Into The Silent Sea Quotes & Sayings

It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her ... Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me. — Alan Bradley

When you drop a glass or a plate to the ground it makes a loud crashing sound. When a window shatters a table leg breaks or when a picture falls off the wall it makes a noise. But as for your heart when that breaks it s completely silent. You would think as it s so important it would make the loudest noise in the whole world or even have some ... Read Moresort of ceremonious sound like the gong of a cymbal or the ringing of a bell. But it s silent and you almost wish there was a noise to distract you from the pain. If there is a noise it s internal. It screams and no one can hear it but you. It screams so loud your ears ring and your head aches. It trashes around in your chest like a great white shark caught in the sea it roars like a mother bear whose cub has been taken. That s what it looks like and that s what it sounds like a trashing panicking trapped great big beast roaring like a prisoner to its own emotions. But that s the thing about love no one is untouchable. — Cecelia Ahern

To slip beneath the surface and soar along the silent bottom of the sea agile and shining in water honeycombed with light. — Ellen Meloy

Waking or sleeping, it seemed that she constantly saw that dark body dropping, swift and silent, into the cold, grim sea. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

How do we meditate silently? Just by not talking, just by not using outer words, we are not doing silent meditation. Silent meditation is totally different. When we start meditating in silence, right from the beginning we feel the bottom of a sea within us and without. The life of activity movement and restlessness is on the surface, but deep below, underneath our human life, there is poise and silence. So, either we shall imagine this sea of silence within us or we shall feel that we are nothing but a sea of poise itself. — Sri Chinmoy

You know," he said, "this design begins to appeal to me after all. Sea slugs aren't the least bit arousing, but logarithms . . . I've always thought that word sounded splendidly naughty." He let it roll off his tongue with ribald inflection. "Logarithm." He gave an exaggerated shiver. "Ooh. Yes and thank you and may I have some more."

"Lots of mathematical terms sound that way. I think it's because they were all coined by men. 'Hypotenuse' is downright lewd."

" 'Quadrilateral' brings rather carnal images to mind."

She was silent for a long time. Then one of her dark eyebrows arched. "Not so many as 'rhombus.' "

Good Lord. That word was wicked. Her pronunciation of it did rather wicked things to him. He had to admire the way she didn't shrink from a challenge, but came back with a new and surprising retort. One day, she'd make some fortunate man a very creative lover. — Tessa Dare

Sleeping Atlantis

Silent cool waters
dancing upon her skin ~
silent cool water
ushering dreams within... — Muse

The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally things we never look at. A huge piece of carpeting, empty and naked plains, silent and uninterrupted stretches with nothing to alter the homogeneity of their continuity. I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes. — Jean Dubuffet

From the olive-strewn forum, one could see the village down below. Not a sound came from it; wisps of smoke rose in the limpid air. The sea also lay silent, as if breathless beneath the unending shower of cold, glittering light. From the Chenoua, a distant cock crow alone sang the fragile glory of the day. Across the ruins, as far as one could see, there were nothing but pitted stones and absinthe plants, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of the crystal air. It was as if the morning stood still, as if the sun had stopped for an immeasurable moment. In this light and silence, years of night and fury melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself, as if my heart had long been stopped and was now gently beginning to beat again. — Albert Camus

Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave! — Pascal Mercier

Do you want to change the world?
Then change yourself first.
Do you want to change yourself?
Then remain completely silent inside the silence-sea. — Sri Chinmoy

The thing about love - no one is untouchable. It's as wild as that, as raw as an open flesh wound exposed to salty sea water, but when it actually breaks, it's silent. You're just screaming on the inside and no one can hear it. — Cecelia Ahern

Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! ... It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water. — Malcolm Lowry

Through all his years of roving, even on nights like this, he had remained blind to the beauty of the sea, and now his feeling toward it had settled into weary hatred. He knew its effects of blended color, its wide gradations of sound and action, the tireless charm of a sailing ship's effortless movement, the quality of silent distance and the wonder of the skies. Dimly at times, in moments of rare emotion, he had caught a glimpse of the mystic hand that beckons beyond the horizon and felt for a little while the fated urge of the wanderer. But that was in the beginning, long ago when he had first gone to sea, and he had forgotten it.
("Fire In The Galley Stove") — William Outerson

The fair breeze blew,
The white foam flew,
And the forrow followed free.
We were the first to ever burst into the silent sea. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

I ask for a moment's indulgence to sit by thy side. The works
that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.
Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite,
and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.
Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and
the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.
A Moments Indulgence
Now it is time to sit quite, face to face with thee, and to sing
dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure. — Rabindranath Tagore

The invigorating scent of the sea was nectar to her wearied body, the immensity of the lonely cliffs was silent and dreamlike. Her brain only remained conscious of its ceaseless, its intolerable torture of uncertainty. — Emmuska Orczy

You were crying. It's a terrible thing, loving the sea."
"Yes," she whispered, her eyes straying to it. Waves gathered and broke invisibly in the dark, reaching toward her, pulling back. They were never silent, they never spoke. — Patricia A. McKillip

The sea is intriguing and exciting. It always reinforces in me a sense of belonging. The waves bring with them a strange kind of peace and calm. The sea has been a silent spectator to many major incidents in my life. The many outings with friends and family; the long walks on the shore with dad, my hero and philosopher; the moments spent with my love, the memories are endless. — Jagdish Joghee

THE SUN CAME UP a baleful smear in the sky, not quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance of a device immediately recognizable yet unnamable, so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy deepened almost moment to moment . . . its name a word of power, not to be spoken aloud, not even to be remembered in silence. All around lay ambushes of the bad ice, latent presences, haunting all transaction, each like the infinitesimal circle converging toward zero that mathematicians now and then find use for. A silver-gray, odorless, silent exit from the upper world. . . . The sun might be visible from time to time, with or without clouds, but the sky was more neutral-density gray than blue. Out on the promontory grew some even-textured foliage, in this light a blazing, virtually shadowless green, and breaking down at the base of the headland was the sea-green sea, the ice-green, glass-green sea. Hunter — Thomas Pynchon

I have watched the river and the sea for a lifetime. I have seen rivers rob soil from the roots of trees until the giants came foundering down. I have watched shores slip and perish, the channels silt and change; what was beach become a swamp and a headland tumble into the sea. An island has eroded in silent pain since my boyhood, and reefs have become islands. Yet the old people used to say, People pass away, but not the land. It remains forever. Maybe that is so. The land changes. The land continues. The sea changes. The sea remains. — Keri Hulme

On the edge of a tropical ocean, in a thousand reflections of the silver light of an invisible moon, among undulations of restless waters, ceaselessly changing ...
Among silent breakers, the tremors of the shining surface, in the swift flux and reflux martyrizing the patches of light, in the rendings of luminous loops and arcs, and lines, in the occultations and reappearances of dancing bursts of light being decomposed, recomposed, contracted, spread out, only to be re-distributed once more before me, with me, within me, drowned, and unendurably buffeted, my calm violated a thousand times by the tongues of infinity, oscillating, sinusoidally overrun by the multitude of liquid lines. enormous with a thousand folds, I was and I was not, I was caught, I was lost, I was in a state of complete ubiquity. The thousands upon thousands of rustlings were my own thousand shatterings. — Henri Michaux

Well, yeah, you listen to a talking snake and there's gonna be trouble. — Mike Mignola

Night.
The beach and the sea are in darkness.
A dog passes, going toward the sea wall.
No one walks on the boardwalk, but, on the benches lining it, people sit. They relax. Are silent. Separated from one another. They do not speak.
The traveler passes. He walks slowly, he goes in the same direction as the dog.
He stops. Returns. He seems to be out for a walk. He starts off again.
His face is no longer visible.
The sea is calm. No wind.
The traveler returns. The dog does not return. The sea begins to rise, it seems. Its sounds getting closer. Muffled thudding coming from the river's many mouths. Somber sky. — Marguerite Duras

I am the love, the pain, the intensity
I am the remnants of a banished plea;
I am the trivialized doors of a jubilant home
I am the shadows of an abandoned dome;
I am the instinct, the bizarre sound
I am the fate of a trampled mound;
I am the words half-heard when half-said
I am the memories of a longing thread;
I am the anarchist in disdain,
I am the bewilderment of an orphan pain;
I am your hand, I am the bar
I am the bellicosity of our resilient scar;
I am the love, the pain, the intensity
I am the predicament of the silent sea. — Ashfaq Saraf

The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives - all that was over. — H.G.Wells

Beyond the few boats still on their moorings, a bank of fog was moving in off the sea. I watched it slowly cover the spit of land at the mouth of the inlet, shrouding the fir trees and the granite shore, and then the whole end of the bay, covering the barnacled outcroppings where the cormorants landed and seals basked in summer, rolling slowly toward me over the water until I saw that it wasn't fog but snow, the flakes tumbling thick and silent out of the encompassing cloud, and I remembered that was how it had been up here when we were kids, seeing weather approach from a distance, a thunderstorm on the horizon, rain sweeping toward us like a curtain across the water, and how it had thrilled me, that enormity and power, how oblivious it was of us. I had an inkling of that again now, of that state of being wide open to time, not as a thing to use or waste, but as a motion of its own, an invisible wholeness made apparent by the motion of the world. — Adam Haslett

When we meditate, what we actually do is enter into a vacant, calm, still, silent mind. We go deep within and approach our true existence, which is our soul. When we live in the soul, we feel that we are actually meditating spontaneously. On the surface of the sea are multitudes of waves, but the sea is not affected below. In the deepest depths, at the bottom of the sea is all tranquility. So when you start meditating, try to feel your own inner existence first. That is to say, the bottom of the sea: calm and quiet. Feel that your whole being is surcharged with peace and tranquility. — Sri Chinmoy

Just as an octopus may have his den in some ocean cave, and come floating out a silent image of horror to attack a swimmer, so I picture such a spirit lurking in the dark of the house which he curses by his presence, and ready to float out upon all whom he can injure. — Arthur Conan Doyle

What do I want to say? I myself do not quite understand. Only that today, when for the glory of God Mokichi and Ichizo moaned, suffered and died, I cannot bear the monotonous sound of the dark sea gnawing at the shore. Behind the depressing silence of this sea, the silence of God....the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent. — Shusaku Endo

No miles of level desert, no jagged mountain heights, no sea of endless blue Neither words nor tears, nor silent fears will keep me from coming back to you. — Lisa Kleypas

It soon got so cold that the men rushed to close the doors. When they had shut them and the room was again silent, they saw that several women had begun to cry. The women said it was because of the numbing air that had washed over their bare shoulders, but even strangers embraced sadly as they coasted into the new year and felt its strength commencing. They cried because of the magic and the contradictions; because time had passed and time was left; because they saw themselves as if they were in a photograph that had winked fast enough to contradict their mortality; because the city around them had conspired to break a hundred thousand hearts; and because they and everyone else had to float upon this sea of troubles, watertight. Sometimes there were islands, and when they found them they held fast, but never could they hold fast enough not to be moved and once again overwhelmed. — Mark Helprin

The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don't add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the fain suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup. — Rebecca Solnit

I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

At Night on the High Seas
At night, when the sea cradles me
And the pale star gleam
Lies down on its broad waves,
Then I free myself wholly
From all activity and all the love
And stand silent and breathe purely,
Alone, alone cradled by the sea
That lies there, cold and silent, with a thousand lights.
Then I have to think of my friends
And my gaze sinks into their eyes,
And I ask each one, silent and alone:
"Are you still mine?
Is my sorrow a sorrow to you, my death a death?
Do you feel from my love, my grief,
Just a breath, just an echo?"
And the sea peacefully gazes back, silent,
And smiles: NO
And no greetings and no answers come from anywhere. — Hermann Hesse

When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?' Ogion went on a halfmile or so, and said at last, 'To hear, one must be silent. — Ursula K. Le Guin

He recalled those brief years when his song had fallen silent, his refusal to heed it leaving him bereft, without guidance. It had been hard to be so rudderless in a sea of chaos and war. This, however, was much worse, because now there was the chill, the bone-deep cold that had seeped into him in the Ally's domain and lingered on here in this world of myriad paths, all seemingly so dark. And the words, of course, those words that hounded him from the Beyond. We will make an ending, you and I. — Anthony Ryan

I do not know if Alice in Wonderland was an original story-I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it-but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen story-books have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea'-is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again. — Lewis Carroll

As it was, nothing happened except the two of us watching the sea come in and go out again, listening to the birds, sheltering from the rain when it came, and lying silent as the sky changed from blue to white to gold. For hours we lay side by side, breathing softly together, watching thin rivulets of water run down the cliffs and into the sea, feeling the world slowly revolve around us as we leaned into each other for warmth
and for something else, something I couldn't quite name, something glorious, frightening, and unforgettable. — Meg Rosoff

Stranger, think long before you enter,
For these corridors amuse not passing travellers.
But if you enter, keep your voice to yourself.
Nor should you tinkle and toll your tongue.
These columns rose not, for the such as you.
But for those urgent pilgrim feet that wander
On lonely ways, seeking the roots of rootless trees.
The earth has many flowery roads; choose one
That pleases your whim, and gods be with you.
But now leave! - leave me to my dark green solitude
Which like the deep dream world of the sea
Has its moving shapes; corals; ancient coins;
Carved urns and ruins of ancient ships and gods;
And mermaids, with flowing golden hair
That charm a patch of silent darkness
Into singing sunlight. — G.A. Kulkarni

There was no portion of land in the world with so contradictory a nature as the Highlands. Now it was a land of sunlit moors stained red with heather, knowing only the peace of the quiet sky and the heart-shaking beauty of the blue hills; now it was a harsh and awesome place where silent mists obscured the peaks and a bitter relentless rain came down from bitter skies, where an angry sea washed against the shore, and sullen clouds reflected in sullen gray lochs.
Scotland in the sun and Scotland in the rain ... — Jan Cox Speas

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

I think of you when upon the sea the sun flings her beams.
I think of you when the moonlight shines in silvery streams.
I see you when upon the distant hills the dust awakes;
At night when on a fragile bridge the traveler quakes.
I hear you when the billows rise on high,
With murmur deep.
To tread the silent grove where wander I,
When all's asleep. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Somewhere today in time, I died. Conscious of a love cruelly wronged, almost hearing the silent calls beaming from eternity, hearing the sounds of the sea waves breaking at my feet - beckoning me, and it is in those cries, deep inside my fated soul, deep in another life which brings me the allure of: destiny. — J.L. Holtz

All night the earth and the heavens followed their usual arrangements. Stars passed: an immense tide hung over them. A silent sea raced back with the sun, its wave turn-over small, delicate and comfortless. The most glorious of all stars hung above the sun's threshold and went out. An hour later the sun governed the earth again, mist-chasing, flower-opening, bird-rousing, ghost-driving, spirit-shepherding back out the various gates of sleep. — Mary Butts

The ocean rose up around me, hiding that low, dark patch from my eyes. The daylight, the trailing glory of the sun, went streaming out of the sky, was drawn aside like some luminous curtain, and at last I looked into the blue gulf of immensity which the sunshine hides, and saw the floating hosts of stars. The sea was silent, the sky was silent. I was alone with the night and silence. — H.G.Wells

We would either have a silent, a soft, a perfumed cross, sugared and honeyed with the consolations of Christ, or we faint; and providence must either brew a cup of gall and wormwood, mastered in the mixing with joy and songs, else we cannot be disciples. But Christ's cross did not smile on him, his cross was a cross, and his ship sailed in blood, and his blessed soul was sea-sick, and heavy even to death. — Samuel Rutherford

We are all contingent. Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift amont each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried. — Annie Dillard

Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. — Barbara W. Tuchman

I detected instantly that she didn't like me. It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he's smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signalling that Mary detesting me. — Alan Bradley

And there he stood, holding his head high in silent approval of his crew's fine work.

Her heart leaped all the way up into her throat. She knew one of those ships was his, the ship he named for her - the Varina. She couldn't say how, but she felt it the instant she heard the lookout announce their allies' arrival on the scene. — Jennifer McKeithen

The literature of childhood abounds with evidence that the peaks of a child's experience are not visits to the cinema, or even family outings to the sea, but occasions when he escapes into places that are disused and overgrown and silent. To a child there is more joy in a rubbish tip than a flowery rockery, in a fallen tree than a piece of statuary, in a muddy track than a gravel path. — Iona Opie

Inside my heart there is
A temple, a synagogue,
a church, a mosque,
A monastery, a fish market
A serene lake, a tempestuous sea
Agreements and disagreements
Glory and failure
A big bang at dawn and
a little bang at dusk
All the cries, aspirations and
silent prayers
Yearning and seeking
Everything disintegrates
and dissolves
In a tempestuous ocean
Finally unifies
Collapses on one altar
In one Breath
In God — Gabriel Iqbal

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

Me was the glittering desolation of the sea, the awful solitude upon which I had already suffered so much; behind me the island, hushed under the dawn, its Beast People silent and unseen. The enclosure, with all its provisions and ammunition, burnt noisily, with sudden gusts of flame, a fitful crackling, and now and then a crash. The heavy smoke drove up the beach away from me, rolling low over the distant tree-tops towards the huts in the ravine. Beside me were the charred vestiges of the boats and these four dead bodies. — H.G.Wells

I Leave This at Your Ear For When You Wake"

I leave this at your ear for when you wake,
A creature in its abstract cage asleep.
Your dreams blindfold you by the light they make.

The owl called from the naked-woman tree
As I came down by the Kyle farm to hear
Your house silent by the speaking sea.

I have come late but I have come before
Later with slaked steps from stone to stone
To hope to find you listening for the door.

I stand in the ticking room. My dear, I take
A moth kiss from your breath. The shore gulls cry.
I leave this at your ear for when you wake. — W. S. Graham

Around the steel no tortur'd worm shall twine, No blood of living insect stain my line; Let me, less cruel, cast the feather'd hook, With pliant rod athwart the pebbled brook, Silent along the mazy margin stray, And with the fur-wrought fly delude the prey. — John Gay

The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
with silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! — Emma Lazarus

At Oreanda they sat on a beach not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist; white clouds rested motionlessly on the mountaintops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing advance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement towards perfection. — Anton Chekhov

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean
But be. — Archibald MacLeish

She was silent; the great wings almost stopped moving; only a delicate stirring seemed to keep them aloft. "Listen, then," Mrs. Whatsit said. The resonant voice rose and the words seemed to be all around them so that Meg felt that she could almost reach out and touch them:
"Sing unto the Lord a new song, and His praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that there is therein; the isles, and the inhabitants thereof. Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift their voice; let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord! — Madeleine L'Engle

The skerry was resting in the sea. It was like being in a cradle, or on a deathbed, he thought. All the voices hidden in the cliff were whispering. Even rocks have memories, as do waves and breakers. And down below, in the darkness where fish swam along invisible and silent channels, there were also memories. — Henning Mankell

Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. "But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say. — Ray Bradbury

They went to the sands, to watch the flowing of the tide, which a fine south-easterly breeze was bringing in all the grandeur which so flat a shore admitted. They praised the morning; gloried in the sea; sympathized in the delight of the fresh-feeling breeze- and were silent ... — Jane Austen

Dante is the first Christian poet, the first one whose whole system of thought is colored by a pure Christian theology. But the poem comes nearer to us than this. It is there real history of a brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumphant human soul; it teaches the benign ministry of sorrow. His is the first keel that ever ventured into the silent sea of human consciousness to find a new world of poetry. He held heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die until he had done his task. Neither shall Longfellow. Neither shall I."
Lowell turned and started to descend. — Matthew Pearl

February ... Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth, It kissed the forehead of the Earth, And smiled upon the silent sea, And bade the frozen streams be free, And waked to music all their fountains, And breathed upon the frozen mountains ... — Percy Bysshe Shelley