Quotes & Sayings About Docks

Led through lined and grimy streets down to the river and eastward, as he had expected, towards the Isle of Dogs. A raw wind blew up from the water, carrying the smell of salt, stale fish, the overspill of sewage and the cold dampness of the outgoing tide sweeping down from the Pool of London towards the estuary and the sea. Across the gray water endless strings of barges made their heavy way downstream, laden with merchandise for half the earth. Ships passed them outward bound, down towards the docks of Greenwich and beyond. — Anne Perry

When I returned, not to Berlin, but to Hamburg in the midst of the fog of the beginning of winter, to the road that runs right above it's river and docks, a castle which never existed and a fountain which is really a sewer, a gust of wind far sweeter and more fragrant than any red rose carried the smell of shit and floating soil like a tongue into my nostril. — Kathy Acker

The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs, Losing both beauty and utility. — William Shakespeare

And was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorted, 'like a dildo!' 'That's appropriate,' Churt Lyne said. 'Armed, it can fuck solar systems. — Iain M. Banks

The true terrorists of our world do not meet at the docks at midnight, or scream "Allahu Akbar" before some violent action. The true terrorists of our world wear 5000 dollar suits and work in the highest positions of finance, government and business. — Peter Joseph

From where is the material for my picturing this scene derived? I search my memory to find a similar place, with similar docks. It takes a while.

But then I remember a trip I took with my family when I was a child. There was a river, and a dock--it's the same dock as the dock I just imagined.

I realize later that, when a new friend described to me his home in Spain, with its "docks," I was picturing this same dock--the dock I saw on my childhood vacation; the dock I "used" already in imagining the novel I am reading.

(How many times have I used this dock?) — Peter Mendelsund

I traveled to Ireland to research 'Sandcastles,' to visit the coastline where my ancestors looked toward America, the tiny town they once loved so much, and the docks from which they sailed toward their dreams of building a better life for their family. The answers I found on that journey are woven through the novel. — Luanne Rice

She didn't let herself finish that thought, though crippling nausea gripped her as she scanned the banks and docks and sewer depositories.
He would be waiting for her at home. And then he'd chide her and laugh at her and kiss her. And them she'd dispatch Jayne tonight, and then they'd set sail on this river and then out to the nearby sea, and then be gone.
He would be waiting at home.
He'd be home.
Home. — Sarah J. Maas

Without thinking, Lillian let out a few curse words that caused Evie to blanch. One of Lillian's more questionable accomplishments was the ability to swear as fluently as a sailor, acquired from much time spent with her grandmother, who had worked as a washwoman at the harbor docks. — Lisa Kleypas

The settle, followed by 10 for power will give you that grasp on their nuts that you need. Once you've got that, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze and squeeze and don't ever let up! You'll just be breaking 1500 meters down when you hear them yelp. Listen for the yelp, and then bring it into the dock. — Christopher Allsopp

Body found floating by the docks... — Joe Abercrombie

What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks.
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home. — Robert Louis Stevenson

To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace. — George Eliot

Wolf Spring s not a city of finery. It is of fishers and farmers and folk on the docks, and no one wears their fine blacks except on Beltane. — Kendare Blake

The main reserve of the Haisla Nation hugs the northwest coast of British Columbia, about 500 miles north of Vancouver. The government docks sprawl on the south end of the reserve, nestled in a bay. As children, we swam at the docks and ran to the nearby point to pick blueberries and huckleberries when we were hungry so we wouldn't have to go home. — Eden Robinson

When I had jobs, I was always doing manual jobs because I couldn't think. I worked at the docks, unloading trucks, and did ridiculous jobs. — Dito Montiel

We have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city, said Harry Truman. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war. It was to spare - — Kurt Vonnegut

People are strange about animals. Especially large ones. Daily, on the docks of Wellfleet Harbor, thousands of fish are scaled, gutted, and seasoned with thyme and lemon. No one strokes their sides with water. No one cries when their jaws slip open. Pilot whales are not an endangered species, yet people spend tens of thousands of dollars in rescue efforts, trucking the wounded to aquariums and in some places even airlifting them off beaches. — Marina Keegan

Of the two thousand original copies printed of The History of Love, some were bought and read, many were bought and not read, some were given as gifts, some sat fading in bookstore windows serving as landing docks for flies, some were marked up with pencil, and a good many were shredded to pulp along with other unread or unwanted books, their sentences parsed and minced in the machine's spinning blades. — Nicole Krauss

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

When the ship docks, I'm getting off with you.
This is crazy.
I know it doesn't make any sense, that's why I trust it. — James Cameron

And, as there wasn't enough breakfast to go round, she set out hungry on the long walk to the docks. — Jeffrey Archer

This London City, with all of its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic an tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One-a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick. — Thomas Carlyle

The docks went to the heart of her life. — Clarice Lispector

The villages slept as the capable man went down,
Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,
The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,
As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,
Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,
Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road,
And, capable, created in his mind,
Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones,
The ultimate elegance: the imagined land. — Wallace Stevens

The docks were said to be quite tough, but there were pubs you didn't go into if you were a respectable ... but um, I never felt a sense of danger in Liverpool. — Derek Taylor

He pushed my back against the stall door, kissing me. Edward had tried kissing me, but I'd been so shocked I'd barely had time to explore how it felt. Lucy had told me stories of shady corners and sweaty palms. But this was passionate. Wild. Something I'd never known.
"Have you kissed a girl before?" I whispered. He ran his thumb over my cheek. His eyes lingered on my lips.
"Yes," he said. I thought of Alice, her pretty blonde hair, the split lip that made her so vulnerable. But it wasn't her name he said.
"A woman at the docks in Brisbane. She didn't mean anything. I was lonely. It wasn't love." A prostitute, he meant. — Megan Shepherd

London, black as crows and noisy as ducks, prudish with all the vices in evidence, everlastingly drunk, in spite of ridiculous laws about drunkenness, immense, though it is really basically only a collection of scandal-mongering boroughs, vying with each other, ugly and dull, without any monuments except interminable docks. — Paul Verlaine

Parents are the mystified criminals, blinking in the docks, making it all the worse for themselves with every word they utter. — Michael Cunningham

The Thames is a wretched river after the Mersey and the ships are not like Liverpool ships and the docks are barren of beauty ... it is a beastly hole after Liverpool; for Liverpool is the town of my heart and I would rather sail a mudflat there than command a clipper out of London — John Masefield

I would rather sail and hit a rock
than sit and rot in dry dock. — Lester Roloff

I went to Morocco, joined a band called Pegasus, ran out of money, went to Gibraltar and worked on the docks, writing songs about the sun and the morning and the birds. — Graham Parker

You sleep with a dream of summer weather,
wake to the thrum of rain - roped down by rain.
Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass
and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace
has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.
The mountains have had the sense to disappear.
It's the Celtic temperament - wind, then torrents, then remorse.
Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.
Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,
docks in a pool of shadow all its own.
That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.
Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on. — Anne Stevenson

I told her about the best and the worst. The slow and sleepy places where weekdays rolled past like weekends and Mondays didn't matter. Battered shacks perched on cliffs overlooking the endless, rumpled sea. Afternoons spent waiting on the docks, swinging my legs off a pier until boats rolled in with crates full of oysters and crayfish still gasping. Pulling fishhooks out of my feet because I never wore shoes, playing with other kids whose names I never knew. Those were the unforgettable summers. There were outback towns where you couldn't see the roads for red dust, grids of streets with wandering dogs and children who ran wild and swam naked in creeks. I remembered climbing ancient trees that had a heartbeat if you pressed your ear to them. Boomboom-boomboom. Dreamy nights sleeping by the campfire and waking up covered in fine ash, as if I'd slept through a nuclear holocaust. We were wanderers, always with our faces to the sun. — Vikki Wakefield

Immediately, and according to custom, the ramparts of Fort Saint-Jean were covered with spectators; it is always an event at Marseilles for a ship to come into port, especially when this ship, like the Pharaon, has been built, rigged, and laden at the old Phocee docks, and belongs to an owner of the city. — Alexandre Dumas

They sped by a pack of sea lions lounging on the docks, and she swore she saw an old homeless guy sitting among them. From across the water the old man pointed a bony finger at Percy and mouthed something like 'Don't even think about it.'
"Did you see that?" Hazel asked. Percy's face was red in the sunset.
"Yeah. I've been here before. I ... I don't know. I think I was looking for my girlfriend."
"Annabeth," Frank said. "You mean, on your way to Camp Jupiter?"
Percy frowned. "No. Before that. — Rick Riordan

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

Now burst above the city's cold twilight
The piercing whistles and the tower-clocks:
For day is done. Along the frozen docks
The workmen set their ragged shirts aright.
Thro' factory doors a stream of dingy light
Follows the scrimmage as it quickly flocks
To hut and home among the snow's gray blocks. --
I love you, human labourers. Good-night!
Good-night to all the blackened arms that ache!
Good-night to every sick and sweated brow,
To the poor girl that strength and love forsake,
To the poor boy who can no more! I vow
The victim soon shall shudder at the stake
And fall in blood: we bring him even now. — Trumbull Stickney

The wheels rolled on, and rolled down by the Monument, and by the Tower; and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe; down by where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river. — Charles Dickens

Only a few pages into "The Technologists" and Matthew Pearl already has written a gem about Boston:
"Then would come the view of the stretches of docks and piers ... then beyond that the State House's gold dome capping the horizon - the glittering cranium of the world's smartest city. — Matthew Pearl

Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever ... the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp. This was the American family at play, escaping the city heat. — E.B. White

[Immigrants] who come from anywhere there is hunger, unemployment, oppression, and violence and who clandestinely cross the borders of countries that are prosperous, peaceful, and rich in opportunity, are certainly breaking the law, but they are exercising a natural and moral right which no legal norm or regulation should try to eliminate: the right to life, to survival, to escape the infernal existence they are condemned to by barbarous regimes entrenched on half the earth's surface. If ethical considerations had any pervasive effect at all, the women and men who brave the Straits of Gibraltar or the Florida Keys or the electric fences of Tijuana or the docks of Marseilles in search of work, freedom, and a future should be received with open arms. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them. — Henry David Thoreau

When I was younger I did things with a camera I would not do by myself. I went down to the docks in San Francisco and asked a fisherman if he would take me out on his boat. I would never do that without a camera. — Annie Leibovitz

In these cases, the mind knows what it's doing better than the guile, because the mind flows, the guile dams up, that is, the mind stride but the guile limps. And that's no guileless statement, however, and that's no Harvard like, as MIT will measure soon with computers and docks of Martian data. — Jack Kerouac

Now, space has its own unique smell. So whenever a vehicle docks, or if guys are out doing a spacewalk, the smell of space when you open up the hatch is very distinct. It's kind of like a burning-metal smell, if you can imagine what that would smell like. — Scott Kelly

Hope docks in my heart — Angelica Hopes

He feels flattered by the attention. Most people look anywhere but his lower body. They pretend not to notice when he limps down the docks. It makes it worse, somehow, everyone pretending that he's still whole. — Karen Russell

But as some muskets so contrive it
As oft to miss the mark they drive at,
And though well aimed at dock or plover
Bear wide, and kick their owners over. — John Trumbull

long. Trade has always traveled and the world has always traded. Ours, though, is the era of extreme interdependence. Hardly any nation is now self-sufficient. In 2011, the United Kingdom shipped in half of its gas. The United States relies on ships to bring in two-thirds of its oil supplies. Every day, thirty-eight million tons of crude oil sets off by sea somewhere, although you may not notice it. As in Los Angeles, New York, and other port cities, London has moved its working docks out of the city, away from residents. Ships are bigger now and need deeper harbors, so they call at Newark or Tilbury or Felixstowe, not Liverpool or South Street. — Rose George

When I was six, Hitler, who had become rather a nuisance, launched a sustained attempt to destroy Liverpool, and though we lived several miles from the vulnerable docks target, our Childwall suburb became too close for comfort and safety. — Brian Epstein

Even when one sits in the prisoner's dock, it is interesting to hear talk about oneself. — Albert Camus

For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Block City
What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks.
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home.
Let the sofa be mountains, the carpet be sea,
There I'll establish a city for me:
A kirk and a mill and a palace beside,
And a harbor as well where my vessels may ride.
Great is the palace with pillar and wall,
A sort of a tower on top of it all,
And steps coming down in an orderly way
To where my toy vessels lie safe in the bay.
This one is sailing and that one is moored:
Hark to the song of the sailors on board!
And see on the steps of my palace, the kings
Coming and going with presents and things! — Robert Louis Stevenson

Nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs, Losing both beauty and utility. — William Shakespeare

I would like to forget the image of the ship's crane at Southampton docks when it lifted into the sky the three wooden trunks which held all that my family owned. There is only one memory I want to preserve. It is Maria, who is also Zama, sipping condensed milk on the steps of the doep at night. The African nights were warm. The stars were bright. I loved Maria but I'm not sure she loved me back. Politics and poverty had separated her from her own children and she was exhausted by the white children in her care, by everyone and everything in her care. At the end of the day, away from the people who stole her life's energy and made her tired, she had found a place to rest, momentarily, from myths about her character and her purpose in life." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy) — Deborah Levy

Boxing in Hartlepool started on the beach at Seaton Carew where the fighters fought bare knuckle. In the early 1900s there was a boxing booth on the corner of Burbank Street known as the 'Blood Tub'.
The Blood Tub always drew the crowds and you were guaranteed a good punch up. Hartlepool was a booming ship port and someone would go round the docks and pick five coloured seamen for what was called an 'All In'. One in each corner and one in the middle and when the bell rang it was every man for himself and the winner was the one left standing after some furious toe-to-toe exchanges. That was always a big crowd puller. — Stephen Richards

Up till now, they are only on dock No. 10, not in Umm Qasr, not in the city — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

I actually got so drunk I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl of the Scollay Square Cafe and got pissed and puked on all night long by a thousand sailors and seamen and when I woke up in the morning and found myself all covered and caked and unspeakably dirty I just like a good old Boston man walked down to the Atlantic Avenue docks and jumped into the sea. — Jack Kerouac

As she walked through the foggy streets toward the ramshackle docks, Celaena had prayed Yrene Towers wasn't foolish enough to tell anyone - especially the innkeeper - about the money. Prayed Yrene Towers seized her life with both hands and set out for the pale-stoned city of Antica. Prayed that somehow, years from now, Yrene Towers would return to this continent, and maybe, just maybe, heal their shattered world a little bit. — Sarah J. Maas

I just couldn't stand it any more back in Bes Pelargic,' Twoflower went on blithely, 'sitting at a desk all day, just adding up columns of figures, just a pension to look forward to at the end of it ... where's the romance in that? Twoflower, I thought, it's now or never. You don't just have to listen to stories. You can go there. Now's the time to stop hanging around the docks listening to sailors' tales. — Terry Pratchett

It's a small town, it has only a few docks ... now they are in a trap. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

We're all like the little sailor. From the harbors we hear the strains of accordions and the murky soapy noises of the docks, from the mountains we receive the dish of silence that the shepherds eat, but we don't hear more than our own distances. And what distances without end and without doors and without mountains! — Federico Garcia Lorca

You ever have the feeling you were in the wrong place? That if you could just get over the next hill, cross the next river, look down into the next valley, it'd all ... fit. Be right."
"All my life, more of less"
"All your life spent getting ready for the next thing. I climbed a lot of hills now. I crossed a lot of rivers. Crossed the sea even, left everything I knew and came to Styria. But there I was, waiting for me at the docks when I got off the boat, same man, same life. Next valley ain't no different from this one. No better anyway. Reckon I've learned ... just to stick in the place I'm at. Just to be the man I am. — Joe Abercrombie

The water is alive. It is alive. If we could get a mask and fins and drop down off these docks, we'd see snook and redfish and probably goliath grouper. And it's an amazing world unto itself and a very thin demarcation between one world and the other. You know, the distance of the water surface. — Randy Wayne White

O would, beloved, that you lay
Under the dock-leaves in the ground,
While lights were paling one by one. — William Butler Yeats

Look at where Jesus went to pick people. He didn't go to the colleges; he got guys off the fishing docks. — Jeff Foxworthy

He led her to the dressing room, opened the wardrobe, and riffled through her clothes. He pulled out a black tunic, leggings, and jacket and thrust them at Kestrel.
Coolly she said, "This is a ceremonial fighting uniform. Do you expect me to fight a duel on the docks? — Marie Rutkoski

Soldier," he said. "A lousy one, but I was a soldier in the Army." He studied the menu then laid it to his side. "When the government fell and they let us all go I started working the docks over at south bay. Did that for a while and hated it. Started delivering goods for a guy I met working there and that's how I met Raul. — Jarrett Rush

Time since my escape ticked by and the voices came to me. God Almighty and the Devil coaxed me onwards and stated that the edge of the forest was close at hand. The voices told me that they would search for me by air and put screws on the points and docks where there was access to the mainland. The voices also told me that the three prisons on the island would go on lock down until I was caught or wasn't. — Stephen Richards

Sometimes, they wait. Sometimes, you see the dead come in to the harbor, and their old dogs are all along the docks, wagging their tails, for they have waited for their masters and mistresses for many years. You see mothers who have missed their sons. Fathers who had never spoken of love to their children, ready to embrace them as they voyage from the end of life. It shows the lies of this world, you see. We are wrong about so many things here. Mankind has done terrible things, yet we are forgiven. — Douglas Clegg

At the Docks' altitude, gravity was still about three-quarters of a gee. Air fountains hung a breathable atmosphere over the middle part of the platform. The day before, she had taken a sailboat across the clear-bottomed sea. That was a strange experience indeed: planetary clouds below your keel, stars and indigo sky above. — Vernor Vinge

I vaguely remember we had an air-raid shelter in our yard. We lived in a semi-detached house with a small garden in the suburbs of Salford, a couple of miles from the docks. — Robert Powell

If a man go into the London Docks sober without means of getting drunk, and comes out of one of the cellars very drunk wherein are a million gallons of wine, I think that would be reasonable evidence that he had stolen some of the wine in that cellar, though you could not prove that any wine was stolen, or any wine was missed. — William Henry Maule

He was met even now As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud; Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With bur-docks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn. — William Shakespeare

People see my current success but don't realize I've worked hard to get where I am. I used to clean garbage off the Philadelphia docks and put a lot of time into developing my music. — Kevin Eubanks

A knife struck the docks between Kell's feet, and he jumped.

"Lila!" he shouted.

"Leaving!" she called from the deck. "And bring me back that knife," she added. "It's my favorite one."

Kell shook his head, and freed the blade from where it had lodged in the wood. "They're all you favorite. — V.E Schwab

This music ebbs and flows, irregular, sad. It reminds me, weirdly, of watching the ocean during a bad storm, the lashing, crashing waves and the spray of sea foam against the docks; the way it takes your breath away, the power and the hugeness of it.
That's exactly what happens as I listen to the music, as I come up over the final crest of hill, and the half-ruined barn and collapsing farmhouse fan out in front of me, just as the music swells, a wave about to break: The breath leaves my body all at once, and I'm struck dumb by the beauty of it. For a second it seems to me like I really am looking down at the ocean - a sea of people, writhing and dancing in the light spilling down from the barn like shadows twisting up around a flame. — Lauren Oliver

We should return to the docks," Miss Grey suggested. "Perhaps they will be waiting there." Sure enough, she was correct - or at least, half correct. Mr. Kent was leaning on a splintery post by the Aurora, shaking his head as we approached.

"It took you three far too long to return here," he said. "Did you not learn that universal tenet as a child? If you ever lose track of your mother, go back to the last place you shared, no other. It's not terribly complicated. — Tarun Shanker

The little fishing boat anchors right off the shore of Gili Meno. There are no docks here on this island. You have to roll up your pants, jump off the boat and wade in through the surf on your own power. There's absolutely no way to do this without getting soaking wet or even banged up on the coral, but it's worth all the trouble because the beach here is so beautiful, so special — Elizabeth Gilbert

Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.
Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it. — Armistead Maupin

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath - "The Spouter Inn: - Peter Coffin." Coffin? - Spouter? - Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee. — Herman Melville

In New York, FEMA granted the Mamaroneck Beach & Yacht Club's request to be remapped from the high-risk flood zone in August 2012 - just two months before the club was damaged and its outbuildings destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, which stacked up yachts at its docks like pick-up sticks. — Bill Dedman