Quotes & Sayings About Beaches And Life

Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus's motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening's slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old-heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky through the years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon. — Albert Camus

You know what people who go to nude beaches look like?"
"Tell me."
"People who shouldn't go to nude beaches."
"Is Chili Palmer joining the tour?'
"I wasn't told"
"Ask Nick for me."
About a minute went by. Now he heard Nick saying, "Tell him if he goes near Chili Palmer I'll see that he suffers excruciating pain and will never fucking walk again in his life."
And, then Robin's voice: "Nick said to tell you that if you go near Chili Palmer he'll have your legs broken."
"Why couldn't he say it like that?"
"He reads, but the wrong books. — Elmore Leonard

How, I wonder, staring out my hotel window into black nothingness, can Icelanders possibly be happy living under this veil of darkness? I've always associated happy places with palm trees and beaches and blue drinks and, of course, swim-up bars. That's paradise, right? The global travel industry certainly wants us to think so. Bliss, the ads tell us, lies someplace else, and that someplace else is sunny and eighty degrees. Always. Our language, too, reflects the palm-tree bias. Happy people have a sunny disposition and always look on the bright side of life. Unhappy people possess dark souls and black bile. — Eric Weiner

Two lost things that had survived the seas and arrived on a coastline. What did they do? They implanted themselves in the sand and grew into trees and lined the beaches. Sometimes a lot can come of being all washed up. You can really grow. — Cecelia Ahern

If Cairnholm's only phone connected to some den of iniquity called the "piss hole," how did that bode for the rest of the island? Would my first trip to Europe be spent evading drunken maniacs and watching birds evacuate their bowels on rocky beaches? Maybe so. But if it meant that I'd finally be able to put my grandfather's mystery to rest and get on with my unextraordinary life, anything I had to endure would be worth it. — Ransom Riggs

I was curious as to why a million Americans weren't lining the beaches in boats and with buckets to preserve the life sustaining resource that is the Gulf of Mexico. Personally, as a surfer, I was most sorry for my fellow watermen. Seeing beaches closed due to contamination just broke my heart. If that ever happened in San Diego I'm afraid I might be forced to move. — Jason Mraz

Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits. — H.G.Wells

Please." He swallowed hard and begged with those big blue eyes. "Please don't leave me here." All the air trickled out of her lungs. "Take me to the beaches," he said, blinking down at her. "I won't cause any trouble." How did he do that? A minute ago she wanted to break his jaw, and now she had to fight the urge to pat him on the head and give him a cookie. That had to be some kind of superpower. She finally understood how he got everything he wanted in life. — Melissa Landers

Breaking from the universe,
like waves spilling, plunging and surging
against a shore,
we crash with life and vigor,
scrape and scour,
spit beaches and eat land,
polish stone, glass and driftwood of splintered dreams,
uncover and bury bleached bones
of ambitions and aspirations,
carve grottoes of intentions and regrets
and then slip back into the deep
from whence we came
and may return again. — Jeffrey A. White

But we have not used our waters well. Our major rivers are defiled by noxious debris. Pollutants from cities and industries kill the fish in our streams. Many waterways are covered with oil slicks and contain growths of algae that destroy productive life and make the water unfit for recreation. "Polluted Water-No Swimming" has become a familiar sign on too many beaches and rivers. A lake that has served many generations of men now can be destroyed by man in less than one generation. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Justin is twenty-four years old: the world will never be more suited to him than it is now, he will never feel more embraced by life or have greater faith in his right to exist. The earth and the oxygen, the cities and lights, the nights and the beaches seem created for him and for those like him. — Sonya Hartnett

I was sitting in Arizona when I received Dogs on Cape Cod. Seeing the joy these dogs had playing on the beaches and in the marsh grasses on the Cape carried me back to my family visits in Harwich. The dogs are so full of life, it just made me smile. — Betsy King

On every full moon, rituals ... take place on hilltops, beaches, in open fields and in ordinary houses. Writers, teachers, nurses, computer programmers, artists, lawyers, poets, plumbers, and auto mechanics
women and men from many backgrounds come together to celebrate the mysteries of the Triple Goddess of the Dance of Life. The religion they practice is called Witchcraft. — Starhawk

Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots. I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp. — Bill Mollison

So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky. — Nelson Algren

The cycles of Eric's life took in stony beaches and pine forests where you could walk in a daylight all but night dark and fields where there was no grass, only stones and moss, alongside tar and macadam measured at its edge with poles and wires and solar panels, and water, broken, flickering, so much water, as much water - salt and silver - as there was sky, enough to make you scream or laugh at such absurd vastness, swelling within until Eric became his self exploding through today toward tomorrow, water green as glass falling between rocks and wet grass, the smell of dust and docks and distances, and sometimes Shit stepped up and took Eric's rough hand in his rough hand. — Samuel R. Delany

Just when summer gets perfect-fresh nights, soft sun, casual breezes, crushingly full and quietly cooling trees, empty beaches, and free weekends- it ends. Life is like that too. Just when we get it right, it starts to change. The job gets easy and we know just how to do it, and they tell us we're retired. The children grow up and get reasonable and they leave home, just when it's nice to have them around ... That's life on the edge of autumn. And that's beautiful-if we have the humility for it. — Joan D. Chittister

Our family life, before figure skating turned it upside down, seemed normal. Our town of Riverside, Connecticut, was part of Greenwich, and we had the advantage of their wonderful community, with great beaches and beautiful parks. — Dorothy Hamill

Hutte, for instance, used to quote the case of a fellow he called "the beach man." This man had spent forty years of his life on beaches or by the sides of swimming pools, chatting pleasantly with summer visitors and rich idlers. He is to be seen, in his bathing costume, in the corners and backgrounds of thousands of holiday snaps, among groups of happy people, but no one knew his name and why he was there. And no one noticed when one day he vanished from the photographs. I did not dare tell Hutte, but I felt that "the beach man" was myself. Though it would not have surprised him if I had confessed it. Hutte was always saying that, in the end, we were all "beach men" and that "the sand" - I am quoting his own words - "keeps the traces of our footsteps only a few moments. — Patrick Modiano

I have finally come around to asking myself what is expressed in that sand of written words which I have strung together throughout my life, that sand that seems to me to be so far away from the beaches and desert of living. Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come close to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and model. — Italo Calvino

Imagine that the whole world belongs to you. The birch trees in New Hampshire's White Mountains are yours, and so are the cirrus clouds in the western sky at dusk and the black sand on the beaches of Hawaii's big island.
You own everything, my dear sovereign - the paintings in all the museums of the world, as well as the internet and the wild horses and the roads. Please take good care of it all, OK? Be an enlightened monarch who treats your domain with reverent responsibility. And make sure you also enjoy the full measure of fun that comes with such mastery. Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you. — Rob Brezsny

Recalling his childhood in later life, Adams wrote of the unparalleled bliss of roaming in the open fields and woodlands of the town, of exploring the creeks, hiking the beaches, "of making and sailing boats ... swimming, skating, flying kites and shooting marbles, bat and ball, football ... wrestling and sometimes boxing," shooting at crows and ducks, and "running about to quiltings and frolics and sances among the boys and girls." The first fifteen years o fhis life, he said, :went off like a fairytale". — David McCullough

Nothing I do to describe these experiences can possibly convey the emotions that went with them. If there were a drug that could reproduce the same effect, I would be on that drug right now, and damn the side effects. Imagine a blend of all your favorite things: ice cream, sex, white sandy beaches, Beethoven's symphonies, all those happy times with your Garden-Weasel, the whole nine yards. Picture these experiences combined, boiled down into their most concentrated elements of pure joy, then multiplied by trillions and injected into every one of your cells. That might begin to help you imagine what I felt when the sense of Something Bigger emerged in the hurricane's eye of my life, surrounded by events that were otherwise completely devastating. The peace and joy were so dazzling, so potent, that I thought they would never fade. — Martha N. Beck

Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger
reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous
thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind
amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its
forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life. — Loren Eiseley

That which interests most people leaves me without any interest at all. This includes a list of things such as: social dancing, riding roller coasters, going to zoos, picnics, movies, planetariums, watching tv, baseball games; going to funerals, weddings, parties, basketball games, auto races, poetry readings, museums, rallies, demonstrations, protests, children's plays, adult plays ... I am not interested in beaches, swimming, skiing, Christmas, New Year's, the 4th of July, rock music, world history, space exploration, pet dogs, soccer, cathedrals and great works of Art. How can a man who is interested in almost nothing write about anything? Well, I do. I write and I write about what's left over: a stray dog walking down the street, a wife murdering her husband, the thoughts and feelings of a rapist as he bites into a hamburger sandwich; life in the factory, life in the streets and rooms of the poor and mutilated and the insane, crap like that, I write a lot of crap like that — Charles Bukowski

We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,
at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives onthe sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird. — Henry David Thoreau

Imagine a day when all plants and trees go on a strike, a bandh just for a day. All of us will die for want of oxygen." Reading this, I was instantly reminded of Bolivia's recent legislation (in December 2010) to grant all nature equal rights as humans. Justice William O. Douglas, writing against a 1972 decision by the United States Supreme Court, wrote, "Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation ... So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life ... The voice of the inanimate object, therefore, should not be stilled. — Anonymous

We were fortunate his brief psychic vision distracted him from what his fingertips could have told him about my face.
Of course we were aware that temporary clairvoyance was a lame and unlikely explanation. The ordering of this world, however is so abstruce, so deep and complex, most explanations that people to make sense of moments of strange experience are inadequate. Our very existence as thinking creatures is an astonishment that cant be solved. Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact more complex than the two combined. All life on earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us.
There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. — Dean Koontz

I've read all the books, I've watched all the films and now, thanks to the glory of home gaming, I've even kind of experienced it: I've landed on the beaches of Normandy, I have successfully held Pegasus Bridge and I've disabled German tanks with stolen Panzerfausts. I have fought in Italy, France and North Africa and if I had a Euro for every virtual life I've lost I'd be able to build a replica of Hitler's bunker in my back garden. — Tom Dunne

The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent, where wild- fowl had been, but where then there was no life nor sign of life - only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches. — Jack London

It only took Alexis a day to read a five-hundred page book. Fiction stories took her to another world where she could lose herself for a while in someone else's life.
Its funny how things like loans to pay back, a broken home and family, and a future to worry about meant nothing to characters who only had to worry about things like boys, beaches and fun. — Lindsay Chamberlin

You asked me if I believed in magic, and I said yes, and that's how. You just step out, start pulling your life out of the air. You make friends, you find work you really like doing, you find places. You find diners and Laundromats. You find beaches. You find a junk car and drive it for a month, then lave it beside the road. You find someone to fall in love with you. You make it all up as you go. Or, you know, maybe it makes you up. — Brad Barkley