Mast Quotes & Sayings

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her - one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. — Herman Melville

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now. — Henry David Thoreau

In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; — Herman Melville

It's a slow sultry song. She opens her mouth and what comes out can only be described as dripping with sex.
The climax of the song comes and the college boys are cat calling her but she doesn't seem to notice at all. She's completely in the song, eyes half mast, a slight smile on her lips, and hips methodically rolling to the beat. She's pure sex and every male in the bar is thinking the same thing I am. What would she be like in my bed. She absent mindedly trails her hand from her collarbone down between her breasts to her belly. It's the hottest thing I've ever seen. My jeans instantly get too tight in the crotch and I adjust myself discreetly while everyone's eyes are still on her. — K. Larsen

Have Jesus always for your patron, His Cross for a mast on which you must spread your resolutions as a sail. Your anchor shall be a profound confidence in Him, and you shall sail prosperously. — Francis De Sales

So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness - Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together - there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses! — Herman Melville

Had I guns (as I had goods) to work my Christian harm.

I had run him up from the quarter deck to trade with his own yard-arm;

I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw,

And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw;

I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot in the rocking dark,

I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark;

I had lapped him round with cocoa husk, and drenched him with the oil,

And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil;

I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasseled his beard in the mesh,

And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh. — Rudyard Kipling

No Fridolf, bother all this learning. I can't study anymore because I must climb the mast to see what kind of weather we're going to have tomorrow. — Astrid Lindgren

Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes? pr.23.30 They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine. pr.23.31 Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. pr.23.32 At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. pr.23.33 Thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter perverse things. pr.23.34 Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast. pr.23.35 They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they have beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet again. — Anonymous

Fabio Capello needs to nail his hammers to the mast. — Andy Townsend

Claudette turned her arms upward to show us her tattooed wrists. One held the skull and crossbones of the Wilted Rose. The other resembled the flag which adorned the mast above us. A ship's wheel with two swords crossed through it. — Freedom Matthews

The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle. — Alfred Stieglitz

The musical flags of the world should fly at half mast because truly one of the greatest guitarists in the world and king of the blues has died. I have cherished him and so has the rest of the world who knew him and loved him for his entire career. As we pain, we must celebrate that his music, his style of playing and singing will last forever, from the recordings that he has done and the influence that he has had and will have on guitarists all over this planet. Long live the spirit of B.B. King. — Stevie Wonder

They say that it is one of the most terrifying manifestations in nature: a bull elephant in a state of must. Twin streams of vile-smelling liquid flow from the ducts of the temples and into the corners of the jaws. At these times the great beast will gore giraffes and hippos, will break the backs of cringeing rhinoceri. This was male-elephantine heat. Must: it derived via Urdu from the Persian mast or maest - "intoxicated." But I had settled for the modal verb. I must, I must, I just must. — Martin Amis

Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast, Ready with every nod to tumble down Into the fatal bowels of the deep. — William Shakespeare

Sexual intercourse ... a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on man's sensual mast. — Anais Nin

Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows. The barometer never changes, the flag is always at half-mast. — Henry Miller

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered. — David Markson

The two Mast Houses just within the Victory Gate of Portsmouth Dockyard are raised above the water on piloti. They are structures of remarkable grace, clinker-built, painted the palest green. They are vast, as they needed to be. Their survival is an industrial site devoted for a century to the servicing of mastless vessels is a matter for celebration. The use of which the more southerly is put is a matter for obloquy: the Mary Rose Shop is a repository of tawdry, insipid tat. It's the sort of stuff to make me wince- a dismal, timid inventory of mediocrity. Bad taste is forgivable. It's no taste which is so disheartening. — Jonathan Meades

With his ship faced with the danger of sinking, the Richard's chief gunner screamed to the Serapis, "Quarter! quarter! for God's sake!" Jones hurled a pistol at the man, felling him. But the cry had been heard by Pearson, the Serapis' commander, who called, "Do you ask for quarter?" Through the clash of battle, gunshot and crackle of fire the famous reply came faintly back to him: "I have not yet begun to fight!" Making good his boast, Jones sprang to a 9-pounder whose gun crew were killed or wounded, loaded and fired it himself, aiming at the Serapis' mainmast, then loaded and fired again. As the mast toppled, Pearson, surrounded by dead, with rigging on fire, hauled down his red ensign in token of surrender. Escorted to Richard's quarterdeck, he handed over his sword to Jones just as the Serapis' mainmast crashed over the side and its sail, nevermore to carry the wind, collapsed in a dying billow into the sea. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Craft the finest arrow
Forage jungles for straightest shaft
Forge sharpest head of glass
Pluck feathers of the wisest crow
Without the simplest archer and bow
Without a mark that's true
Useless
Craft the finest vessel
Fell the jungle's strongest mast
Build the world's mightiest hull
A flag the crown of all seas you can sew
Without the simplest oarsmen to row
Without a port that's true
Useless — Dylan Thomas McCall

Steer wide;
keep well to seaward; plug your oarsmen's ears
with beeswax kneaded soft; none of the rest
should hear that song.
But if you wish to listen,
let the men tie you in the lugger, hand
and foot, back to the mast, lashed to the mast,
so you may hear those harpies' thrilling voices;
shout as you will, begging to be untied,
your crew must only twist more line around you
and keep their stroke up, till the singers fade. — Homer

If I ever found where he'd stashed my spiked heels, I was going to nail his black heart to the mast of his fucking boat. — Leylah Attar

The cakes and pies and casseroles beckoned like gastronomic sirens, and there was no one to lash me to the mast. — Chris Fabry

A pirate once shouted 'Avast! I've caught you, you seadog, at last! Best pull out your sword - I'm coming aboard! Drop your britches, and climb up me mast! — J.L. Merrow

Kunley belongs to a spiritual school of thought known as crazy wisdom. Every religion has its branch of crazy wisdom. The Christians have their Fools for Christ. The Muslims have their Sufi Mast-Qalanders. The Jews have Woody Allen. Yet none is as crazy, or as wise, as Drukpa Kunley. — Eric Weiner

But he sleeps on the top of his mast
with his eyes closed tight.
The gull inquired into his dream,
which was, I must not fall.
The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all. — Elizabeth Bishop

He was sailing over a boundless expanse of sea, with a blood-red sky above, and the angry waters, lashed into fury beneath, boiling and eddying up, on every side. There was another vessel before them, toiling and labouring in the howling storm: her canvas fluttering in ribbons from the mast. — Charles Dickens

A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze? — Victor Hugo

Now that the house was securely hidden, the fact that he was holed up with Havily sent a wave of heat over his body. I'm not going to be able to keep away from you, he said. Tell me you know that. Tell me you understand.
Her eyelids fell to half-mast as she released a deep sigh. Another wave of honeysucke hit him square in the chest. No one is asking you to, Warrior. — Caris Roane

To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale. — Virginia Woolf

May be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads ME that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As — Herman Melville

Always, when Cleve had tried to reach somewhere else, something else, Ardis had stripped him of the possibility - like a pine tree being stripped of its branches. The episode last night was different, though, for Ardis had finally penetrated Cleve's protective bark. His brother had exposed the hideous knotholes left by past limb stripping, and had caused Cleve to leak resinous tears. What was he now? Another tree unfit for ever becoming the mast of a great ship? Was his brother to be blamed? Wasn't he himself the one who had allowed this to happen? Cleve — Gaylier Miller

Few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste
sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill
and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. — Henry David Thoreau

Identity was just a box people liked to put themselves in, a mast to tether to in a storm, a security blanket. — Leonardo Donofrio

There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

When the full moon was out the other night, it created one of the most spectacular scenes that I have seen in the Alps. The high glaciers of the Mont Blanc range were glowing an eerie bright blue-white, and they looked like huge ghost ships in the dark ocean of sky, sailing amongst black mountain valleys.

There were no clouds, and the moon was a huge and perfect disc tracking across the sky, shining on different parts of the glaciers through the night.

Looking up, I saw the black silhouette of the mid-altitude mountains below the ethereal shining high-mountain terrain, which created a weird vision: the ghostly glaciers floating, and appearing separate, contrasting sharply with the dark valleys beneath.

The Aiguille Verte especially, being so steep and isolated, seemed almost like a holographic mast with sails, plowing into the rolling waves, chasing after the Mont Blanc summit with its billowing spinnaker... — Steve Baldwin

I am your boat! I am your crew
Your rudder and your mast -
Your friend, I am your limpet too
And your elastoplast.
- Tintinnabulum — Mervyn Peake

How come she never got sad?"
She did get sad, Booboo. She got sad in her way instead of yours and
mine. She got sad, I'm pretty sure."
Hal?"
You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast out front by
the portcullis here after it happened? Do you remember that? And it
goes to half-mast every year at Convocation? Remember the flag, Boo?"
Hey Hal?"
Don't cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole?
Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you
listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So
listen - one way to lower the flag to half mast is just to lower the
flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole.
You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me?
You understand what I mean, Mario?"
Hal?"
She's plenty sad, I bet. — David Foster Wallace

Public opinion is the pennant on a nation's mast which shows the politician and the editor how to trim the sails. — Austin O'Malley

Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and even when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. — Herman Melville

The first time I saw America was from my perch on the mast of a Spanish naval ship, where I could spot the Statue of Liberty reaching proudly into the open, endless American sky. — Jose Andres

How I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast. — Herman Melville

In every man there is a hidden child which is called the urge to create and he prefers as play things and serious things not the miniature ships, recreated in the minutest detail, but the walnutshell with a bird feather as mast and sail and a pebble as the captain. He also wants to be able to participate and to co-create in art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer. For this "child in man" is the immortal creator within him. — Christian Morgenstern

And suddenly his cock was out, jutting upward from his breeches like a fat pink mast. — George R R Martin

Every art always deals with human beings, it is a human manifestation and presents human beings. To paraphrase Marx: "The root of all art is man." When the film close-up strips the veil of our imperceptiveness and insensitivity from the hidden little things and shows us the face of objects, it still shows us man, for what makes objects expressive are the human expressions projected on to them. The objects only reflect our own selves, and this is what distinguished art from scientific knowledge (although even the latter is to a great extent subjectively determined). When we see the face image of things, we do what the ancients did in creating gods in man's image and breathing a human soul into them. The close-ups of the film are the creative instruments of this mighty visual anthropomorphism. — Gerald Mast

Life is cruel. Why should the afterlife be any different? I offer you a choice. Join my crew ... and postpone the judgment. One hundred years before the mast. Will ye serve? — Davy Jones

At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn't immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it. — Anthony Marra

The terrifying physics of going up-mast in heavy seas are inescapable. — Abby Sunderland

If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past
Security in human systems we're told will always always last
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast
Without the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere fast.
(History Will Teach Us Nothing) — Sting

When other presidents used the executive pen, they used to it for things like should we lower the flag at half mast for someone who died and things like that. When President Obama uses it, he changes the way America does business. — Eric Bolling

Say I Am You
I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.
To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.
I am morning mist, and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove, and surf on the cliff.
Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.
I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.
The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of a stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,
and the falling away. What is, and what isn't.
You who know Jelaluddin, You the one in all,
say who I am. Say I am You. — Rumi

He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure. — Ernest Hemingway,

What do we plant when we plant the tree? We plant the ship that will cross the sea, we plant the mast to carry the sails, we plant the planks to withstand the gales
the keel, the keelson, and beam and knee
we plant the ship when we plant the tree. — Henry Abbey

Let your home be you mast and not your anchor. — Kahlil Gibran

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. — Robert Louis Stevenson

4. The whole Icarus-flying-too-near-the-sun-and-plummeting-out-of-the-sky thing? That's real. Same with the Sirens who lure you to death with their irresistible song, and the odalisque so beautiful anyone who looks at her dies. And remember: as badass as Grendel was, Beowulf hadn't seen anything until he went up against Grendel's mother. I know, I know - I thought they were just myths too. But the fact is, sometimes, if you don't want to meet a tragic end, your only option is to avert your gaze, tie yourself to the mast with cotton in your ears, or ascend a little less close to the Vault of Heaven. — Todd Hanson

Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. 'If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,' Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chieftest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman's beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor fall from a mast-head. 'A pox on them!' she said, realizing for the first time what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood ... — Virginia Woolf

And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement. — Herman Melville

Without constant restoration we are not ready for the perpetual assaults of hell, or the stern afflictions of heaven, or even for the strifes within. When the whirlwind shall be loosed, woe to the tree that has not sucked up fresh sap, and grasped the rock with many intertwisted roots. When tempests arise, woe to the mariners that have not strengthened their mast, nor cast their anchor, nor sought the haven. If we allow the good to grow weaker, the evil will surely gather strength and struggle desperately for the mastery over us; and so, perhaps, a painful desolation, and a lamentable disgrace may follow. Let us draw near to the footstool of divine mercy in humble entreaty, and we shall realize the fulfillment of the promise, Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Bishop Erkenwald, who ruled Lundene, had chided me, saying I should have named the ship for some Christian milksop saint, and he had presented me with a crucifix that he wanted me to nail to Seolferwulf 's mast, but instead I burned the wooden god and his wooden cross and mixed their ashes with crushed apples, that I fed to my two sows. I worship Thor. Now, — Bernard Cornwell

Love will not be constrain'd by mastery.
When mast'ry comes, the god of love anon
Beateth his wings, and, farewell, he is gone.
Love is a thing as any spirit free. — Geoffrey Chaucer

Why spend your whole life on the high seas looking for treasure,' Peter asked, talking to the clouds as he scaled a rope up what remained of the half-crumbled mast, 'when you could have a promised pay check in exchange for all the life you'd live between nine-and-five. — Audrey Greathouse

Cram nailed his colours to the mast and threw down the Great Pretender — Ron Pickering

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy's encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy. — Erica Jong

Lord Cutler Beckett: [Jack is about to light a cannon that's pointed at the mast] You're mad.

Jack Sparrow: Thank goodness for that, 'cause if I wasn't this would probably never work.

[fires the cannon, which catapults him onto his ship, landing safely on his feet behind his crew]

Jack Sparrow: And that was without even a single drop of rum. — Jack Sparrow

It is certainly not then - not in dreams - but when one is wide awake, in moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
- Vladimir Nabokov — Vladimir Nabokov

The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities that he could get drunk on it. And later, when he learned from stories how large the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships fit days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself shutting high up in the crow's nest of the foremost mast on such ship, gliding on through the endless shell of the sea
which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhilaration of breath, the end of all smells
dissolving with pleasure in that breath. — Patrick Suskind

Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm?
Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put. — David Markson

Bilbo's Last Song

Day is ended, dim my eyes,
But journey long before me lies.
Farewell, friends! I hear the call.
The ship's beside the stony wall.
Foam is white and waves are grey;
Beyond the sunset leads my way.
Foam is salt, the wind is free;
I hear the rising of the Sea.

Farewell, friends! The sails are set,
The wind is east, the moorings fret.
Shadows long before me lie,
Beneath the ever-bending sky,
But islands lie behind the Sun
That I shall raise ere all is done;
Lands there are to west of West,
Where night is quiet and sleep is rest.

Guided by the Lonely Star,
Beyond the utmost harbour-bar,
I'll find the heavens fair and free,
And beaches of the Starlit Sea.
Ship, my ship! I seek the West,
And fields and mountains ever blest.
Farewell to Middle-earth at last.
I see the Star above my mast! — J.R.R. Tolkien

We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly. — Virginia Woolf

Na, she's righted again," said a cool young fisherman, "and they've gotten down that unchancy mast. They maun have stout hearts and skeely hands that work her; but it's for life, and that learns folk baith pith and lear. There! - but it's owre now. — Mrs. Oliphant

Time flaps on the mast-- — Virginia Woolf

Don't cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole?
Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you
listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So
listen - one way to lower the flag to half mast is just to lower the
flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole.
You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me?
You understand what I mean, Mario? — David Foster Wallace

Its single mast reached high towards the stars and its slender form creaked with every lapping wave. — Jack Croxall

You're not terrified of me. You're terrified of letting yourself care for me, and I can't say I blame you. People who love me usually end up dead. But you see, I'm not going to give you any choice. You belong to me now whether you like it or not."
"I don't like it, not one bit!"
"Try to escape," he suggested coolly. "Go ahead. See what happens. Give me one excuse to take what I want from you, even if it is against your will. I want you that much. Too damned much." He turned without warning and kissed her, flattening her back against the pine mast. — Gaelen Foley

That was something else he had learned from clever Odysseus, who had tied himself to the mast of his ship so that he might hear the captivating song of the sirens without being tempted to his death. If you ever allowed your most sacred promises to be broken - if you set sail with a rope you knew was weak - then you would never be able to enjoy all the best kinds of music. — Anonymous

He smirked, his lids lowering to half-mast. Twinkling, hot-lava, sexy cake, sex-on-a-stick, obscene levels of charisma. — Penny Reid

Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake. — Siri Hustvedt

The moment I took hold of the line, I felt the mighty tug of the wind coursing into my palm and wrist, and there I stayed, transfixed. The pwer in that topgallant sail suddenly awed me, and yet it was among the smaller sails on the mast. It was a mere speck on the ocean, catching an infinitesimal fraction of all the howling winds that crossed the wide seas. I literally could not move a muscle, trying in vain to absorb the magnitude of it.
And there was something else, as well. This wind was blowing me westward. I was hurtling into my own predestined future. With neither star nor compass, I knew the heading of this wind. It bore down on a lonely river crossing in one of the last wild places on Earth, where timber moaned in a gale, and frosty grass sparkled in the dawn, and beasts lumbered and thundered the valley. A sacred place protected by Comanches. — Mike Blakely

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Peter was a gentle, red-haired bear of a man. Standing at six-four in his socks, he moved everywhere with a slight and nautical sway, but even though he was broad across the chest there was something centered and reassuring about him, like an old ship's mast cut from a single timber. — Graham Joyce

Going up the mast is one of the most dangerous things you can do as a solo sailor. — Abby Sunderland

Get rid of their mast, knock holes in the hull, then get back on board."
"You want us to sink her?" Gundar asked, and Halt shook his head.
"No. I want her badly damaged but capable of making it back to port. I want the word to go out that the strange ship with the red falcon ensign" - he gestured to Evanlyn's ensign, flying from the mast top - "is manned by dangerous, hairy maniacs with axes and is to be avoided at all costs."
"That sounds like us," Gundar said cheerfully. — John Flanagan

Between his legs was his enormous cock - mmm, even at half-mast Markus was huge, with a thick shaft and long length most men would envy. His balls were large and meaty - so lickable. — Kate Kent

Nail the colours to the mast! That is the right thing to do, and, therefore, that is what we must do, and do it now. What colours? The colours of Christ, the work He has given us to do- the evangelization of all the unevangelized. — Charles Studd

My left hand is a Rorschach blotch all its own, a six-fingered, skin-blood-and-bone ink splatter. People see it and fly their worst fears and secret fetishes at full mast when they think they're being discreet. They see it as strange, fascinating, ugly, beautiful, disgusting or erotic depending on what's behind their eyes. — Craig Clevenger

You are going to take the high sea of the world; change not, on that account, patron or sails, anchor or wind. Have Jesus always for your patron, His Cross for a mast on which you must spread your resolutions as a sail. Your anchor shall be a profound confidence in Him, and you shall sail prosperously.
May the favorable wind of celestial inspirations ever fill your vessel's sails fuller and fuller and make you happily arrive at the port of a holy eternity. — Francis De Sales

Those interest me. I will climb them."
"All the way up there?" Bridget asked. She felt slightly dizzy just thinking of the view from the mast tops. "It seems unnecessary."
Rowl turned his head and gave her a level look. Then he said, "I sometimes forget that you are just a human. " He flicked his ears dismissively and looked back up at the masts. "A cat would understand. — Jim Butcher

Courage~ What makes the flag on the mast to wave? What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the "ape" in apricot?~Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz — L. Frank Baum

Footnote 40: "But fast or slow, hard or easy, the PC manages to keep her frame and crew furiously vibrating - adding insult to injury with a nice juicy ducking, spray often times covering a goodly portion of her tall mast. If she's not pitching, she's rolling. If she's not rolling, she shaking. And if she's not shaking, then she's tied up in port . . ." p. 67 — Gary W. Neidhardt

Stupid rock gods! Leo yelled through the helm, thats the third time ive had to replace that mast! You think they grow on trees?
Nico frowned. Masts are from trees. — Rick Riordan

You feel pretty ,manly to me," I breathed out, all jelly-legged with half-mast eyes.
"And you feel like a woman worthy of a fight, Ms.Greene. — L.J. Shen

First she said we were to keep clear of the Sirens, who sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers; but she said I might hear them myself so long as no one else did. Therefore, take me and bind me to the crosspiece half way up the mast; bind me as I stand upright, with a bond so fast that I cannot possibly break away, and lash the rope's ends to the mast itself. If I beg and pray you to set me free, then bind me more tightly still. — Homer

The enemy now began to appear from the mast-head. — John Byng

Even at such a tender age, I knew that life is lived in leftovers, account ledgers, and timetables rather than in the Platonic sphere of perfect theory. I couldn't float sylphlike around Love Hall in the flowing robes of indeterminacy for the rest of my life, however much I wished there to be no change. I had to accept my responsibilities and, at least in the eyes of the world and at least for the time being, nail my colors to a mast. Unless I wished to appear a strange wonder for the rest of time, caked in circus makeup covering the truth inches beneath, the mast would be male. — Wesley Stace

Charles made an effort. "Well," he said, "right now they're preparing for the shrouds to be warped from the hounds of the mast to the channels on the sides of the ship. The deadeyes will be turned in with a left-handed thread seizing, properly whipped and capped. They'll be made taut by the throat seizings, and attached to the turnbuckles on the mizzen chains. The ratlines will be seized horizontally across the shrouds with clove hitches in between and eyes spliced at the ends. That will make the ladderway for the topmen to climb up and down the mast." He — Jay Worrall

I'm going to take a shower. You're going to be good, try not to be sexy or freak me out or anything like that. I've got to concentrate, preparing for a formal party is serious business. I don't need distractions."
His eyes went half-mast and his half-grin appeared.
"You're doing it!"I accused.
His eyebrows went up.
I shook my head. "Never mind".
Then I stomped to the shower. — Kristen Ashley

The gooseneck," Badim adds, with a quick smile at Freya. "It connects the boom to the mast, but it isn't very robust. — Kim Stanley Robinson