A Pier Quotes & Sayings

I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling into a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon's pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up, each one a willing receiver for the Thunder-God grooves. To my young ears, the sound of these amplified guitars was angelic (although, with hindsight, I don't suppose angels play Gibson guitars at ear-bleeding volume). A voice that suggested vocal chords of polished silver soared alongside razor-sharp overdriven riffs. I knew that I was hearing the future. — Mark Rice

Family is no doubt a pier glass for one's own self-contempt. But for all my regret that this should happen now, for all my frustration and incomprehension, those feelings, I knew, had to be set next to my own meager participation in these lives, the implicit idea that it was enough for me to show up now and again for a few days and assume the unencumbered neutrality that may, in fact, have been no different from my habitual absence. — Greg Jackson

You ask me whether I am in good spirits. How could I not be so? As long as Faith gives me strength I will always be joyful. Sadness ought to be banished from Catholic souls ... the purpose for which we have been created shows us the path; even if strewn with many thorns, it is not a sad path. It is joyful even in the face of sorrow. — Pier Giorgio Frassati

my religion was but a fragrance. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

The true measure of a city is its soul. This is the restless energy that doesn't wait for political leadership. — Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 A.M. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city. — Herb Caen

It's not Love. But what fault is it of mine
if my affections do not become
Love? Very much my fault, I would say,
when I can live from day to day
on mad purity, blind pity ...
Make a scandal of meekness.
But the violence of the senses and intellect
that has confounded me for years
was the only way. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

The path we're taking is not a road, Kiyo, it's a pier, and it ends someplace where the sea begins. It can't be helped. — Yukio Mishima

We passed a small-boat harbor, gleaming white on blue, and a long pier draped with fishermen. Everything was as pretty as a postcard. The trouble with you, I said to myself: you're always turning over the postcards and reading the messages on the underside. Written in invisible ink, in blood, in tears, with a black border around them, with postage due, unsigned, or signed with a thumbprint. — Ross Macdonald

The most adorable thing about Toronto is that she remains fiercely aloof and indifferent to the fads and entrepreneurial fevers of her lovers. She is intractably herself, admissive to the most vagrant, sober in a way that gets misinterpreted as stodginess. Her generosity extends to the meek as well as the gold diggers. Mercifully, she doesn't give a hoot about our portraits of her, but just waits, patiently, for our affection and citizenship. — Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

But whatever happened, I knew I'd always have this summer, and that first night on the pier under the stars, with the waves surging around us, when we both glowed. And armed with that, I was not afraid. This summer, and this life, had been a privilege. I was sure of that. — Seth King

I myself was nothing more than a collection of marginal selves who sit out their time like unpaid stevedores on an unfinished pier where no boats ever dock. — Andre Aciman

It blows a snowing gale in the winter of the year;
The boats are on the sea and the crews are on the pier.
The needle of the vane, it is veering to and fro,
A flash of sun is on the veering of the vane.
Autumn leaves and rain,
The passion of the gale. — Robert Louis Stevenson

She is sad. She does not speak Japanese. Her husband went to the desert months and months ago. Every day she goes to the market and brings back chocolate, a peach, and a salmon rice-ball for her dinner. She sits and eats and stares at the wall. Sometimes she watches television. Sometimes she walks three miles to Blue Street to look at necklaces in the window that she wishes someone would buy for her. Sometimes she walks along the pier to see the sunken bicycles, pinged into ruin by invisible arrows of battleship-sonar, crusted over with rust and coral. She likes to pet people's dogs as they walk them. That is her whole life. What should she dream of?"
"Something better. — Catherynne M Valente

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast. — Andy Andrews

The wind roared like thunder, and blew with such force that it was with difficulty that even strong men kept their feet, or clung with grim clasp to the iron stanchions. It was found necessary to clear the entire pier from the mass of onlookers, or else the fatalities of the night would have increased manifold. To add to the difficulties and dangers of the time, masses of sea-fog came drifting inland. White, wet clouds, which swept by in ghostly fashion, so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort of imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death, and many a one shuddered as the wreaths of sea-mist swept by. — Bram Stoker

The end for which we are created invites us to walk a road that is surely sown with a lot of thorns, but it is not sad; through even the sorrow, it is illuminated by joy. — Pier Giorgio Frassati

Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood. An unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood in the open. — Joseph Conrad

SHORE-LARK
During the week, the shore-lark works in the City and flies home every night with its mate in Wimbledon, where it is a model husband and father. At weekends, however, it migrates briefly on Brighton, on any of one hundred pretexts, where is meets female shore-larks under the pier and seeks to recapture its lost youth. — Alan Coren

[Rylie:] I was thinking about that short you directed
The Pier. I wondered if you had a video or a reel of it somewhere.
[Finn:] You want to see my short. Why?
[Rylie:] Color me curious. — Jessica Lave

With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Her cousins laughed, daring the next wave to wash over before they passed. While they ran, a huge swell rolled along the side of the pier, fat fingers reaching up just in time to pluck them from the pier and win the macabre game of tag. Melora watched, helpless, hardly realizing the gravity of what was happening. It had all been a game. Her cousins were so good at games. — Marie Zhuikov

[Michael Bitbol] asked us to ponder whether the purpose of science is to provide answers about what things are in themselves, or if science is only our most advanced way of developing a pragmatic, conventional knowledge of phenomena sufficient to guide us in our actions. — Pier Luigi Luisi

When I make a film I'm always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

If I then discovered a cancer in myself and died, I'd consider it a victory of that reality of things. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

The next adventure is the government, a government of change. — Pier Luigi Bersani

Though he was tired of loneliness - tired down to the depths of his heart - that was really not was troubled him most. What tortured him was the hunger in his soul. A longing. A quiet voice that could not be stilled. Not a threatening voice - or a nagging one. But a persistent calling. Like a parent who calls an errant child back to dinner. Or a father who calls for a son to join him down at the pier for a fishing trip; like a voice echoing off the lake. It was a strangely familiar voice that was calling. A little like the memory of a reunion, long forgotten. Why did he resist it, even fear it? Why would he not respond to a call that came to him in a way that sounded, and felt, so much like family? — Craig Parshall

There was a pier filled with thousands of people, men and women, fathers and mothers and children
so many children
children from the past and the present, children who had not yet been born, side by side, hand in hand, in caps, in short pants, filling the boardwalk and the rides and the wooden platforms, sitting on each other's shoulders, sitting in each other's laps. They were there, or would be there, becuause of the simple mundane things [he] had done in his life, the accidents he had prevented, the rides he had kept safe, the unnoticed turns he had affected every day. And while their lips did not move, [he] heard their voices, more voices then he could have imagined, and a peace came upon him that he had never known before. — Mitch Albom

A pier is a disappointed bridge. — Julian Barnes

An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something trying to get in, the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass. Dona nobis pacem. He withstood it, with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the St. Pancras waiting room, Dallow's and Judy's secret lust, and the cold and unhappy moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast
whatever it was
got in, God knows what it would do. He had a sense of huge havoc
the confession, the penance, and the sacrament
an awful distraction, and he drove blind into the rain. — Graham Greene

Gloria watched the swollen white orb of a hot-air balloon rising over Navy Pier and knew she had to break it off with Oliver, for he was the type who would never enjoy hot-air balloons, Van Morrison songs, or mess, whether from orgasm or otherwise. But who was she to be dreaming about mess today? — Andrea Kayne Kaufman

An artist, if he's unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

A city's greatness is manifest in a people confident in their ability to take risks, to encounter — Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are. - GEORGE ORWELL, The Road to Wigan Pier — Gretchen Rubin

I am black with love/ neither boy nor nightingale/ perfectly whole as a flower/ I desire without impulse — Pier Paolo Pasolini

What would you think if I told you that, yes, your bad choices and decisions have had a part in your ending up under this pier, but beyond that, under this pier is exactly where you should be in order for a future to occur that you can't even imagine at this point? — Andy Andrews

In December 2013, a tourist in Melbourne fell off a pier and plunged into the sea while checking Facebook on her phone. She still had it in her hand when she was rescued. — Arianna Huffington

Ohls showed the motor-cycle officer his badge and we went out on the pier, into a loud fish smell which one night's hard rain hadn't even dented. — Raymond Chandler

And dead an epoch of our existence, which in a world destined to humiliate us was moral light and resistance. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see? - Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster - tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? — Herman Melville

Death does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

We survive, in the confusion
of a life reborn beyond reason. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

In a world gone astray from God there is no peace, but it also lacks charity, which is true and perfect love ... Nothing is more beautiful than love. Indeed, faith and hope will end when we die, whereas love, that is, charity, will last for eternity. — Pier Giorgio Frassati

She came to me first and asked me to help her. I told the hag to go fuck herself with her own broom, and she left." "You have a beautiful way with words," I confessed to her. Eos smiled. "I'm not done yet. Hera tried the same trick with Helios and Selene, each of them telling her which short pier to take a long run off. — Steve McHugh

I'd better light the charcoal," Gennie said after a moment.
"I didn't ask before," Grant began as they started down the pier. "But do you know how to cook on one of those things?"
"My dear Mr. Campbell," Gennie said in a fluid drawl, "you appear to have several misconceptions about southern women.I can cook on a hot rock."
"And wash shirts in a fast stream."
"Every bit as well as you could," Gennie tossed back. "You might have some advantage on me in mechanical areas, but I'd say we're about even otherwise."
"A strike for the women's movement."
Gennie narrowed her eyes. "Are you about to say something snide and unintelligent? — Nora Roberts

Beyond the electroliers, beyond the beat and toot of the small sidewalk cars, beyond the smell of hot fat and popcorn and the shrill children and the barkers in the peep shows, beyond everything but the smell of the ocean and the suddenly clear line of the shore and the creaming fall of the waves into the pebbled spume. I walked almost alone now. The noises died behind me, the hot dishonest light became a fumbling glare. Then the lightless finger of a black pier jutted seaward into the dark. This would be the one. I turned to go out on it. Red — Raymond Chandler

Good Things Happen to Big-Thinking People A tourist walked down a pier and watched a fisherman pull in a large fish, measure it, and throw it back. He caught a second fish, smaller this time, he measured it, and put it in his basket. Oddly, all fish over 10 inches, he discarded. The smaller ones, he kept. Someone asked him, "why?" The fisherman said, "Because my frying pan only measures 10 inches." Is that foolish? Of course it is, but it's no more so than when we throw away the biggest ideas and most beautiful dreams that come into your mind simply because your experience is too limited. Start growing now. Start thinking. Big things happen to big-thinking people. You can become the team you want to be. It's possible. Every man must make his contribution. — Peter G. Tormey

Truth lies not only in a dream, but in many dreams. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Toronto is a city that has yet to fall in love with itself ... — Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

If you work in the city long enough, it begins to deal with you on a personal level. Streets reveal their moods. Sometimes the signal light loves you. Sometimes they fight you. When you're hunting for a new building, you hope the city is on your side. You have to use a little bit of thinking
you might call it the process of elimination
and you need a little bit of instinct, but not too much of either. If you think too hard, you overshoot your target and end up at the Pier or the Tenderloin. If you relax and let the city help, the destination does all the work for you. — Scott Adams

I am not interested in deconsecrating: this is a fashion I hate, it is petit-bourgeois. I want to reconsecrate things as much as possible, I want to re-mythicize them. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

They didn't speak. Words were powerless now. Like a pair of dancers who had stopped mid-step, they simply held each other quietly, giving themselves up to the flow of time. Time that encompassed both past and present, and even a portion of the future. Nothing came between their two bodies, as her warm breath brushed his neck. Tsukuru shut his eyes, letting the music wash over him as he listened to Eri's heartbeat. The beating of her heart kept time with the slap of the little boat against the pier. — Haruki Murakami

Stephen picks up on Armstrong's pier, and calls Kingstown pier "a disappointed bridge" (2.22). He's joking about the fact that Ireland wanted to be connected to continental Europe but ended up being extremely isolated. — James Joyce

And that's the mistake that was made with Steel Pier. Roger was caught between a rock and hard place. It would have cost a couple of million dollars more to take it to Boston or someplace first. So we opened about a month too early. — Gregory Harrison

There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairytale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood. — Margaret Atwood

Bright were the memories of his childhood at these docks, to which he had been ever drawn by the allure of the stranger traders as they swung into their berths like weary and weathered heroes returned from some elemental war. In those days it was uncommon to see the galleys of the Freemen Privateers ease into the bay, sleek and riding low with booty. They hailed from such mysterious ports as Filman Orras, Fort By a Half, Dead Man's Story, and exile; names that rang of adventure in the ears of a lad who had never seen his home city from outside its walls.
The man slowed as he reached the foot of the stone pier. The years between him and that lad marched through his mind, a possession of martial images growing ever grimmer. If he searched out the many crossroads he had come to in the past, he saw their skies storm-warped, the lands ragged and wind-torn. The forces of age and experience worked on them now, and whatever choices he had made then seemed fated and almost desperate. — Steven Erikson

There was a pact, unspoken but a pact all the same. You couldn't keep punishing someone for the same crime no matter how badly you wanted to. Fish or cut bait. April was on the pier, whether she was coming or going she did not yet know. — Michelle Gable

The cord, a familiar voice said. Remember your lifeline, dummy!
Suddenly there was a tug in my lower back. The current pulled at me, but it wasn't carrying me away anymore. I imagined the string in my back keeping me tied to the shore.
"Hold on, Seaweed Brain." It was Annabeth's voice, much clearer now. "You're not getting away from me that easily."
The cord strengthened.
I could see Annabeth now- standing barefoot above me on the canoe lake pier. I'd fallen out of my canoe. That was it. She was reaching out her hand to haul me up, and she was trying not to laugh. She wore her orange camp T-shirt and jeans. Her hair was tucked up in her Yankees cap, which was strange because that should have made her invisible.
"You are such an idiot sometimes." She smiled. "Come on. Take my hand."
Memories came flooding back to me- sharper and more colorful. I stopped dissolving. My name was Percy Jackson. I reached up and took Annabeth's hand. — Rick Riordan

Yet I had not been many days shut up with them before I began to be ashamed of my first judgment, when I had drawn away from them at the Ferry pier, as though they had been unclean beasts. No class of man is altogether bad, but each has its own faults and virtues; and these shipmates of mine were no exception to the rule. Rough they were, sure enough; and bad, I suppose; but they had many virtues. They were kind when it occurred to them, simple even beyond the simplicity of a country lad like me, and had some glimmerings of honesty. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

To live without faith, without a patrimony to defend, without a steady struggle for truth, that is not living but existing — Pier Giorgio Frassati

Captain Owen Hartford, at your service." He tipped his hat.
Oh, so it was going to be like this, was it? She searched her memory for a good name. "Patience Corntower. Of Thorny Hollow way."
His grin went wide. "We are well acquainted. You may not recollect me."
"But I do, sir. Quite clearly."
Something flickered in his gaze. "Would the miss be available for a short walk on the pier?"
"In the middle of a battle?" Her eyes went wide and she tried not to laugh. "Aren't you supposed to be getting something amputated?"
"Shhh." He held up a finger, eyes crinkled at the corners. "Don't break character. — Mary Jane Hathaway

The revolution is now just a sentiment. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Behold those times re-created by
the brutal power of sunlit images,
the light of life's tragedy.
The walls of the trial, the field
of the firing squad; and the distant
ghost of Rome's suburbs in a ring,
gleaming white in naked light.
Gunshots: our death, our survival. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Looking at oneself in a mirror is a self-canceling phenomenon. Eyes looking into eyes make a hole which spreads out and renders one invisible. I had seen more of myself in that single glimpse of a ghostly image in the pier mirror, not knowing it was I. — Walker Percy

The sexual freedom of today for most people is really only a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, a necessary feature of the consumer's way of life. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Hurry not a woman's favor; neither forcer her hastily to surrender to thee. For she goeth into love as she goeth into the waters at the seashore; first a hand and then a lip goeth she in by littles. She diveth not, she leapeth not from the pier; but by gentle shocks and cries of protest she entereth slowly; yet when the waters of love encompass her, then she is supported. She swimmeth in her joy; she floateth on the tide of happiness. — Gelett Burgess

It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the "Giulia" blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze. — Jeffrey Eugenides

You are a ghost, like you were a ghost before because you were never here, but everywhere at once, i wish i could talk like my eyes can see, word you with what i smell, knock your socks off with aromas of a tiny metropolis tourists only catch glimpses of at the Wharf. A thousand LSD trips and middle-aged folks remembering Timothy Leary playing like a Pied Piper leading them all off to jump off the pier. — Ana Castillo

At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It's great to be an Intrepid Voyager. — Ernest Hemingway,

Most people new to a city on the ocean would probably go to the beach during the day when there are people around. I, on the other hand, decided to try a midnight swim at the somewhat gamy Santa Monica pier, by myself. That is, until a nearby guard kicked me off the beach for my own safety. — Kathy Griffin

As the surface of the seashore rocks were pitted by by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distres brought by the sea, so did silence at Lahardane. — William Trevor

I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't 'want' to cut down on my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc. etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men. — George Orwell

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii. — Ross Macdonald

The horror of what I saw chilled me to the bone. Blood glistened on my friend's lips. He knelt down and whispered something I could not hear. Star then stopped attacking, and to lay down to sleep. What the hell had he done to my dog? Just how much of a chance did I have to live through the next few moments of my life? I turned and ran as fast as I could, heart thudding in my chest. I ran down the pier, running for my life. Something came in front of me and grabbed me. It was Drew. He held my arms still in front of him. He stared intently into my eyes. — Stella Coulson

Shortly before ten o'clock the stillness of the air grew quite oppressive, and the silence was so marked that the bleating of a sheep inland or the barking of a dog in the town was distinctly heard, and the band on the pier, with its lively French air, was like a dischord in the great harmony of nature's silence. A little after midnight came a strange sound from over the sea, and high overhead the air began to carry a strange, faint, hollow booming. — Bram Stoker

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder. — Jonathan Lethem

When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play. — DJ Spooky

The truth a fairly important thing to hold on to when you've been pulled out of the sea after wanting to drown in it. I could've let the sea take me. I could easily be dead now, which is funny when you think of it. When I say funny, what I actually mean is weird and kind of disturbing.
When there's the loud sound of a siren screaming in your head it doesn't take too long before a feeling of not caring what happens washed over you and you become recklessly self- destructive. I used to be full of energy and happiness but I could barely remember those kinds of feelings. The cheerful, childish things I used to think had been replaced. A whole load of new realisations had begun to grow inside me like tangled weeds, and they were starting to kill me. That's why I'd make the decision that involved heading ogg to the pier on my pike in the middle of the night and cycling off it. — Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

The entire city was his hunting ground. In the summer months, dressed in a blazer and wearing his straw hat at a jaunty angle, he would regularly stroll along under the arches, and then along the pier. Next he would ride on the Volks Railway, where in the cramped intimacy of its hard seats he liked to talk to strangers, telling them this was the world's oldest still-running electric train, and boring them with facts about it. — Peter James

It's been open about a year now.And it is one of my favorite places in the city."
"You never told me," he said, sounding surprised.
"So even after all these years,we can still surprise one another," she teased.
He leaned over and kissed her quickly on the cheek. "Even after all these years," he said. "So enlighten me-how often do you come to this place?"
"Five,maybe six times a week."
"Oh?"
"Every morning when I'd leave the shop,I'd usually walk down to the Embarcadero,amble along the promenade and end up walking the length of this pier.Where did you think I was for that hour?"
"I thought you'd popped across the road for coffee."
"Yea,Nicholas," Perenelle said in French. "I drink tea. You know I hate coffee."
"You hate coffee?" Nicholas said. "Since when?"
"Only for the last eighty years or so."
Nicholas blinked,pale eyes reflecting the blue of the sea. "I knew that.I think."
"You're teasing me."
"Maybe," he admitted. — Michael Scott

The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him, of running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One g. Funny how the body remembered it. — Kim Stanley Robinson

A life spent at the edge of the pier is a life full of regret, a life full of fear. — Ryan Lilly

She had been lying there, facedown in the water long before the tide had turned at 3.04 that morning. Her eyes were staring into the river, her blonde hair first fanning out, then drawing back under her head with the wash of the water, like a pulsating jellyfish. The belt of her raincoat was caught on the branches of an overhanging tree and she'd been hooked, destined to forever flap against the corner of the broken pier with outstretched arms. She wasn't going anywhere now; she was simply bobbing up and down with the rhythm of the water - and she hadn't blinked in a long while. — A.J. Waines

In the end, oh I know,
never, in my haggard passion,
have I ever been such a cadaver as now
as I take again in hand my tables of the present
if reality's real, but after it's been
destroyed in the eternal and the moment by
the obsessive idea of a shining nothingness. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

As they left the pier and walked into the park, Chahda looked around appreciatively. "Nice place, this. Capital of New Caledonia. Big island, has 8,548 square mile, also has 53,245 peoples. Eleven thousand in Noumea. That is what says the Worrold Alm-in-ack."

Rick and Scotty laughed. It was like old times to hear Chahda quoting from The World Almanac. A Bombay beggar boy, he had educated himself with only the Almanac for his textbook, and he had laboriously memorized everything in it. — John Blaine

The sun's rays reflected beautifully upon the water, creating a magnificent glistening effect over the waves. The pier to the left was docking ships, while on the right, a ferry took off into the open waters. It was a beautiful sight to watch; how small everything looked in something as big as the ocean. It reminded me of people, how we were just a small part of what made up the world. Our numbers might be large, but we were not alone in this world. We were insignificant to nature. — Nicole Sobon

But their discovery of the void brings with it new implications: not only that they must continue on in their actions and diligence, no longer considered as duties but as gratuitous, senseless routines, but also the exhilarating realization that all is nothing but a game. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Always think extra hard before crossing over to a bad side, if you were weak enough to cross over, you may not be strong enough to cross back! — Victoria Addino

For to a boy it can seem
that he shall never have what he alone
has never had. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

What did you have on your feet this time?" I ask.
"Toes," he replies easily, and grins at me, lifting one long foot to put it on the sill of the car, wiggling his toes for emphasis. There's a jagged open cut near his big toenail. "Well, toes and blood. Cut it on a shell. But I made it all the way to the pier this time. Very Navy Seal, huh? Ran right through the pain, because I am just that full of testosterone. — Huntley Fitzpatrick

He couldn't believe that you could look up anyone and seek them out, that all you had to do to prove you weren't an orphan was to open a book and point to your parents. It was unfathomable that a permanent link existed to mothers and fathers and lost mates, that they were forever fixed in type. He flipped through the pages. Donaldson, Jimenez, Smith - all it took was a book, a little book could save you a lifetime of uncertainty and guesswork. Suddenly he hated his small, backward homeland, a land of mysteries and ghosts and mistaken identities. He tore a page from the back of the book and wrote across the top: Alive and Well in North Korea. Below this he wrote the names of all the people he'd helped kidnap. Next to Mayumi Nota, the girl from the pier, he placed a star of exception. — Adam Johnson

I found myself thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark seawater that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket, if you have Old Mrs. Hempstock to help you get it in there, and you ask nicely. — Neil Gaiman

People tend to read books about a guy who goes back in time or a guy who is living under a pier. — Andy Andrews

It seems like as we stand there I'm watching my whole life with Hana, our entire friendship, fall away: sleepover parties with forbidden midnight bowls of popcorn; all the times we rehearsed for Evaluation Day, when Hana would steal a pair of her father's old glasses, and bang on her desk with a ruler whenever I got an answer wrong, and we always started choking with laughter halfway through; the time she put a fist, hard, in Jillian Dawson's face because Jillian said my blood was diseased; eating ice cream on the pier and dreaming of being paired and living in identical houses, side by side. All of it is being sucked into nothing, like sand getting swept up by a current. — Lauren Oliver

I couldn't breathe when I was away from you. It felt as though each breath was just enough to sustain me, but I was slowly dying. When I saw you again, I had a reason to breathe and then I messed up. I'm so sorry for everything I said to you on the pier, and for all of the pain I've caused you. I swear I will never leave you again." - Brady — K.J. Bell

She leaves the coffee shop and walks down to the seafront, standing staring for a long time at the burnt-out remains of West Pier, derelict, rusting, but somehow still beautiful, looking like there may be life left in its broken remains yet, that it could magically be reborn from its own devastation, bigger and better than ever. — Nigel Jay Cooper

I, too, head for the Baths of Caracalla,
thinking - with my old, magnificent
privilege of thinking ...
(And let there still be a god in me that thinks,
lost, weak, and childish,
yet whose voice is so human
it is almost a song.) Oh, to leave
this prison of poverty!
To be free of the yearning
that makes these ancient nights so splendid!
He who knows yearning, and he who does not,
have something in common: man's desires are humble. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Jack must have looked confused, and Sienna leaned closer to him as she explained. Her perfume was sharp and floral, and he took a deep breath, enjoying the fresh fragrance after a day on the road smelling dust and tar.
"When we were in high school, Uncle Renzo brought us down here to the pier at Monterey for a birthday dinner, and he spun Georgie a story about his grandmother going to sleep at the table when he was a little boy, and drowning in her chowder."
Jack grinned as Sienna continued the story. "He had her sucked in, hook line and sinker, for the whole night until she started to cry, and then he took pity on her."
Sienna smiled as she looked at Jack. Her long, delicate neck arched gracefully as her head turned slowly from side to side, and Jack got another whiff of her perfume. Her eyes were hooded and Jack sensed she was waiting for something. — Annie Seaton