongest Divergent mind in order to shore up all weaknesses in the technology.”

— Veronica Roth

“The most interesting heroes have a bit of villainy to them, and the most interesting villains have a certain bit of heroism in them, ... I think (Alan Shore) intends to do the right thing, but his view of the world is very different so, to get to the right place, he sometimes takes a path that goes through a very dark forest.”

— James Spader

“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")”

— E.F. Benson

“Unfortunately there are still people in other areas who regard New York City not as part of the United States, but as a sort of excrescence fastened to our Eastern shore and peopled by the less venturesome waves of foreigners who failed to go West to the genuine American frontier.”

— Robert Moses

“Nixon is the kind of guy who, if you were drowning twenty feet from shore, would throw you a fifteen-foot rope.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“Sssh says the ocean
Sssh says the small wave at the shore
sssh not so violent, not so proud, not so remarkable.
Sssh says the surf crowding around the outcrops, washing the shore.
Sssh, they say to people, this is our Earth, our eternity.”

— Rolf Jacobsen

“Melancholy had crept inside me. Small children made me cry, I got depressed eating meat, old book bindings awakened tenderness in me. Everything was disintegrating. Nothing stood the test of time, including me. Somewhere on the other shore were madness and God, sometimes both wearing a beard. Neither instilled much confidence.”

— Mati Unt

“It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

“You are nipping in the bud fancies which I let blossom. The shore is safer, but I love to buffet the sea - I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger!”

— Emily Dickinson

“In order to get to the other side of the shore, you have to lose sight of this one!”

— Steven Tyler

“Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.”

— Joel Spolsky

“I'm afraid to be on this shore a trunk without limbs, and what I most regret is not to have flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my suffering.”

— Federico Garcia Lorca

“They who see the Flying Dutchman never, never reach the shore.”

— John Boyle O'Reilly

“What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and to emptiness. Sometimes a voice of one drowning, and in a moment the silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful, the unhappiness of many people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. It is usually the central thing around which their lives are built, and I suppose if they did not live most of their lives in the things of the moment, they would not be able to go on.”

— Bertrand Russell

“As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore. Or if I would delight my private hours With music or with poem, where so soon As in our native language can I find That solace?”

— John Milton

“That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman
the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.”

— Truman Capote

“Tis pleasant to stand on shore and watch others labouring in a stormy sea.”

— Lucretius

“I could never stay long enough on the shore; the tang of the untainted, fresh, and free sea air was like a cool, quieting thought.”

— Helen Keller

“Perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet ... It took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the Pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space. Do we not see in the firmament the lights carried along the shore by night, as Columbus did? Let us not despair or mutiny.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“The realms of good fortune and calamity in human life are all made of thoughts and imaginings. Therefore Buddhists say that the burning of desire for gain is itself a pit of fire, while drowning in greedy love is itself a bitter sea. The moment thoughts are pure, fierce flames become a pond; the moment you become aware, the boat has arrived on the further shore. If your thoughts vary at all, your world will immediately differ, so can we not be careful?”

— Zicheng Hong