Adrift At Sea Quotes & Sayings

It is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no sea's repose; I pass from waking agonies ... to the semiconscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know only that the nerves scream, the body aches, and there is no one to turn crying to for comfort. — Iain Banks

Just as at sea those who are carried away from the direction of the harbor bring themselves back on course by a clear sign, on seeing a tall beacon light or some mountain peak coming into view, so Scripture may guide those adrift on the sea of the life back into the harbor of the divine will. — Gregory Of Nyssa

I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn't cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions. — Barbara Kingsolver

I was adrift in a sea of questions and if answers were lifeboats, I was in imminent danger of drowning. — Karen Marie Moning

Today, the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes its configuration underneath them - with continents adrift across a widening sea, and national boundaries repeatedly redrawn by war or peace. — Dava Sobel

The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Darkness
I find myself set upon a ship of fools and cast adrift.
Adrift in sea of madness, steaming towards a storm of uncertainty.
Overboard, swirling, twirling tumbling.
Engulfed in madness.
Shipwrecked, marooned.
Washed upon a rock of hope.
Darkness surrounds.
Within the darkness madness laps upon a distant shore.
Morning breaks and sun rises once more.
Darkness retreats into the shadows.
Golden rays of light cleanse the mind and soul.
A new day dawns heralding sanity, and hope
for the human race once more. — Michael Tianias

Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jellyfish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past. — John Darnielle

Adrift and unmoored, she had tried again and again to throw him a rope to save him from the raging waters. And now he no longer felt like a drowning man at sea. Nora ... the siren and the goddess, the ship and the wine-dark sea. She would either save him or end him. — Tiffany Reisz

The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflected all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected on the dark sea of time. — Greg Weisman

A far cicada rings high and clear over the river's heavy wash. Morning glory, a lone dandelion, cassia, orchids. So far from the nearest sea, I am taken aback by the sight of a purple land crab, like a relict of the ancient days when the Indian subcontinent, adrift on the earth's mantle, moved northward to collide with the Asian landmass, driving these marine rocks, inch by inch, five miles into the skies. The rise of the Himalaya, begun in the Eocene, some fifty million years ago, is still continuing: an earthquake in 1959 caused mountains to fall into the rivers and changed the course of the great Brahmaputra, which comes down out of Tibet through northeastern India to join the Ganges near its delta at the Bay of Bengal. — Peter Matthiessen

Adrift upon the sea of time, the lonely god wanders from shore to distant shore, upholding the laws of the stars above. — Christopher Paolini

Adrift in a sea of madness, the sextant is broken, but I can still see the stars. — Jack G. Bowman

We are adrift on a sea of moonlight sand, the silence as infinite as the space between the stars. — Jessica Khoury

A strange feeling of loneliness
Adrift near the blue canvas
You may stare long and listen deep
Yet not know whether sea-shore or sea-snore! — Avijeet Das

I put a sour cherry pastille on my tongue, but the combination jarred. A meaty, protein taste was called for. With a cool skin, sticky sweet fragrance in the nostrils, the aleatory drip of timeless water echoing in your ears, a limbo beyond the muscle spindles... you become a spiced mummy in a cool chamber beneath the Nile. This salt-surfeited breeze tingling every corpuscle of my skin set me adrift on a cool back eddy near a basser sea... but the wave lap and sibilance of the palm leaves was like the rustle of a costly veil... in what exotic world did a vortex of primary colours drain into the eyes?... did it all make me a taffeted plankter drinking substance from the spectrum of a fractured sun?"

-"Cancerous Kisses of Crocodiles — William Scott Home

As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendour of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbour City, whose lights and colours spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call 'the breath of angels' ... — Sofia Samatar

I gazed up at the sky. I was in a tiny boat, on a vast ocean. No wind, no waves, just me floating there. Adrift on the open sea..
..A tiny boat cut loose from the fiction of the ship. — Haruki Murakami

This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. — Muriel Barbery

The battle between her body and mind was raging, and she was adrift in a sea of passion and desire without a life preserver. As she fought the waves of her own passion, the ability to express her need in words was eluding — Avery Gale

I felt adrift, anchorless in a running sea. This is now my home. — Diana Gabaldon

The first time I goofed out on Heroin was 1985. It was like sinking into a sea of warm marmalade. And once submerged in its sickly sweet balm I was cast adrift in a universe of dreams. And in the middle of vacant, non-existence I had found freedom. The outside world was no longer my enemy because my final tenuous connection with it had been severed forever. — U.V. Ray

Most humans were on one big island, to the fairies, and that island was adrift on a sea called I Totally Don't Care. — Charlaine Harris

But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. It interposes a gulf, not merely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes
a gulf, subject to tempest, and fear, and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable, and return precarious. — Washington Irving