Coral Quotes & Sayings

A poisonous snake is not dangerous, not any more than a loaded gun is dangerous - in each case, if you handle it properly. The thing that made that coral snake dangerous was that I hadn't known what it was, what it could do. If, in my ignorance, I had handled it carelessly, it would have killed me as casually and as innocently as a kitten scratches. — Robert A. Heinlein

Coral reefs represent some of the world's most spectacular beauty spots, but they are also the foundation of marine life: without them many of the sea's most exquisite species will not survive. — Sheherazade Goldsmith

I think I need to spend some time with safari but what arrests my attention are salient, sadomasochism, saccadic, and salad days. I think I will go learn more about coral only to learn a lot more about corollary and counterturn and coffin nail. I go from magnificence to means to marquee to maniac to distyle, ductile, hindsight, shell game, veronica, yardstick, ball field, magpie, variegated, and close shave. — Dara Wier

Miraculously, though, the same coral heads that split the ship's sides held the wounded vessel fast, upright as if she were in the jaws of a vise. — Kieran Doherty

It's impossible to imagine our planet without coral. — Ian Somerhalder

As to her rank, she should be at the very least a princess, seeing that she is my lady and my queen. Her beauty is superhuman, for in it are realized all the impossible and chimerical attributes that poets are accustomed to give their fair ones. Her locks are golden, her brow the Elysian Fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her complexion snow-white. As for those parts which modesty keeps covered from the human sight, it is my opinion that, discreetly considered, they are only to be extolled and not compared to any other. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Nature delights in making use of the same forms in the most various biological connections: as it does, for instance, in the appearance of branch-like structures both in coral and in plants, and indeed in some forms of crystal and in certain chemical precipitates. — Sigmund Freud

Bright coral and sand spread thirty-five feet below, crisp in the air-clear water. Blue clouds of Creole wrasse parted as Hugh dropped. White and yellow flashes of yellowtail snapper flitting past. How could he have questioned if coming back here was the right thing? Bubbles rose from five buddy teams. Swimming five different directions. Hugh kicked hard after the nearest pair. — Tim W. Jackson

You have to store up books, becoming acquainted with human experience; let them lie around your thoughts, becoming yours - ring upon ring, as a tree grows, let them rise up from the depths like coral islands.

If it gets crowded with all the books and there's nowhere to put your bed, it's better to exchange it for a folding bed — Victor Shklovsky

French Polynesia embraces a vast ocean area strewn with faraway outer islands, each with a mystique of its own. The 118 islands and atolls are scattered over an expanse of water 18 times the size of California, though in dry land terms the territory is only slightly bigger than Rhode Island. The distance from one end of the island groups to another is four times further than from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Every oceanic island type is represented in these sprawling archipelagoes positioned midway between California and New Zealand. The coral atolls of the Tuamotus are so low they're threatened by rising sea levels, while volcanic Tahiti soars to 2,241 meters. Bora Bora and Maupiti, also high volcanic islands, rise from the lagoons of what would otherwise be atolls.
— David Stanley

His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palms of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the slope that had never known the print of a boot, there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist - only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles. And — Evelyn Waugh

But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space. — Terence McKenna

To the untrained (human) eye, Thalassinia looks like an expanse of coral reefs and volcanic formations. There are no straight lines or geometric shapes to give away the fact that the structures are actually mermade. (Get it? Mermade. Like mermaid, but ... oh, never mind.) — Tera Lynn Childs

How tranquil is a coral tomb, and may the heavens grant that my companions and I be buried in no other! — Jules Verne

A bard's down-to-earth love: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red and when she walks, treads on the ground ... — John Geddes

I build a book the way coral reefs are built: millions of little calcareous skeletons piling up one atop another, though in my case the skeletons are drafts. — Dean Koontz

My island was not wild, compared to this.
There are such monsters in a palace. — Foz Meadows

I forget myself sometimes, but then I look up, as I am looking up now, and I see in my mind's eye a sheild, strangely changed by a rich encrusting of jewel-like barnacles and cold-water coral, with an eight foot tooth sticking right out of the middle of it. I reach out and the edge of that tooth is still so bitingly sharp after all these years that just a gentle brush with the fingers might send a rain of blood down on these pages. And I bend my head, not too close, and I am sure I can hear, very faintly:
Once I set the sea alight
With a single fiery breath ...
Once I was so mighty that I thought
My name was Death ...
Sing out loud until you're eaten,
Song of melancholy blisss,
For the mighty and the middling
All shall come to THIS ...
The Supper is still singing. — Cressida Cowell

Cat," said Peterkin, turning his head a little on one side, "I love you. — R.M. Ballantyne

A HEART OF LAPIS

The most beautiful stones adorn my neck
Like an Ancient Egyptian collar.
Two glistening balls of onyx sit on top
Followed by a double stretch of coral.
At the center is a lapis heart,
Deeper in color than the Red Sea waters
And I am so grateful for this heavenly gift
This precious necklace is
My daughter. — Suzy Kassem

This We Have Now

This we have no
is not imagination.

This is not
grief or joy.

Not a judging state,
or an elation,
or sadness.

Those come
and go.

This is the presence
that doesn't.

It's dawn, Husam,
here in the splendor of coral,
inside the Friend, the simple truth
of what Hallaj said.

What else could human beings want?

When grapes turn to wine
they're wanting
this.

When the nightsky pours by,
it's really a crowd of beggars,
and they all want some of this!

This
that we are now
created the body, cell by cell,
like bees building a honeycomb.

The human body and the universe
grew from this, not this
from the universe and the human body. — Jalaluddin Rumi

Blue is for cruel bargains; green is for daring what you oughtn't; violet is for brute force. I will say to you: Coral coaxes; pink insists; red compels. I will say to you: You are dear to me as attar of roses. Please do not get eaten. — Catherynne M Valente

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

You always save the best lies for yourself. — Coral Russell

He didn't ask because he didn't wanted to know. If you know, moments die an instant death. She held his hand in hers; hiding them like a pearl; her coral eyes ensconcing his pain. — Aporva Kala

Centuries-old habitats such as coral gardens are destroyed in an instant by bottom trawls, pulverized by weighted nets into barren plains. And global carbon dioxide emissions from human activity affect the ocean, changing the pH balance of the waters in a phenomenon known as ocean acidification. — Ted Danson

Each day Marda gets closer. The sub circles coral reefs off the coasts, where mermaids are said to like the colors of the schools of fishes, and train them to swim around their necks like jewelry or live behind their ears, beneath their long hair. Sometimes mermaids like shallow places, but mostly they like the dark and the beautiful, uncharted, abandoned, soulless parts of the undiscovered world. — Holly Walrath

There are ecosystems like coral reefs [at risk] through ocean acidification. Those are valuable things that we should protect. — Bill Gates

Sometimes the gravest things must, of necessity, become the most comic. It's how we know they haven't destroyed us. — Foz Meadows

The coral zoophyte may be leveled by transported masses swept over by the waters; yet like the trodden sod, it sprouts again, and continues to grow and flourish as before. — James Dwight Dana

Jane was wearing a charcoal shift dress. The black dipped into a love V accented with a large black chiffon bow. A layer of delicate black lace peeked out from the bottom of her dress. Her long blond hair was pulled back tightly into a straight ironed ponytail. Her makeup was simple: coral blush on her cheeks and gunmetal shadow brushed under her blue eyes. — Lauren Conrad

A Mexican guy named Sam pushes Gary Frankel next to Isabel. "This guy can break your arm with one snap, asshole. Get out of my sight before I sic him on you," Sam says.
Gary, who's wearing a coral shirt and white pants, growls to look tough. It doesn't work. — Simone Elkeles

Where I'm going, anything may happen. Nothing may happen. Maybe I will marry a middle-aged widower, or a longshoreman, or a cattle-hoof-trimmer, or a barrister or a thief. And have my children in time. Or maybe not. Most of the chances are against it. But not, I think, quite all. What will happen? What will happen. It may be that my children will always be temporary, never to be held. But so are everyone's.
I may become, in time, slightly more eccentric all the time. I may begin to wear outlandish hats, feathered and sequinned and rosetted, and dangling necklaces made from coy and tiny seashells which I've gathered myself along the beach and painted coral-pink with nail polish. And all the kids will laugh, and I'll laugh, too, in time. I will be light and straight as any feather. The wind will bear me, and I will drift and settle, and drift and settle. Anything may happen, where I'm going. — Margaret Laurence

The Young Wrecker on the Florida Reef, and Reap the Wild Wind, Oliver Griswold's The Florida Keys and the Coral Reef, and McGuane's Ninety-two in the Shade. — Tom Corcoran

Gonpo Tso was born a princess. As a young woman, she dressed in fur-trimmed robes with fat ropes of coral beads strung around her neck. She lived in an adobe castle on the edge of the Tibetan plateau with a reception room large enough to accommodate the thousand Buddhist monks who once paid tribute to her father. — Barbara Demick

Quinces are ripe...when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. they are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. but even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate--useless...until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak-up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. to answer your questionlove is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched. ~The Book of Salt — Monique Truong

I never knew words could be so sharp, until the wrong ones cut me — Foz Meadows

Bellis gasped.
Everywhere lights where suspended. Globes of cold illumination like frost moons, with no trace of the sepia of the New Crobuzon's gaslamps. The city glowed in the darkening water like a net full of ghostly lights.
The outer edges of the city were low buildings in porous stone and coral. — China Mieville

I knew from experience that before you went swimming off a dock for the first time each summer, you needed to check the sides and the ladder carefully for bryozoan, colonies of slimy green critters that grew on hard surfaces underwater (think coral, but gelatinous-shudder). They wouldn't hurt you, they were part of a healthy freshwater ecosystem, their presence meant the water was pristine and unpolluted, blah blah blah-but none of this was any consolation if you accidentally touched them. Poking around with a water ski and finding nothing, I spent the rest of the afternoon watching for Sean from the water.
And getting out occasionally when he sped by in the boat, in order to woo him like Halle Berry coming out of the ocean in a James Bond movie (which I had seen with the boys about a hundred times. Bikini scene, seven hundred times). Only I seemed to have misplaced my dagger. — Jennifer Echols

You marvel that this matter, shuffled pell-mell at the whim of Chance, could have made a man, seeing that so much was needed for the construction of his being. But you must realize that a hundred million time this matter, on the way to human shape, has been stopped to form now a stone, now lead, now coral, now a flower, now a comet; and all because of more or fewer elements that were or were not necessary for designing a man. Little wonder if, within an infinite quantity of matter that ceaselessly changes and stirs, the few animals, vegetables, and minerals we see should happen to be made; no more wonder than getting a royal pair in a hundred casts of the dice. Indeed it is equally impossible for all this stirring not to lead to something; and yet this something will always be wondered at by some blockhead who will never realize how small a change would have made it into something else. — Cyrano De Bergerac

A smile flickered across Coral's face. "Have you ever noticed that once you have had a taste of certain sweets - raspberry trifle is my own despair - it is quite impossible not to think, not to want, not to crave until you have taken another bite?"
"Lord Swartingham is not a raspberry trifle."
"No, more of a dark chocolate mousse, I should think," Coral murmured.
"And," Anna continued as if she hadn't heard the interruption, "I don't need another bite, uh,night of him. — Elizabeth Hoyt

The Bahamas has mangrove nurseries, coral reefs, shallow sea grass beds, and deep oceanic trenches - all perfect ecosystems for sharks. Photographing multiple shark species in exquisite water was the assignment I had dreamed about from the start. — Brian Skerry

It was a clear, impenetrable hole in the ship: a circular viewport into an alien terrarium where, out past the ghostly reflection of his own face, strange hyperbaric creatures built monstrous artifacts out of sand and coral. Their eyes twinkled like green stars in the gloom. — Peter Watts

The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that is wasn't created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, have lived in it, known it, died in it
have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef. — Wallace Stegner

Can you read my thoughts?" she asked them.
"Are you talking to me?" Lee said.
"To all of you. Can you read my thoughts?"
"What are you trying to do - get me sent to seclusion?"
"Go to hell", Helene said pleasantly.
"Don't look at me," Miss Coral said, with the genteel horror of a countess visiting an abattoir, "I can't even read my own. — Joanne Greenberg

Michael wasn't on the pool deck, which was hard for me. None of my old Coral Springs teammates were around. Still, that old plane of cement felt like home. I folded my clothes and put them on the bench. I placed my water bottle under my starting block, and I dove in. Once again, I felt that ultimate state of transition, my feet no longer on the ground, my hands not yet in the water. — Dara Torres

We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer. — Terence McKenna

Not infrequently, when a man asks a woman to marry him, he means that he wants her to help him love himself, and if, blinded by her own feeling, she takes him for her captain, her pleasure craft becomes a pirate ship, the colours change to a black flag with a sinister sign, and her inevitable destiny is the coral reef. — Myrtle Reed

He was clearly related to Declan: same nose, same dark eyebrows, same phenomenal teeth. But there was a carefully cultivated sense of danger to this Lynch brother. This was not a rattlesnake hidden in the grass, but a deadly coral snake striped with warning colors. Everything about him was a warning: If this snake bit you, you had no one to blame but yourself. — Maggie Stiefvater

Fire+ Water= Blizzard Dragon or Cloud Dragon Fire + Plant= Spicy Dragon or Firebird Dragon Fire + Electric= Laser Dragon or Hot Metal Dragon Fire + Metal= Medieval Dragon or Steam punk Dragon Fire + Dark= Vampire Dragon or Dark Fire Dragon Water Dragon Hybrids Water + Earth = Mud Dragon Water + Fire = Cloud Dragon or Blizzard Dragon Water + Plant = Nenufar Dragon Water + Plant = Coral Dragon Water + Electric = Lantern Fish Dragon or Storm Dragon — Maple Tree Books

Sonnet 130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare. — William Shakespeare

Under business as usual, by mid-century things are looking rather grim," he told me a few hours after I had arrived at One Tree. We were sitting at a beat-up picnic table, looking out over the heartbreaking blue of the Coral Sea. The island's large and boisterous population of terns was screaming in the background. Caldeira paused: "I mean, they're looking grim already. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Despite the experimental success of the theory...the fact that the infinities occur at all continues to produce grumbling...Dirac in particular always referred to renormalization as sweeping the infinities under the rug. I disagreed with Dirac and argued the point with him at conferences at Coral Gables and Lake Constance. Taking account of the difference between the bare charge and mass of the electron and their measured values is not merely a trick that is invented to get rid of infinities; it is something we would have to do even if everything was finite. There is nothing arbitrary or ad hoc about the procedure; it is simply a matter of correctly identifying what we are actually measuring. — Steven Weinberg

Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served. — Herman Melville

It happened in Miami, in Coral Gables, a great big ol' Cuban wedding. It was pretty intense. — Jon Secada

Do you see the Field of Mars, where I walked next to my bride in her white wedding dress, with red sandals in her hands, when we were kids?"
"I see it well."
"We spent all our days afraid it was too good to be true, Tatiana," said Alexander. "We were always afraid all we had was a borrowed five minutes from now."
Her hands went on his face. "That's all any of us ever has, my love," she said. "And it all flies by."
"Yes," he said, looking at her, at the desert, covered coral and yellow with golden eye and globe mallow. "But what a five minutes it's been. — Paullina Simons

An eye for an eye.
And the whole world goes blind. — Lauren Oliver

I shall be a carrion monster, he whispered into the coral shell of her ear, an organ of women he found unspeakably moving in its soft, whorling vortex, and which always seemed to him an invitation to adventure. He very softly kissed her lobe. — Richard Flanagan

In the course of time I have learned to tramp about coral reefs, twenty to thirty feet under water, so unconcernedly that I can pay attention to particular definite things. But after all my silly fears have been allayed, even now, with eyes overflowing with surfeit of color, I am still almost inarticulate. We need a whole new vocabulary, new adjectives, adequately to describe the designs and colors of under sea. — William Beebe

Watch it! It was robbed from other beings so it's HOT 'MERCHANDISE' and it's against the Law ... the LAW OF DECENCY!!! Stay within this Law, steer clear of wool/pearl/silk/ fish bone/ fur/ivory/coral/ down/beeswax/honey/ cashmere/ lanolin/ feathers/ camel hair/flesh/milk/ eggs/ fish/ seafood/ other!!! — Adela Popescu

The Marine Aquarium Council really wants us to keep the coral and the fish safe. They are not saying it is bad to have an aquarium in your house, just that you should make sure when you buy fish for your aquarium ... they have been Marine Aquarium Council-certified. — Alexander Gould

What am I? ... I say so inasmuch as I am the memory of all my past moments, the sum of everything I remember. If I say I in the sense of that something that is here at this moment and is not the mainmast or the coral, then I am the sum of what I feel now. But what is what I feel now? It is the sum of those relations between presumed indivisibles that have been arranged in that system of relations in that special order that is my body. — Umberto Eco

An we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness an that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything. — Umberto Eco

The creatures of the sea hold special mystery, and they are among the most exciting, graceful, and beautiful on Earth. Just consider the living riot of a coral reef, the beauty of an albatross, the awesome power of a giant turtle, the grace of a dolphin. Now multiply that by the millions of creatures in the sea. Wow! — Carl Safina

Dream!
Forge yourself and rise
Out of your mind and into others.
Men, be women.
Fish, be flies.
Girls, take beards.
Sons, be your mothers.
The future of the world now lies
In coral wombs behind our eyes. — Clive Barker

A scientist with a poet's command of language, Cristina Eisenberg writes with precision and passion ... takes her reader on a breathtaking, sometimes heartbreaking tour of the planet from the Gulf of Maine to the Amazonian rain forests, the tropical coral reefs to old growth forests of the Northwest as well as rivers, lakes, and wetlands. I found the wealth of information not only accessible but riveting ... Eisenberg's powerful, beautifully written book ... has the potential to open many people's eyes, minds, and hearts. — Elizabeth Cunningham

I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls 'tomorrow's child,' asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time. — Sylvia Earle

The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was! — George Orwell

within the next fifty years or so "all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve. — Elizabeth Kolbert

When it comes to wildlife, no state is deadlier than Florida. Let me count the ways: fire ants, mosquitoes, alligators, eastern diamondback rattlers, black bears, panthers, coral snakes, bull sharks, jellyfish, black widow spiders, water moccasins, wasps, crocodiles, pygmy rattlers, brown recluse spiders, wild boar, copperheads, scorpions, Burmese pythons. And ticks. No state has more attacks from fire ants, sharks, or snakes. Let's not forget Mother Nature, who is equally aggressive. Florida is the lightning capital of the United States, attracting by far the most strikes to ground, injuries (more than two thousand since 1959) and fatalities (nearly five hundred since 1959). About seven people die each year from lightning in the Sunshine State, accounting for about 15 percent of the total number of U.S. fatalities each year. — Joe Gisondi

Whether on Ida's shady brow,
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
From ancient melody have ceas'd;

Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,
Where the melodious winds have birth;

Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea
Wand'ring in many a coral grove,
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!

How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!

- "To the Muses — William Blake

Then, as in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a conversation, or making love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I wanted and out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which was expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself became this which was denied but which constantly asserted itself, making life and killing life at the same time. — Henry Miller

That's why travel is so important, among other reasons: to get far enough away from our everyday lives to see those lives with new clarity. When you're literally on the other side of the world, when you're under the silent sea, watching a bright, silent world of fish and coral, when you're staring up at a sky so bright and dense with stars it makes you gasp, it's in those moments that you begin to see the fullness of your life, the possibility that still prevails, that always prevails. — Shauna Niequist

Er eyes were the color of faraway love
her arms were matching topazes
her lips moved soundlessly in the coral light
and ultimately, she left by the door.. — Pablo Neruda

I always think of it you know building a business, building a brand, a friend of mine gave me a metaphor for it which I think is really true it's like building coral, you don't see it happening it's just little little little and when you step back you think wow. — Karen Walker

When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect - designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead. — H.P. Lovecraft

The night above. We two. Full moon.
I started to weep, you laughed.
Your scorn was a god, my laments
moments and doves in a chain.
The night below. We two. Crystal of pain.
You wept over great distances.
My ache was a clutch of agonies
over your sickly heart of sand.
Dawn married us on the bed,
our mouths to the frozen spout
of unstaunched blood.
The sun came through the shuttered balcony
and the coral of life opened its branches
over my shrouded heart.

- Night of Sleepless Love — Federico Garcia Lorca

To the Muses
Whether on Ida's shady brow,
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
From ancient melody have ceas'd;
Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,
Where the melodious winds have birth;
Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea
Wand'ring in many a coral grove,
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!
How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc'd, the notes are few! — William Blake

The theory which I would offer, is simply, that as the land with the attached reefs subsides very gradually from the action of subterranean causes, the coral-building polypi soon raise again their solid masses to the level of the water: but not so with the land; each inch lost is irreclaimably gone; as the whole gradually sinks, the water gains foot by foot on the shore, till the last and highest peak is finally submerged. — Charles Darwin

I have touched coral, and it feels hard like a rock, with a little slimy thing on top of it. But it is better to not touch coral, to prevent damaging it. — Enric Sala

Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system. — Richard Lamm

After Nicholas hung up the phone, he watched his mother carry buckets and garden tools across the couch grass toward a bed that would, come spring, be brightly ablaze as tropical coral with colorful arctotis, impatiens, and petunias. Katherine dug with hard chopping strokes, pulling out wandering jew and oxalis, tossing the uprooted weeds into a black pot beside her.
The garden will be beautiful, he thought. But how do the weeds feel about it? Sacrifices must be made. — Stephen M. Irwin

At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection. — Hannah Arendt

My poems are like a dagger Sprouting flowers from the hilt; My poetry is like a fountain Sprinkling streams of coral water. — Jose Marti

His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute. — Janet Fitch

The Pacific coral reef, as a kind of oasis in a desert, can stand as an object lesson for man who must now learn that mutualism between autotrophic and heterotrophic components, and between producers and consumers in the societal realm, coupled with efficient recycling of materials and use of energy, are the keys to maintaining prosperity in a world of limited resources. — Eugene Odum

The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic to bleaching coral reefs. — Rebecca Solnit

Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around. — Sylvia Earle

Sam raises an eyebrow. "You know this guy?"
"Listen," I say, taking one look at White Guy and am glad he's wearing a blue button-down instead of his coral shirt. It's still geek city, but at least I can keep a straight face when I say, "This guy's been in jail more times than me. He might look like a complete pendejo, but underneath that fucked-up hair and lame shirt he's a complete badass. — Simone Elkeles

Captain James Cook's ship, The Endeavour, hit a coral outcrop in the Great Barrier Reef in 1770. Cook and his crew camped in what is now called Cooktown for nearly two months while making repairs. Then they sailed south, where Cook claimed the east coast of Australia as British territory. — Julie Murphy

Her husband, like her children, was a person who often annoyed her but whom she loved very deeply. — Coral Lansbury

She could feel the coolness, a whole childhood of it, falling through her. Rain on the coral beach in Galway. White tennis balls on the broken court. Her brother at his shortwave radio. A nest of wires and voices. Her father's cattle huddled on a laneway. The broken church bell. A grass verge of green in the laneway. High windows. Too tall for the school chairs. The milk came in small silver cans. She would not cry or whimper. She had always refused him that. — Colum McCann

By 2050, at bio-extinction's current rate, between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of all species will have disappeared or be too few in numbers to survive. There'll be a few over-visited parks, the coral reefs will be beaten up, grasslands overgrazed. Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas. — Stuart L. Pimm

You're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government! — Dave Barry

What does it take to get you on board with building this district to mirror Coral Gables or the Hamptons? — Thomas Barr Jr.

BURGESS
How do you like Moscow?

CORAL
Loathe it, darling. I cannot understand what those Three Sisters were on about. It gives the play a very sinister slant. — Alan Bennett

alter kocker like me. Street-word is Hal hired Coral — Scott Turow

That includes not cutting down the rain forest, and stop polluting the ocean because once we kill the coral reefs and the rain forest, this earth is toast. — Michael Berryman

Christian, beware how thou thinkest lightly of sin. Take heed lest thou fall by little and little. Sin, a little thing? Is it not a poison? Who knows its deadliness? Sin, a little thing? Do not the little foxes spoil the grapes? Doth not the tiny coral insect build a rock which wrecks a navy? Do not little strokes fell lofty oaks? Will not continual droppings wear away stones? Sin, a little thing? It girded the Redeemer's head with thorns, and pierced His heart! It made Him suffer anguish, bitterness, and woe. Could you weigh the least sin in the scales of eternity, you would fly from it as from a serpent, and abhor the least appearance of evil. Look upon all sin as that which crucified the Saviour, and you will see it to be exceeding sinful. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Habits, soft and pliant at first, are like some coral stones, which are easily cut when first quarried, but soon become hard as adamant. — Charles Spurgeon