Life Below Water Quotes & Sayings

Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad. — Sharon Creech

It was an evening of torment, and I remember only one other thing about it. At some point after everyone was asleep, I wandered away from the inn in a daze and ended up on the sea cliffs, staring out into the darkness with sound of the roaring water below me. The thundering of the ocean was like a bitter lament. I seemed to see beneath everything a layering of cruelty I have never known was there. The howling of the wind and shaking of the trees seemed to mock me. Could it really be that the stream of my life had divided forever. — Arthur Golden

And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats
then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water
seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. — Elizabeth Strout

No country is so peaceful as the one that leads into death. Life arches above one's head like a bridgespan, and below it flows the water, carries the boat, takes it further. — Alfred Doblin

We did such a great job of creating the interstate highway system in Oklahoma City that we don't have traffic congestion. You can actually get a speeding ticket during rush hour in the city. That's how great our traffic flows. — Mick Cornett

People don't seem to realize
it that it is not like we're on
the Titanic and we have to
avoid the iceberg. We've
already hit the iceberg. The
water is rushing in down below. But some people just
don't want to leave the dance
floor; others don't want to
give up on the buffet. But if
we don't make the hard
choices, nature will make them for u — Peter Adejimi

How was Gengo to know, Saigyo reflected, that this unheroic existence imposed even greater torment than the icy lashings of the Nachi Falls in its thousand-foot leap? How was Gengo to realize that Saigyo had not slept a single night undisturbed since he had fled his home for the Eastern Hills, that his sleep was haunted by the cries of his beloved daughter from whom he had torn himself.
Who knew that during the day, when he went about his tasks of drawing water and chopping wood as he composed verses, the sighting of the wind in the treetops of the valleys below and the pines surrounding the temple sounded to him like the mourning of his young wife, and so troubled his nights that sleep no longer visited him? Never again would Saigyo find peace. He had wrenched asunder the living boughs of the tree that was his life. Remorse and compassion for his loved ones would dog him to the end of his days. — Eiji Yoshikawa

Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure time for freedom than unconventionality does. — George Bernard Shaw

Take your racism and jump in the Tugela! — Ferial Haffajee

The Crocodile The sun of the Macusi people was worried. Every day there were fewer fish in their ponds. He put the crocodile in charge of security. The ponds got emptier. The crocodile, security guard and thief, invented a good story about invisible assailants, but the sun didn't believe it, took a machete, and left the crocodile's body all crisscrossed with cuts. To calm him down, the crocodile offered his beautiful daughter in marriage. "I'll be expecting her," said the sun. As the crocodile had no daughter, he sculpted a woman in the trunk of a wild plum tree. "Here she is," he said, and plunged into the water, looking out of the corner of his eye, the way he always looks. It was the woodpecker who saved his life. Before the sun arrived, the woodpecker pecked at the wooden girl below the belly. Thus she, who was incomplete, was open for the sun to enter. (112) — Eduardo Galeano

I think that the best kind of change, is the change that comes from the inside and begins it's way out until it emerges on the outside; a change that is born underneath then continues and spreads until it has reached the surface. That's a true change. A powerful change. And I have found that while we are emerging, changing into something glorious; it is actually us becoming who we really are. A water lily is born underneath the water, inside the soil at the bottom of the river or lake. And the water lily has always been a water lily for that whole time that it was sprouting out of the wet soil, reaching up through the dark water towards the sunlight, stretching and grasping for the surface; where it then buds and blooms on the outside in the sunshine. It doesn't bud and bloom on the surface and then try to reach down below into the soil. — C. JoyBell C.

Her life is a wrecked boat torn apart for kindling and set ablaze to send a message to the sky from a deserted beach. From a distance the words spell SAVE ME. The closer the sign the clearer the statement. Turns out it says FUCK YOU. — Merri Lisa Johnson

When you're confronted by a really difficult thing in your life, you're faced with a choice: you can runaway from it, or you can face it, confront it, and work through it. But to work through it, sometimes feels like holding your own head below water when you're already drowning. Your natural instinct when drowning is to get back up to the surface and give yourself some relief from that terrible situation ... you just want to breathe again. — Buck 65

Despite a frenzy of East-West diplomacy and negotiations, there was little sign that tensions were easing. — Anonymous

If somebody has a property in the middle of a 7,000 job factory, as an example, that's going to move into the town - but they need this one corner of this property, and it's going to provide 7,000 jobs in a community that's dying, of which we have many in this country, OK? I am for that. That's a big economic development — Donald Trump

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DIGNITY AND CHOICE

By the One who set the earth with rivers pouring through in mist below the mountains, and two oceans with a strip of land between (27:61), we move the elements into various shapes without their consent, but human beings, unlike the water and trees, have a choice. They are given dignity, discernment, and the evolutionary wisdom that can move from death to new life, again to die and be restored on another level of existence. You have many choices about the ways you live and work and change and survive. Say you fall into an ocean. You may give up and sink, or you may try to swim to shore. Salvation is your decision. — Bahauddin

The melody of her heart had no name; it was quick, and light. It rolled with the waves, falling as the breath left his chest, rising as he inhaled. It was the rain sliding down the glass; the fog spreading its fingers over the water. The creaking of a ship's great body. The secrets whispered by the wind, and the unseen life that moved below. It was the flame of one last candle. — Alexandra Bracken

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't, — David Foster

Your country requires
heroes; be heroes; your
duty is to go on working,
and then everything will
follow of itself. — Swami Vivekananda

Why was he alive on Earth? Very often the meaning was obscured. Very often it required some digging. The meaning of his life was an elusive stream of water hundreds of feet below the surface, and he would periodically drop a bucket down the well, fill it, bring it up and drink from it. But this did not sustain him for long. — Dave Eggers

Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny. — Henri Frederic Amiel

I love to work. I really enjoy getting up really early and driving downtown. I just really love the process of acting and being on a series. — Portia De Rossi

The two-man crew of the patrol boat does not speak English. Rachel exploits this as best she can, while still dumping life jackets in the water. "What? I don't understand what you're saying? Do you speak English?"
They confirm in their native tongue that they obviously do not. Rachel must be putting on a theatrical display, because the small boat rocks while she talks. "I don't need these life jackets anymore," she says, in her thickest Italian accent. "The colors are all wrong for me. I mean, look at this orange. Ew, right?"
Galen rolls his eyes. I try not to giggle.
"And this green? Hideous!" she continues.
The men get more irate when she doesn't stop littering their domain. "Hey, what the ... Don't touch me! I have a foot injury, you jerk!"
Galen and I slink below the surface. "We knew that might happen," he says. — Anna Banks

When I go to describe something as remarkable as what I saw that day, I could only say it was a place of dreams. The water is crystalline clear, a mixture of opalescent colors and frosted with white tips. It surges forward and crashes up against the rocks below us as the sun cast a fire-like glare in the distance. Adding to my reverie is the salty smell in the air that lingers and enlivens senses that seem to have been dormant before this moment. I don't recall moving in this dream-like state but my hand moves up and cups the wind as if trying to capture it's essence. If I could have pocketed every smell and sound of this place I would have and I would defended it with my life. — Celia Mcmahon

You have to take care of freedom. Can't be afraid of it, like Fromm said, like MacLeish said. Can't be too scared or too bold. Like a plant, you had to water it and weed it and keep it safe from frosts. And we lost it, somehow. We let the wrong ideas do the talking. We liked the easy short-term too much, and couldn't commit to the difficult long-term. We even stopped breeding, toward the end there, didn't we? Our birth rate went below replacement level. America was worth exploiting, but it wasn't worth leaving for anyone else, anyone who came after. Maybe evolution just shook its head and let us clear ourselves off the map. Mother Nature doesn't think much of life that isn't willing to replicate. — Algor X. Dennison

The euphoric lust cloud is gone and once the smoke begins to clear, like in all good fairytales, the princess turns into nothing more than a common farm girl while the prince goes back to being a regular frog. — Tali Alexander

Artham felt lighter and stronger, and for the first time in nine years, his mind was clear and sure. The words to a hundred of his own poems scrolled across his memory; he saw faces of old friends, battles he had fought, and even the most terrible moments of his life - and yet he remained himself. The wild animal inside that he had struggled so long to kill pulsed with power, but it was no longer his master. He rode the pain like a knight rides a horse. ...
Artham's eyes watered from the wind and from the speed and from the magnificent beauty of the land arrayed below him. Water streaked from the corners of his eyes ... and , in the vicious cold froze into silvery jewels.
He would have to write a poem about this. — Andrew Peterson

PATER PROFUNDUS. [Far below] The chasm at my feet, dark, yawning, Rests on a chasm deeper still, A thousand streams, their waters joining, In a cascade terrific fall; The tree's own life, its strength from nature, Its trunk lifts skywards straight and tall - All, all, show love's almighty power That shapes all things, cares for them all. The storm breaks round me, fiercely howling, The woods, ravines, all seem to quake, 12240 And yet, swelled by the deluge falling, The torrent plunges down the rock To water lovingly the valley; The lightning burns the overcast And clears the air, now smelling freshly, Of all its foulness, dankness, mist - All love proclaim! the creating power By which the whole world is embraced. Oh kindle, too, in me your fire, Whose thoughts, disordered, cold, depressed, 12250 Inside the cage of dull sense languish, Tormented, helpless, hard beset! Dear God, relieve my spirit's anguish, My needy heart illuminate! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The less their ability, the more their conceit. — Ahad Ha'am

However, whatever frightening mask it might assume, the national spirit in its original state was of pristine whiteness. Traveling through a country like Thailand, Honda realized more clearly than ever the simplicity and purity of things Japanese, like transparent stream water
through which one could glimpse pebbles below, or the probity of Shinto rites. Honda's life was not imbued with such spirit. Like the majority of Japanese he ignored it, behaving as though it did not exist and surviving by
escaping from it. All his life he had dodged things fundamental and artless: white silk, clear cold water, the zigzag white paper of the exorciser's staff fluttering in the breeze, the sacred precinct marked by a torii, the gods'
dwelling in the sea, the mountains, the vast ocean, the Japanese sword with its glistening blade so pure and sharp. Not only Honda, but the vast majority of Westernized Japanese, could no longer stand such intensely native elements. — Yukio Mishima

Good Lord, that has to be the homeliest woman I have ever laid eyes on. My horse's face is better-looking. — Kathleen Bittner Roth

With these surface waters, through a series of delicately adjusted, interlocking relationship, the life of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea may well determine what happens to a cod lying on a ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of multicolored, gorgeously plumed seaworms carpeting an underlying shoal. or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the balckness of mile-deep water. — Rachel Carson

The water was tripping over itself, splashing and hypnotizing, and I tried to fix my mind on a chunk of it, like each little ripple was a life that began far away in a high mountain source and had traveled miles pushing forward until it arrived at this spot before my eyes, and now without hesitation that water-life was hurling itself over the cliff. I wanted my body in all that swiftness; I wanted to feel the slip and pull of the currents and be dashed and pummeled on the rocks below ... — Justin Torres

Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust. — Karl Kraus

Labor Day. We could hear their bellow and grind from the Route 19 overpass. Below, the river gleamed like a flaw in metal. Leaving the parking lot behind, we billy-goated down the fisherman's trail, one by one, the way all mountain people do. Loud clumps of bees clustered in the fireweed and boneset, and the trail underfoot crunched with cans, condom wrappers, worm containers. A half-buried coal bucket rose from the dirt with a galvanized grin. The laurel hell wove itself into a tunnel, hazy with gnats. There, a busted railroad spike. The smell of river water filled our noses. — Matthew Neill Null

She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son's life. But — Elizabeth Strout

Even in the middle of a hurricane, the bottom of the sea is calm. As the storm rages and the winds howl, the deep waters sway in gentle rhythm, a light movement of fish and plant life. Below there is no storm. — Wayne Muller