Black Sea Quotes & Sayings

The challenge, however, is that Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon do not publish their algorithms. In fact, the methods they use to filter the information you see are deeply proprietary and the "secret sauce" that drives each company's profitability. The problem with this invisible "black box" algorithmic approach to information is that we do not know what has been edited out for us and what we are not seeing. As a result, our digital lives, mediated through a sea of screens, are being actively manipulated and filtered on a daily basis in ways that are both opaque and indecipherable. — Marc Goodman

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive. — Tyler Perry

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo. — Edith Wharton

Startled, I accidently knock over my inkwell. A black tsunami of ink sprawls out across the page, engulfing the tiny village of my words. They are swept away into the midnight sea. Gone forever. I am bereft. — Danger Slater

Even judges' children hear something about the world, they go to the Black Sea like everyone in the country. They look out and feel the same urge to go somewhere, feel it tugging at them from head to toe. You don't have to be particularly bad off to think: This can't be a the life I get. The judges' children know as well as Lilli and me that the same sky that looks down on the border guards stretches all the way to Italy or Canada, where things are better than here. One way or the other, the attempt will be made, whether sooner or later, in this way or that. — Herta Muller

I grew up in Bulgaria in a small city on the Black Sea Coast, so I was very interested in the sea, marine life, and everything related to it. But it was also a very dark place at night, so I could see the stars. And I just got very interested in it. — Dimitar Sasselov

When he finally lifted his head up from the sea to cough, then breathe, he looked out at all the water before him, at the vast expanse of time and space. He could hear Marjorie laughing, and soon, he laughed too. When he finally reached her, she was moving just enough to keep her head above water. The black stone necklace rested just below her collarbone and Marcus watched the glints of gold come off it, shining in the sun. "Here," Marjorie said. "Have it." She lifted the stone from her neck, and placed it around Marcus's. "Welcome home. — Yaa Gyasi

The Black was looking out on the open sea; his ears pricked forward, his thin-skinned nostrils quivering, his black mane flowing like windswept flame. Alec could not turn his eyes away; he could not believe such a perfect creature existed. — Walter Farley

Goed morgen, fentomen!" a deckhand shouts to them as he passes by, his arms full of rope. All the ship's crew call them fentomen. It is the Kerch word for ghosts. When the girl asks the quartermaster why, he laughs and says it's because they are so pale and because of the way they stand silent at the ship's railing, staring at the sea for hours, as if they've never seen water before. She smiles and does not tell him the truth: that they must keep their eyes on the horizon. They are watching for a ship with black sails. Baghra's — Leigh Bardugo

The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low:
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand. — Robert Browning

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor... — Cormac McCarthy

The fog lifted in the evening and a blue-black band at the horizon marked the end of the sea and the beginning of thought. Where does a beginning begin when nothing has gone on before? — Gretel Ehrlich

At the end of all this, Russia held in her hands a vast belt of land running from the Baltic sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, comprising eleven nations with a population of 100 million people. — John T. Flynn

We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there
stood silently in air.
Where else do we ever have to go, and why? — Naomi Shihab Nye

The Soviet Union had achieved an unusual boon through the pact. The Eastern part of Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea was declared as their sphere of influence. They spelled out by name the three Baltic republics: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - all three formerly, under the tsars, Russian territory. The two signatories included as part of the Soviet sphere of influence Bessarabia. Northern Bukovina had not been included in that sinister deal, yet Russia made its own decision to annex it, together with Bessarabia. They made it a kind of connecting bridge to Southern Poland. — Pearl Fichman

Everyone knew Russia's ambitions extended to the Crimea, but a few years earlier some steam was let out of the kettle when the pro-nationalist Ukrainian president was replaced by a pro-Russian successor. The fate of the Black Sea fleet in the port of Sevastopol seemed secure, and Russia went about its business. — Tom Clancy

The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea. — Daphne Du Maurier

We swam in sunshine and in rain; we swam in the morning, when the sea was sluggish as soup, we swam at night, the water flowing over our arms like undulations of black satin; one afternoon we stayed in the water during a thunderstorm, and a fork of lightning struck the surface of the sea so closer to us we heard the crackle of it and smelt the burnt air. — John Banville

Cold be hand and heart and bone, and cold be sleep under stone: never more to wake on stony bed, never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead. In the black wind the stars shall die, and still on gold here let them lie, till the dark lord lifts his hand over dead sea and withered land. — J.R.R. Tolkien

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. — Cormac McCarthy

Childhood is bound like the Gordian knot with my memories of the Black Sea, and I still feel its waters welling up within me today. Sometimes these waters are leaden, as grey as the military ships that sail on their curved expanses, and sometimes they are blue as pigmented cobalt. Then would come dusk, when I would sit and watch the seabirds waver to shore, flitting from open waters to the quiet empty vastlands in darkening spaces behind me, the same birds Ovid once saw during his exile, perhaps; and the same waters the Argonauts crossed searching for the fleece of renewal.

And out in the distance, invisible, the towering heights of Caucasus, where once-bright memories of the fire-thief have transmuted into something weird and many-faceted, and beyond these, pitch-black Karabakh in dolorous Armenia. — Paul Christensen

And like a drowning woman who chooses the black sea instead of rescue, she did not take it. — Tess Gerritsen

That day, that day when I can gaze at the sea
both of us calm
and I, trusting, having poured my whole heart into my Life Work ... when death
black waves!
no longer courts me and I can smile, constantly, at everything because, my bones, there will be so little of myself left to give it. — Juan Ramon Jimenez

WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back. — James Salter

And Peter became a tall and deep-chested man and a great warrior, and he was called King Peter the Magnificent. And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet and the kings of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage. And she was called Queen Susan the Gentle. Edmund was a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgment. he was called King Edmund the Just. But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden-haired, and all princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen, and her own people called her Queen Lucy the Valiant. — C.S. Lewis

The true sea is cold and black, full of animals... — Jean-Paul Sartre

The face before him was like nothing he had ever seen before. It was smooth, with a black strip of cloth tied over its forehead, and yet it was deeply furrowed, like the sea, that can have tall waves but not a wrinkle on the surface. The eyes were like dark chasms and yet they were the eyes of a human being and not empty sockets. The skin was a greenish olive colour and looked as if it were made of bronze ... — Gustav Meyrink

Sometimes friends do foolish things. My father told me that true friends are like gold coins. Ships are wrecked by storms and lie for hundreds of years on the ocean floor. Worms destroy the wood. Iron corrodes. Silver turns black but gold doesn't change in sea water. It loses none of its brilliance or colour. It comes up the same. It survives shipwrecks and time. — Michael Robotham

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

We'd need to leave fast. The biggest hurdle would be finding a ship. Passages across the Atlantic didn't always work out. The Black Sea wasn't easy to cross either. The ancient Greeks called it Pontos Axenos, the Hostile Sea. In our day and age, Greek myths were lifesaving required reading, and I'd read enough of them to know that the Black Sea wasn't a fun place.
"Where on the Black Sea?"
"Georgia."
Colchis. Bodyguard detail in the land of the Golden Fleece, dragons, and witches, where the Argonauts had sailed and nearly died. — Ilona Andrews

His desire was as deep and boundless as the sea, but when the tide receded, the rocks of shame and guilt thrust up as sharp as ever. Sometimes the waves would cover them, but they remained beneath the waters, hard and black and slimy. — George R R Martin

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. — Dylan Thomas

Bakhchisaray was formerly the capital of the Crimean khanate and once an important crossroad of the Silk Road, where traders met from across the Black Sea, the steppes of Central Asia, Russia, and eastern Europe. — Tim Cope

The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black. — Roberto Bolano

Scholars of the Therin Collegium, from their comfortable position well inland, could tell you that the wolf sharks of the Iron Sea are beautiful and fascinating creatures, their bodies more packed with muscle than any bull, their abrasive hide streaked with every color from old-copper green to stormcloud black. Anyone actually working the waterfront in Camorr and on the nearby coast could tell you that wolf sharks are big aggressive bastards that like to jump. — Scott Lynch

Red, brown, yellow, green, black. Five colours to say everything that could be said. And what Cy suddenly wanted, more than anything in the world just then, what he wanted was that missing blue, primary and resistant to the trade. Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother's sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing. — Sarah Hall

Before us, over the tree tops, we beheld a great field of open sea to the East. Sheer above us rose single pines, black with precipices. There was no sound but that of the distant breakers, mounting from all around, and the chirp of countless insects in the brush. Not a man, not a sail upon the sea; the very largeness of the view increased the sense of solitude. — Robert Louis Stevenson

From the tower battlements, Dustfinger looked down on a lake as black as night, where the reflection of the castle swam in a sea of stars. The wind passing over his unscarred face was cold from the snow of the surrounding mountains, and Dustfinger relished life as if he were tasting it for the first time. The longing it brought, and the desire. All the bitterness, all the sweetness, even if it was only for a while, never for more than a while, everything gained and lost, lost and found again. — Cornelia Funke

It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. - It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. - It's a blasted heath. - It's a Hyperborean winter scene. - It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. — Herman Melville

New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.
Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life
Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines.
Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored,
The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree
Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning.
See your rivers stirring with musk alligators
And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens.
Just open your eyes to the April rainbow
And your eyes, especially your ears, to God
Who in one burst of saxophone laughter
Created heaven and earth in six days,
And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep. — Leopold Sedar Senghor

At the end of the world there lies a mountain so high it makes you dizzy even to think about it. It is as black as soot, as smooth as silk, terribly steep, and where there should be a bottom, there are only clouds. But high up on the peak stands the Hobgoblin's House, and it looks like this." And Snufkin drew a house in the sand.
"Hasn't it got any windows?" asked Sniff.
"No," said Snufkin, "and it hasn't got a door either, because the Hobgoblin always goes home by air riding on a black panther. He goes out every night and collects rubies in his hat."
"What did you say?" asked Sniff, with his eyes popping out of his head. "Rubies! Where does he get them from?"
"The Hobgoblin can change himself into anything he likes," Snufkin answered, "and then he can crawl under the ground and even down onto the sea bed where buried treasure lies. — Tove Jansson

Death Valley is the perfect flesh-grilling device, the Foreman Grill in Mother Nature's cupboard.

It's a big, shimmering sea of salt ringed by mountains that bottle up the heat and force it right back down on your skull. The average air temperature hovers around 125 degrees, but once the sun rises and begins broiling the desert floor, the ground beneath Scott's feet would hit a nice, toasty 200 degrees - exactly the temperature you need to slow roast a prime rib. Plus, the air is so dry that by the time you feel thirsty, you could be as good as dead; sweat is sucked so quickly from your body,you can be dangerously dehydrated before it even registers in your throat. Try to conserve water,and you could be a dead man walking.

But every July, ninety runners from around the world spend up to sixty straight hours running down the sizzling black ribbon of Highway 190, making sure to stay on the white lines so the soles of their running shoes don't melt. — Christopher McDougall

black eyes need no translating; the mind itself throws a shadow upon them. In them thought opens or shuts, shines forth or goes out in darkness, hangs steadfast like the setting moon or like the swift and restless lightning illumines all quarters of the sky. They who from birth have had no other speech than the trembling of their lips learn a language of the eyes, endless in expression, deep as the sea, clear as the heavens, wherein play dawn and sunset, light and shadow. The — Rabindranath Tagore

I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound. — Robin Hobb

And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred. — Herman Melville

Three hundred nights like three hundred walls
must rise between my love and me
and the sea will be a black art between us.
Time with a hard hand will tear out
the streets tangled in my breast.
Nothing will be left but memories.
(O afternoons earned with suffering,
nights hoping for the sight of you,
dejected vacant lots, poor sky
shamed in the bottom of the puddles
like a fallen angel ...
And your life that graces my desire
and that run-down and lighthearted neighborhood
shining today in the glow of my love ... )
Final as a statue
your absence will sadden other fields. — Jorge Luis Borges

In this night too, in this night of his mortal eyes into which he was now descending, love and danger were again waiting ...
a murmur of glory and hexameters, of men defending a temple the gods will not save, and of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle;
the murmor of the Odysseys and Iliads it was his destiny to sing and leave echoing concavely in the memory of man.
These things we know, but not those he felt descending into the last shade of all. — Jorge Luis Borges

Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom
so deep that not even light could touch it.
And yet, down in those impossible depths, she thought she could see tiny lights sparkling. She stared uncertainly at the tiny glimmerings. They seemed almost like scattered grains of sand lit from within; in some places they clustered like colonies, faint and twinkling.
Like stars ... — Fuyumi Ono

Beverly had thought how strange and wonderful it would be if the earth were hurled far from its orbit, into the cold extremes of black space where the sun was a faint cool disc, not even a quarter-moon, and night was everlasting. Imagine the industry, she thought, as every tree, every piece of coal, and every scrap of wood were burned for heat and light. Though the sea would freeze, men would go out in the darkness and pierce it's glassy ice to find the stilled fish. But finally all the animals would be eaten and their hides and wool stitched and woven, all the coal would be burned, and not a tree would be left standing. Silence would rule the earth, for the wind would stop and the sea would be heavy glass. People would die quietly, buried in their furs and down. — Mark Helprin

Canceled checks will be to future historians and cultural anthropologists what the Dead Sea Scrolls and hieroglyphics are to us. — Brent Staples

The new era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death against the world in arms; the black flag waved night and day from the great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils of France, as if the dragon's teeth had been sown broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore. — Charles Dickens

The sea stood up before him, foaming, torn by lightning bolts, opening terrifying mouths that gobbled up the dense, hard black rains unleashed by the sky like hate. — Jean-Francois Beauchemin

Then, upon turning their heads,they realised that they had unwittingly been following a succession of winding paths more complicated than those of a mine. There was no end to Harcamone's interior. It was more decked with black than capital whose king has just been assassinated. A voice from the heart declared: "The interior is grieving," and they swelled with fear, which rose within them like a light wind above the sea. — Jean Genet

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was so pissed off at what happened, at myself, I didn't think."
He stroked a hand down her hair first, then gave the choppy ends a quick tug. "I'm not angry with you."
"I know. You could be, but you're not. So I have to be even sorrier."
"Your logic is fascinating, and elusive."
"I can't pay you back with sex or salt-crusted sea bass or whatever because you're too busy taking care of me. So now I've got this black mark in my column against the bright shiny star in yours, and - "
He tipped her head up. "Are we keeping score?"
"No. Maybe. Shit."
"How am I doing?"
"Undisputed champ."
"Good. I like to win." He brushed her bangs back to study the injury himself. "You'll do. Let's eat. — J.D. Robb

I am too weary.
For oh, I am so terribly weary at last! I think, in all of London, there is no-one and nothing so weary as I - unless perhaps the river, which flows beneath the frigid sky, through its accustomed courses, to the sea. How deep, how black, how thick the water seems to-night! How soft its surface seems to lie. How chill its depths must be. — Sarah Waters

A black-crowned night heron stood on an apron of wet sand, looking across the channel. The feather plume at the back of his head lifted in a faint breeze. Out there the channel churned its cyclonic eddies counterclockwise. Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that well up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning. — Gretel Ehrlich

What was left of his fortune, the Laughing Man converted into diamonds, which he lowered casually, in emerald vaults, into the Black Sea. His personal wants were few. He subsisted exclusively on rice and eagle's blood, in a tiny cottage with an underground gymnasium and shooting range, on the stormy coast of Tibet. — J.D. Salinger

The crickets kept crepitating; from time to time there came a sweet whiff of burning juniper; and above the black alpestrine steppe, above the silken sea, the enormous, all-engulfing sky, dove-gray with stars, made one's head spin, and suddenly Martin again experienced a feeling he had known on more than one occasion as a child: an unbearable intensification of all his senses, a magical and demanding impulse, the presence of something for which alone it was worth living. — Vladimir Nabokov

The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anynymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. — Cormac McCarthy

And we lived in a world that was evil. A world that was like a great black ship pulling away from the shore of sanity and civilization, roaring its black horn in the night, taking two billion people with it, whether they wanted to go or not, to death, to fall over the edge of the earth and the sea into radioactive flame and madness. — Ray Bradbury

I opened my eyes; how could I keep them shut when I could not sleep? The same darkness brooded over me; the same unfathomable black eternity which my thoughts strove against and could not understand. I made the most despairing efforts to find a word black enough to characterize this darkness; a word so horribly black that it would darken my lips if I named it. Lord! how dark it was! and I am carried back in thought to the sea and the dark monsters that lay in wait for me. They would draw me to them, and clutch me tightly and bear me away by land and sea, through dark realms that no soul has seen. I feel myself on board, drawn through waters, hovering in clouds, sinking
sinking. — Knut Hamsun

This sludge oozes like a dying sea snake, though it tastes like it's already dead. Some evil force made up this concoction, intending to release it to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world. But the creator made the mistake of tasting his creation and passed on. The world was saved for a moment. Still, like the black plague, this thing refused to fade out forever. I'm sad to report that our good friend Cliff behind the bar rediscovered it. Now it's spreading around the world as if carried by rats. — Ace Boggess

Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon. — Margaret Mahy

We lay side by side on the extension roof, hands behind our heads, elbows just touching. My head was still spinning a little, not unpleasantly, from the dancing and the wine. The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Big Dipper, Orion's Belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right. — Tana French

When the windowpanes start to turn from black to gray, my sisters cradle themselves around me, rocking me like the sea until I can taste the salt of our tears — Sarah Miller

Waves tossed themselves against the shore, dragging grit and sand between their nails as they were slowly pulled back out to sea. — Holly Black

In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead. — Junot Diaz

Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set. — Iain M. Banks

A bedraggled woman stood on his doorstep in the pouring rain, and his first impulse was to slam the door in her face.
But she had clearly come as far as she could; her pale face was twisted in pain, and she shivered convulsively beneath a denim jacket that was as soaking wet as the rest of her. Long black strands of hair hung down in twisted ribbons like seaweed in the vanishing daylight, reminding him of a sea creature he'd once dated briefly in his more adventurous youth. — Deborah Blake

Turkey is a European country, an Asian country, a Middle Eastern country, Balkan country, Caucasian country, neighbor to Africa, Black Sea country, Caspian Sea, all these. — Ahmet Davutoglu

I invent her, then, as a woman emerging from the sea.
A tall man meets here on the black sand.
You've come back, he says.
Can barely see her in the sea-light.
They make love there, and become horses.
As night grows black they become weeds — Maggie Nelson

Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room - a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room. — Yukio Mishima

Even so We find the sea of sorrow. Black as night The sullen surface meets our frightened gaze, As down we sink to darkness and despair ... — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Gray February skies, misty white sands, black rocks, and the sea seemed black too, like a monochrome photograph, with only the girl in the yellow raincoat adding any color to the world. — Neil Gaiman

What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang? — Countee Cullen

She told me that while my father's body might be crushed under tons of black earth, the body is nothing but camouflage. She whispered that every soul is a river trying to find its way back to the sea. — Simon Van Booy

This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye. — Ted Hughes

At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were to exchange. 'I cannot swim. You know it?"

In the dark she saw the flash of his smile. 'Trust me.' And he drew her with a strong hand until the green phosphorescence beaded her ankles, and deeper, and deeper, until the thick milk-warm water, almost unfelt, was up to her waist. She heard him swear feelingly to himself as the salt water searched out, discovered his burns. Then with a rustle she saw his pale head sink back into the quiet sea and at the same moment she was gripped and drawn after him, her face to the stars, drawn through the tides with the sea lapping like her lost hair at her cheeks, the drive of his body beneath her pulling them both from the shore. They were launched on the long journey towards the slim shape, black against glossy black, which was the brigantine, with Thompson on board. — Dorothy Dunnett

BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India's East and to the west, the world's West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once. — Salman Rushdie

The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon. — Rick Yancey

That fellow was like all of us: descended from good people who were stolen from their families and country, sailed over the sea, and forced into slavery. 'We don't let them steal our dignity,' that preacher said. Richard, his name was. He said they cannot steal our honor, our strength, or our love." "True words," I said. "Do you know what he said about this America?" Henry asked. I shook my head. "Remember, lads?" Henry asked his mates. "Join with me. He said, 'This land . . .'" A half dozen voices spoke with Henry, strong black men sharing the preacher's words like a hymn or a prayer. "'Which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country.'" The words drifted up to the stars with the sparks from the fire. "We go to war, Missus Isabel," Henry added, "in order to make our mother country, this land, free for everyone. — Laurie Halse Anderson

She was floating in the midst of a black sea, in the darkest of nights, with no hope or care to see light again. She was a mere wave away from drowning in blackness. — Anam Iqbal

What big eyes you have. Eyes of an incomparable luminosity, the numinous phosphorescence of the eyes of lycanthropes. The gelid green of your eyes fixes my reflective face; It is a preservative, like a green liquid amber; it catches me. I am afraid I will be trapped in it for ever like the poor little ants and flies that stuck their feet in resin before the sea covered the Baltic. He winds me into the circle of his eye on a reel of birdsong. There is a black hole in the middle of both your eyes; it is their still centre, looking there makes me giddy, as if I might fall into it. — Angela Carter

On the Black Sea, my father saw it begin. And on the Black Sea, seventy years on, I saw the beginning of its end. — Neal Ascherson

The View from Europe And that was Africa: the long line to the south little higher than the Atlantic that defined it. The sea rolled its drums on the shore, broke in white foam, flowers for the hair of the girls. I sipped the wind with my nostrils, and the smell was the smell of fear. Two million- year-old skulls surfaced from soil fathoms, grinning their disdain at the accuracy of the new weapons. And that was Eden indeed: Adam was black and the woman, Eve, was black; and the serpent, master of the click languages, spoke to them sibilantly of how the machine would sound as it waited under the tree of death, offering them nothing but a pretence of life. 1988 — R.S. Thomas

That afternoon the sky was scattered with black clouds galloping in from the sea and clustering over the city. Flashes of lightening echoed on the horizon and a charged warm wind smelling of dust announced a powerful summer storm. When I reached the station I noticed the first few drops, shiny and heavy, like coins falling from heaven ... Night seemed to fall suddenly, interrupted only by the lightning now bursting over the city, leaving a trail of noise and fury. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Go to the Black Sea, meet new people, see beautiful places, get killed by a mutant carnivorous kangaroo goat. One item off my bucket list. — Ilona Andrews

I didn't die. I never died. I'm not dead. OK, I feel pretty rotten about the whole situation- the way I disappeared that night without saying where I eas going and how everyone assumed I really was dead, and the way I let them believe it.
Things had gotten on top of me. It was because of this whole sequence of events that made me want to cycle down to the shore and tumble into the black sea. — Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

The autumn stars had come out, incredible in number and brilliance, twinkling and almost blinking because of the dust stirred up by the earthquake and the wind, so that the whole sky seemed to tremble, a shaking of diamond chips, a scintillation of sunlight on a black sea. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Lisa was thinking, as she climbed the apparently unending staircase, the she had taken pretty long odds. She had not hesitated to buck the Tiger, Life. Simon Iff had warned her that she was acting on impulse. But
on the top of that
he had merely urged her to be true to it. She swore once more that she would stick to her guns. The black mood fell from her. She turned and looked upon the sea, now far below. The sun, a hollow orb of molten glory, hung quivering in the mist of the Mediterranean; and Lisa entered for a moment into a perfect peace of spirit. She became once with Nature, instead of a being eternally at war with it. — Aleister Crowley

Though sands be black and bitter black the sea, Night lie before me and behind me night, And God within far Heaven refuse to light The consolation of the dawn for me,
Between the shadowy burns of Heaven and Hell, It is enough love leaves my soul to dwell With memory. — Madison Cawein

Do you ever think about the ocean?" Nick asked me.
"What about it?" I said.
"Like what could live down there? Like how there's as much life down there as up here? Maybe more?"
"God Lives Underwater," said someone. "That's the name of a band. They're awesome."
"But seriously," Nick said, "it's like an alternate universe. Right here on our own planet."
"Right here, a hundred feet from us," said Sheila.
"Right here in my hair," said one of the girls who had swum, pulling some sea gunk out of her wet hair.
Everyone laughed quietly at that. Nick drank his beer. The wood crackled as it burned. We all stared at the black ocean. — Blake Nelson

A sea of people in red crowded around it. I looked at
Mallory's black hoodie and my gray sweater and realized we'd forgotten to wear the school colors. Oh, well. There was always my hair. — Kim Harrington

Pirates?' Lara gasped. 'But we're not at sea. How can they be pirates?'
Weren't pirates supposed to wear eye-patches, feather earrings and lots of black eye-liner, and say 'arrrrr' a lot? Or was that just Johnny Depp? Lara was confused. — Lola Salt

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones. — China Mieville

But when they brought Sabira out, the crowd parted almost magically. A sea of hands rose faster than a swell and a bidding war commenced, amongst these civilized gentlemen who made their living off the backs of slaves. — Jay Grewal

It's not a huge surprise that there are habitations at the bottom of the Black Sea. — Robert Ballard

Many people are walking along the shore, turning poetic springtime faces towards the sea; they're having a holiday because of the sun. [ ... ] The true sea is cold and black, full of animals; it crawls under this thin green film made to deceive human beings. — Jean-Paul Sartre

In the toils of orgasm - she said, she said - she'd be whelmed in a warm green sea through which, dulled by the murk of it, pass a series of small suns like the footlights of a revolving stage, an electric carousel wheeling in a green ether. Envy's color is the color of her pleasuring, and what is the color of grief? Is it black as they say? And anger always red? The color of that sad shade of ennui called blue is blue but blue unlike the sky or sea, a bitter blue, rue-tinged, discolored at the edges. The color of a blind man's noon is white, and is his nighttime too? And does he feel it with his skin like a fish? Does he have blues, are they bridal and serene, or yellows, sunlike or urinous, does he remember? Neural colors like the fleeting tones of dreams. The color of this life is water. — Cormac McCarthy

CHILDHOOD I That idol, black eyes and yellow mop, without parents or court, nobler than Mexican and Flemish fables; his domain, insolent azure and verdure, runs over beaches called by the shipless waves, names ferociously Greek, Slav, Celt. At the border of the forest - dream flowers tinkle, flash, and flare, - the girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the clear flood that gushes from the fields, nakedness shaded, traversed, dressed by rainbow, flora, sea. Ladies who stroll on terraces adjacent to the sea; baby girls and giantesses, superb blacks in the verdigris moss, jewels upright on the rich ground of groves and little thawed gardens, - young mothers and big sisters with eyes full of pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses tyrannical of costume and carriage, little foreign misses and young ladies gently unhappy. What boredom, the hour of the "dear body" and "dear heart." II — Arthur Rimbaud