Flotsam Quotes

“Those who understand such things say that the two partners must always assist each other if a relationship is truly to founder and turn into flotsam.”

— Peter Hoeg Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow

“Flowers don't tell, they show. That's the way good books should be too.
Stephanie Skeem. Author of Flotsam”

— Stephanie Skeem

“Remember if you write, write, write, you can never be wrong.
Stephanie Skeem Author of Flotsam”

— Stephanie Skeem

“It was a time of dark dreams. They washed in like flotsam on the night tide, slipping beneath doorways and window latches, rising through the streets and hills; and the little fishing-town of Scarlock foundered deep.”

— J.A. Clement

“Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals - the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.”

— Martin Gardner

“Bring me your Nortons, your Kramdens, your housewives, and sewermen.
Weight my limbs with the nests of your flotsam, that we may chirp in chorus this melancholy anthem.
Mourn with your busdriver piety this sapless husk;
dull with your tender hymn the string of the lumberman's axe.”

— Daniel Clowes

“And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,
Devouring the green azure where, like a pale elated
Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;
Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium
And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,
The bitter redness of love ferments!”

— Rimbaud Arthur

“The problem with romance is the occlusion. The tunnel vision, drawing your every gaze downstream, into those other eyes, the flotsam of your better self, your clearer self, along for the ride. It doesn't matter what secrets swirl and bob in the waters beneath you, as you float toward that lady at Delphi, who, you imagined, reading Mythology, must have been beautiful. It doesn't matter that Charybdis, with no body, with no form, with only a mouth-as-being, couldn't have been evil, because she lacked the brain for it. It doesn't matter that following the logical course of events, the natural course, always disadvantages someone else, because love, after all, is simply a competition for resources, made infinitely complex and unknowable when squared and cubed and raised to every other emotional exponent - and then layered with sex and society and a bad memory for what those resources were in the first place.”

— Darin Bradley

“And to think, she'd once had the hots for him, back in the old days (six months ago) when razor-thin men with noses like Durante and an encyclopaedic knowledge of de Niro movies had really been her style. Now she saw him for what he was, flotsam from a lost ship of hope. Still a pill-freak, still a theoretical bisexual, still devoted to early Polanski movies and symbolic pacifism.”

— Clive Barker

“If you like, you could call this the psychology of total equivalence, let's say neuronics for short, and dismiss it as biological fantasy. However, I am convinced as we move back through geophysical time, so we reenter the amnionic corridor, and move back through spinal and archeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct ecological terrain, its own flora and fauna, as recognizable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total reorientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as we reappear, we'll be swept back helplessly in the floodtide like pieces of flotsam.”

— J.G. Ballard

“Air is traditionally 'thin,' but the more we learn about our atmosphere, the more substantial it becomes. In some places it is so filled with inorganic flotsam that it is almost thick enough to plough; in others, it has become so primed with the by-products of life that it comes close to being a living tissue in its own right.”

— Lyall Watson

“We're into this barrage of pop culture - you know, TV, movies, the Internet. We become creatures that we've made up, made of certain different flotsam from pop culture and certain different personas that are in style.”

— Gillian Flynn

“[W]e all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?”

— Jon Ronson

“And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

“A life without goals is like flotsam that is governed by the tides and winds of fate.”

— Steven Redhead

“Without the will or desire to achieve one is like flotsam on the oceans of time.”

— Steven Redhead

“But there really was no point in asking. She read things, she knew things, and out they came, little surprises. It was strangely like unwrapping little gifts, not all of which he appreciated. She clung to facts and information, like flotsam in a shipwreck. They'd saved her.”

— Julie Anne Long

“Why must we be left, the survivors picking among the flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable?”

— Marilynne Robinson

“I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living.”

— Margaret Atwood

“Book I still possess in all the flotsam and ruckus of my life,”

— Sebastian Barry

“I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death, and the land is a stained altar stone. We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living on jetsam. We are escapees. We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep with a mouth full of blood.”

— Annie Dillard

“Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual abilities and unfit for any useful work, bursting with envy and bitterness against all whom circumstance and nature had favored over him ... In his desperate ambition for power he discovered that his speeches, confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim by those whose situation and orientation resembled his own. He picked up this human flotsam on the streets and in the taverns and organized them around himself. This is the way he launched his political career.”

— Albert Einstein

“When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as a final full stop. The items of flotsam that I choose to salvage from the general wreckage-and what is a life but a gradual shipwreck?-may take on an aspect of inevitability when I put them on display in their glass showcases, but they are random; representative, perhaps, perhaps compellingly so, but random nonetheless.”

— John Banville

“The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibilolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.”

— Brennan Manning

“The work saved me. I clung to it like flotsam in a boiling sea. It was the only solitary sport that I ever played, or was any good at. It felt natural to sit at my computer and type and type some more. For entire minutes, while writing, I could forget the godawful thing that had happened. I could forget that nothing really mattered anymore. Perhaps, if I set my sights low, I could care again about some small thing. I would type a word. One word. Then another. I started to care about the words, then entire sentences ...”

— Rheta Grimsley Johnson

“Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction.”

— Deborah Eisenberg

“Hard as I fought for it to be otherwise, finally I had to admit it too: without my mother, we weren't what we'd been; we were four people floating separately among the flotsam of our grief, connected by only the thinnest rope.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“This internal sea. The problem is that this beautiful ocean carries with it loads ay poisonous flotsam and jetsam ... that poison is diluted by the sea, but once the ocean rolls out, it leaves the shite behind, inside ma body. It takes as well as gives, it washes away ma endorphins, ma pain resistance centres; they take a long time tae come back.”

— Irvine Welsh

“When the river takes me I don't try to swim or stay afloat. I open my eyes and my mouth and let the water fill me up. I feel my lungs spasm but there's no pain, and I stop being afraid. The current carries me along. I'm flotsam, and I understand that flotsam is all I've ever been.”

— Hillary Jordan

“Surely there is no greater garden for human-nature study than the flotsam and jetsam of the hospital.”

— Mabel Osgood Wright

“Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.”

— Robert MacNeil

“I think all writers are always collecting characters as we go along. Not just characters of course, we're collecting EVERYTHING. Bits and pieces of story. An interesting dynamic between people. A theme. A great character back story. A cool occupation. The look of someone's eyes. A burning ambition. Hundreds of thousands of bits of flotsam and jetsam that we stick in the back of our minds like the shelves full of buttons and ribbons and fabrics and threads and beads in a costumer's shop.”

— Alexandra Sokoloff

“It's a fault line where the flotsam and energy that washes up from the Pacific collides with all of urban America crashing in from the other direction.”

— Antoine Predock

“I'm surrounded by good people. That's the measure of a good life. All the rest is flotsam.”

— Roger Daltrey

“I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“When you once attribute effects to the will of a personal God, you have let in a lot of little gods and evils - then sprites, fairies, dryads, naiads, witches, ghosts and goblins, for your imagination is reeling, riotous, drunk, afloat on the flotsam of superstition. What you know then doesn't count. You just believe, and the more your believe the more do you plume yourself that fear and faith are superior to science and seeing.”

— Elbert Hubbard

“The present is filled with flotsam and irony and chaos and disorder in all arenas, political and sociological. I think we have to work in the present even if it's awkward, even if it's not necessarily good, even if we don't understand it ourselves. You only find out 10, maybe 20 years later what was going on.”

— Frank Gehry

“There are tons of things in your home and life that you don't use, need, or even particularly want. They just came into your life as impulsive flotsam and jetsam and never found a good exit. Whether you're aware of it or not, this clutter creates indecision and distractions ...”

— Tim Ferriss

“Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors.”

— Julian Assange

“You take the flotsam," I tell her, "I'll take the jetsam." You always get the jetsam,"she says pretending to pout. "Do you ever think if poeple heard our conversations they'd lock us up?" All the time.”

— Wendy Mass

“Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.”

— Marcel Proust