Over Sea Under Stone Quotes & Sayings

We're more than common rock," he murmured. "We're pretty nigh indestructible when we're in our stone forms."
I thought this over. "Then why didn't they pick you up and throw you into the sea?"
He sent me a dark look. "You're a bloodthirsty lass, aren't you? — Taylor Longford

The sea does not contain all the pearls, the earth does not enclose all the treasures, and the flint-stone does not inclose all the diamonds, since the head of man encloses wisdom. — Saadi

Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps, or a hand grenade, if handy, or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a .44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly to the surface. — Edward Abbey

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this
through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Trust, is the stone thrown into the sea, sinking deep in all its murkiness, unable to see what it once lived and believed to be a promise. — Anthony Liccione

When he finally lifted his head up from the sea to cough, then breathe, he looked out at all the water before him, at the vast expanse of time and space. He could hear Marjorie laughing, and soon, he laughed too. When he finally reached her, she was moving just enough to keep her head above water. The black stone necklace rested just below her collarbone and Marcus watched the glints of gold come off it, shining in the sun. "Here," Marjorie said. "Have it." She lifted the stone from her neck, and placed it around Marcus's. "Welcome home. — Yaa Gyasi

God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun
became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse. — Anne Sexton

Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea ... — Edward Abbey

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

There's a flame of magic inside every stone & every flower, every bird that sings & every frog that croaks. There's magic in the trees & the hills & the river & the rocks, in the sea & the stars & the wind, a deep, wild magic that's as old as the world itself. It's in you too, my darling girl, and in me, and in every living creature, be it ever so small. Even the dirt I'm sweeping up now is stardust. In fact, all of us are made from the stuff of stars. — Kate Forsyth

Feel this," says Harold Bazin, and crouches and brings her hand to a curved wall which is completely studded with snails. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
"So many," she whispers.
"I don't know why. Maybe because they're safe from gulls? Here, feel this, I'll turn it over." Hundreds of tiny, squirming hydraulic feet beneath a horny, ridged top: a sea star. "Blue mussels here. And here's a dead stone crab, can you feel his claw? — Anthony Doerr

Turn from that road's beguiling ease; return
to your hunger's turret. Enter, climb the stair
chill with disuse, where the croaking toad of time
regards from shimmering eyes your slow ascent
and the drip, drip, of darkness glimmers on the stone
to show you how your longing waits alone.
What alchemy shines from under that shut door,
spinning out gold from the hollow of the heart?
("The Sea's Wash In The Hollow Of The Heart") — Denise Levertov

Cold be hand and heart and bone, and cold be sleep under stone: never more to wake on stony bed, never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead. In the black wind the stars shall die, and still on gold here let them lie, till the dark lord lifts his hand over dead sea and withered land. — J.R.R. Tolkien

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

For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone.
"What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle. — Virginia Woolf

As the music played over the speakers and the waterfall in the pool filled the silence around us, I knew that, without a doubt, I had just been ruined. — Abbi Glines

Countries are forged by war; perhaps girls are, too. New England and I will be reborn together in this war between the witches and the Brothers. Between Maura and me.
I am newly wrought
a girl of steel and snow and heartrending good-byes.
My magic is renewed by my heartbreak. It spills out my fingertips, swirling around me. The wind picks up, bitter cold now. The rain turns abruptly to snow, haloing the gas streetlamps like iron angels. Enormous snowflakes begin to fall
fast, faster
obscuring my sister, hiding her and Brenna and the carriage and the gray stone building that has become my home.
I am all alone in a sea of whirling white.
It feels right that it should be so. — Jessica Spotswood

Bruges was his dead wife. And his dead wife was Bruges. The two were untied in a like destiny. It was Bruges-la-Morte, the dead town entombed in its stone quais, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them. — Georges Rodenbach

Into darkness will I fade,
Into a night that Man has made,
But through that gloom shall gleam the sun
When I am lost, and again am won.

Release! Release! I call to thee
In new lands across the sea:
Let, another on narrow pathways, come to me.

Furthest and Highest,
yet not beyond reach.
Choose thou well a path that will teach
How the sunken is raised
and emptiness is filled
and a wandering heart
can finally be stilled.

Seek the great stone! Mark it well,with a sign.
That the one who shall follow
Shall see it is mine,
and seeing, shall ponder and certainly know
As the Ancients have writ: "As above, so below."

And I shall guard the Source of Greatness;
Waiting by a teardrop
From neither joy nor sorrow born,
In silver bound, beneath the ground,
I am the spiral horn. — Michael Green

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains of the moon.
Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known — J.R.R. Tolkien

Outside, the city is changing. While we have been talking of God's laws and seacrets of the earth, a cold fog has come rolling off the sea, pushing through the allys, sliding over the water, rubbing up agienst the cold stone. As I walk the street falls away behind me, the shop's blue awning lost within seconds. People move like ghosts, their voices disconnected from their bodies; as fast as they loom up they dissapear agien. The fog is so dense that by the time I have crossed toward the Merceria, I can barely see the ground under my feet or tell if the gloom is weather of the beginning of dusk. — Sarah Dunant

WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back. — James Salter

When the Dark comes rising six shall turn it back;
Three from the circle, three from the track;
Wood, bronze, iron; Water, fire, stone;
Five will return and one go alone.
Iron for the birthday; bronze carried long;
Wood from the burning; stone out of song;
Fire in the candle ring; water from the thaw;
Six signs the circle and the grail gone before.
Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold
Played to wake the sleepers, oldest of old.
Power from the Green Witch, lost beneath the sea.
All shall find the Light at last, silver on the tree. — Susan Cooper

You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of man who worked the sheath of this dagger ... You are the builders of coursed stone walls, the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops. We know that, we know it all too well. We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all these things are the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us. We do not understand. And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own. — Rosemary Sutcliff

It had been an evening in the empty dance hall when not even that depth of stone and the constant stirring of the ceiling fans could cool the stifling and humid night air, which had entered the Duckworth Club as heavily as a fog from the Arabian Sea. Even atheists, like Lowji, were praying for the monsoon rains. After — John Irving

They sat on the outcropping of stone and at bread and fruit. Kasta watched the long grass moving around them. The wind pushed it, attacked it, struck it in one place than another. It rose and fell again. It flowed, like water.
"Is this what the sea is like?" Kasta asked, and they both turned to her, surprised. "Does the sea move the way this grass moves?"
"It's like the sea," she said.
Giddon's eyes on her were incredulous.
"What? Is it such a strange thing to say?"
"It's a strange thing for you to say." He shook his head. He gathered their bread and fruit, then rose. "The Lienid fighter is filling your mind with romantic notions. — Kristin Cashore

He could feel the earth beneath, all the deep stone of it, cool and hard near the surface of the earth, but hotter and softer as you went deep, until it flowed like honey, a vast sweet fiery ocean of molten rock a thousand times more voluminous and ten thousand times heavier than the sea. It felt to him as if it were his own blood, and his heart pumped it. — Orson Scott Card

A cruel queen does not mean an unsuccessful one. Under her guidance, Kenettra changed from a glittering gem into a clouded stone, and her empire became one to rule all others, a darkness that stretched from sun, to sea, to sky.
- The Empire of the Wolf, translation by Tarsa Mehani — Marie Lu

Years! Years, ye shall mix with me!
Ye shall grow a part
Of the laughing Sea;
Of the moaning heart
Of the glittered wave
Of the sun-gleam's dart
In the ocean-grave.
Fair, cold, and faithless wert thou, my own!
For that I love
Thy heart of stone!
From the heights above
To the depths below,
Where dread things move,
There is naught can show
A life so trustless! Proud be thy crown!
Ruthless, like none, save the Sea, alone! — Voltairine De Cleyre

He wouldn't spend another standing in the darkness, hot and sick and shaking inside with a confused mess of feelings that weren't worth analyzing. That he shouldn't have felt anyway.
With Rachel gone it was like balancing on the edge of a cliff - and all the little wildflowers, the netting of grass and roots that kept the cliff from sliding into the sea below, were gone. It was just Matt standing there looking down, waiting to fall.
Even Rachel's memory, the sweet recollection of all they had built, all they had shared, was no longer strong enough to fight gravity. From the moment he had looked across the wet grass and seen Nathan Doyle standing in the shadow of a stone saber-toothed tiger, something had changed inside him. Something battened down had torn free, like a sail taking its first deep breath of sea air.
It terrified him.
And at the same time it exhilarated him.
Which terrified him all the more. — Josh Lanyon

And this is where I learned that sometimes our most holy mountain-moving faith looks more like spending our whole lives making that mountain move, rock by rock, pebble by pebble, unsexy day after daily day, casting the mountain to the sea stone by stone rather than watching a mountain suddenly rise up and cast itself. — Sarah Bessey

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

There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowels of the earth, many a fair pearl laid up in the bosom of the sea, that never was seen, nor never shall be. — Joseph Hall

If you pinch the sea of its liberty, though it be walls of stone or brass, it will beat them down. — John Cotton

All right, beautiful. You've got me tied down to this stone table, and there's a knife in your hand that says you get to rule Narnia for another hundred years. So maybe I die, and winter goes on. Maybe the hunger and the darkness and the fear never end. But as long as the children believe in me, I know that Aslan will live again. I, the Great Lion, Son of The Emperor Over The Sea, will live again and
aaaaauugh!! — C.S. Lewis

The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells. Things dimmed and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The dreams encased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night. — Cormac McCarthy