Pacific The Quotes & Sayings

As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it's not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That's the point. The picture is never completed. There is always so much more that remains to be discovered. — Ann Druyan

Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food. — Andrew Rayner

I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame. — Donna Tartt

Take stock, citizen bacillus,
Now that there are so many billions of you,
Bleeding through your opened veins,
Into your bathtub, or into the Pacific
Of that by which they may remember you. — John Brunner

Unlike
in North America, however, there was no single
giant ice sheet that covered the entire northern half of the continent. The biggest ice sheet
covered all of Scandinavia and extended east as
far as the eastern shore of the White Sea today.
The Urals and parts of the Putorana Plateau in
northern Siberia were also heavily glaciated. In
between, however, and all the way to the Pacific
Coast, only small areas of the highest terrain had
much ice cover. The remainder was ice-free, but
with hundreds of meters of permafrost extending deep into the soil. This may seem counterintuitive, but it can be understood if we remember
that moisture available at cold temperatures is
what makes ice and snow, not the cold temperatures themselves. — Mikhail S. Blinnikov

Stalin's position in east Asia was now rather good. If the Japanese meant to fight the United States for control of the Pacific, it was all but inconceivable that they would confront the Soviets in Siberia. Stalin no longer had to fear a two-front war. What was more, the Japanese attack was bound to bring the United States into the war - as an ally of the Soviet Union. By early 1942 the Americans had already engaged the Japanese in the Pacific. Soon American supply ships would reach Soviet Pacific ports, unhindered by Japanese submarines - since the Japanese were neutral in the Soviet-German war. A Red Army taking American supplies from the east was an entirely different foe than a Red Army concerned about a Japanese attack from the east. Stalin just had to exploit American aid, and encourage the Americans to open a second front in Europe. Then the Germans would be encircled, and the Soviet victory certain. — Timothy Snyder

Let me be candid. If I had to rank book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this: 1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley. 2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they're corporate, but let's face it - those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches. 3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It's next to the potting soil.) 4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific. 5. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. — Robin Sloan

I found an agent midway through my year-long run at 'Grease' and just started to audition. I fortunately booked 'South Pacific' six months after 'Grease' was over, and I feel like that was a huge turning point in legitimizing myself in the Broadway community, and getting to do that was absolutely amazing. — Laura Osnes

How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I'd go until down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I'd pray for the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost. — Cheryl Strayed

Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety. — Tony Judt

There was no Pacific railroad in those fine times of ten or twelve years ago - not a single rail of it. I only proposed to stay in Nevada three months - I had no thought of staying longer than that. I meant to see all I could that was new and strange, and then hurry home to business. I little thought that I would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven uncommonly long years! — Mark Twain

The Japanese Navy not only outgunned American forces in the Pacific but proved more powerful in that ocean than the combined navies of the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. — James M. Scott

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and China are more likely to view each other as competitors if not adversaries. But the die has not been cast. The best possible outcome is a new understanding that when they cannot cooperate, they will coexist and allow all countries in the Pacific to grow and thrive. — Lee Kuan Yew

Our theme for this year's festivities, Dreams and Challenges of Asian Pacific Americans, speaks to the many generations of Asian Pacific Americans who worked hard to overcome economic hardship, racism and other barriers in their pursuit of the American dream. — Lucille Roybal-Allard

The expansion of this country was accomplished at the cost of decimation to the Native American population. The American Indian death toll due to the United States' march to the Pacific was massive. Much of the land we stole from the Native Americans is uninhabited to this day; basically, the Indians could have stayed where they were. Had America expanded its boundaries yet been true to its conscience, the American Indian nations could have remained intact. And were there a greater prevalence of Native American philosophy and culture in the United States today, the life of our nation would be immeasurably enriched. — Marianne Williamson

Somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific is a copy of The Forsyte Saga I heaved overboard one afternoon. I very quickly saw what was wrong with it; Galsworthy was a gentleman, and no gentleman would ever write a good book. — MacDonald Harris

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman. — Abigail Adams

We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we've been in wars ever since. We're not a pacific people. — James Lee Burke

As long as the sun rises over Ontario and sets over the Pacific, I will dedicate myself to bringing the people of Oregon what they want and need most - an era of hope, change, and economic renewal. — Ted Kulongoski

If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer. — Joseph Grew

From the peak of Chimborazo (volcano) to the Pacific coast, from the Amazon rainforest to the Galapagos Islands, may you never lose the ability to thank God for what he has done and is doing for you, may you never lose the ability to protect what is small and simple, to care for your children and your elderly, to have confidence in the young, and to be constantly struck by the nobility of your people and the singular beauty of your country. — Pope Francis

Millions upon millions of years ago, when the continents were already formed and the principal features of the earth had been decided, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all other ... a mighty ocean, resting uneasily to the east of the largest continent, a restless ever-changing, gigantic body of water that would later be described as Pacific. — James A. Michener

There is only one sensible way to think of the Pacific Ocean today. It is the highway between Asia and America, and whether we with it or not, from now on there will be immense traffic along that highway. — James A. Michener

If they can fight and die on Okinawa, Guadalcanal (and) in the South Pacific, they can play ball in America. — Happy Chandler

What worries me, especially, is that public opinion over here is patting itself on the back every morning and thanking God for theAtlantic Ocean (and the Pacific Ocean). We greatly underestimate the serious implications to our own future ... Things move with such terrific speed these days, that it is really essential to us to think in broader terms and, in effect, to warn the American people that they, too, should think of possible ultimate results in Europe and the Far East. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

The number one issue that Ocean Mysteries has opened my eyes to is, no matter where you are, whether you're on a beach in Hawaii, you're diving in the Pacific, you're in a remote archipelago, or you're in the middle of nowhere - I am blown away and sobered and crushed, emotionally crushed, by the amount of marine debris, of garbage, that is now in our ocean. — Jeff Corwin

That era provided a profusion of wonderful actors and actresses to admire - and not always the ones remembered by posterity. Take Joel McCrea, for instance, a real cowboy and a good actor who could excel in westerns like Union Pacific or The Virginian, but who was also wonderful in comedies like The Palm Beach Story for Preston Sturges - and comedy is the hardest thing an actor can do. — Robert Wagner

Dear Earth-dweller: Please use your BRAIN! As anyone KNOWS in this SCIENTIFIC age, the origin of the races is now WELL UNDERSTOOD! Africans traveled here after the DELUGE from Mercury, Asians from Venus, Caucasians from Mars, and the people of the Pacific islands from assorted asteroids. If you don't have the NECESSARY OCCULT SKILLS to project rays from the continents to the ASTRAL PLANE to verify this, a simple analysis of TEMPERAMENT and APPEARANCE should make this obvious even to YOU! But please don't put WORDS into MY mouth! Just because we're all from different PLANETS doesn't mean we can't still be FRIENDS. — Greg Egan

It's a tough life being a pop star. You know, at the end of the day when you've paid all the bills and put the kids through college and that, you know, there's only enough left for a small island off the South Pacific. — Larry Mullen

An environmental revolution is taking shape in the United States. This revolution has touched communities of color from New York to California and from Florida to Alaska - anywhere where African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans live and comprise a majority of the population. Collectively, these Americans represent the fastest growing segment of the population in the United States. They are also the groups most at risk from environmental problems. — Robert D Bullard

As the barman's hand rose from beneath the bar, Cabal was filled with a presentiment and a strange foreboding that he hadn't felt since the last time he'd watched the nightmare corpse city of R'lyeh rise, effulgent with the ineffable and fetid with fish, rise from the depths of the Pacific. — Jonathan L. Howard

The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement is a continuation of other disastrous trade agreements, like NAFTA, CAFTA, and permanent normal trade relations with China. — Bernie Sanders

The great Pacific Railway is commenced ... Immigration will soon pour into these valleys. Ten millions of emigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years ... This is the grandest enterprise under God! — George Francis Train

To the majority of those on the job his presence had been magical. Years afterward, the wife of one of the steam-shovel engineers, Mrs. Rose van Hardevald, would recall, "We saw him ... on the end of the train. Jan got small flags for the children, and told us about when the train would pass ... Mr. Roosevelt flashed us one of his well-known toothy smiles and waved his hat at the children ... " In an instant, she said, she understood her husband's faith in the man. "And I was more certain than ever that we ourselves would not leave until it [the canal] was finished." Two years before, they had been living in Wyoming on a lonely stop on the Union Pacific. When her husband heard of the work at Panama, he had immediately wanted to go, because, he told her, "With Teddy Roosevelt, anything is possible." At the time neither of them had known quite where Panama was located. — David McCullough

The Pacific Northwest, and particularly Whidbey Island, is extremely suited to be a location in a novel. — Elizabeth George

I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you and the State over which you preside in His holy protection ... that He would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy nation. — George Washington

Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for "making poetry" is the same as the verb "to breathe."
Such tidbits of ethnic lore delighted Amanda, and she vowed from that time onward she would try to regulate each breath as if she were composing a poem. — Tom Robbins

The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles "the Coast," but they seem a long time ago. — Joan Didion

If I liken the Pacific War to a football match, I can say to you that the first half is over, we have kicked off after the interval, and we are going to carry the ball into enemy territory for a smashing victory. — John Curtin

There are all kinds of letters and protests that come from, not surprisingly, Japanese fishermen, the fishermen's wives; there are student groups, all different types of people; the protest against the Americans' use of the Pacific for nuclear testing. — Martha Smith

But it was hard, oh, it was hard. Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love
but sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation, and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up. — Yann Martel

Put any two people together and each will seek ways of feeling superior to the other. If a ship went down in the Pacific and a single sailor managed to swim to a desert island, would he be pleased to see, ten minutes later, another sailor emerging from the surf? Quite possibly - but only if the new arrival accepted that the first man was now a landed aristocrat while he himself was an illegal immigrant. — Michael Foley

It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry. — Alfred North Whitehead

Humans pull together in an odd way when they're in the wilderness. It's astonishing how few people litter and how much they help one another. Indeed, the smartphone app to navigate the Pacific Crest Trail, Halfmile, is a labor of love by hikers who make it available as a free download. — Nicholas Kristof

I came to my first Colts training camp in July of 1950, and it was murder, absolute murder. We had a coach named Clem Crow who must have been nuts. You got to remember that I'd been a Marine, had gone through basic training and spent 26 months in the Pacific during WWII, but the Marine drill instructors had nothing on Clem. — Art Donovan

They're each on separate coasts but I think that the deep Maine woods shares some similarities to the Pacific Northwest. — Mark Duplass

As the sun disappeared below the horizon and its glare no longer reflected off a glassy sea, I thought of how beautiful the sunsets always were in the Pacific. They were even more beautiful than over Mobile Bay. Suddenly a thought hit me like a thunderbolt. Would I live to see the sunset tomorrow? — Eugene B. Sledge

Major mutations or changes took place among the descendants of Japheth. This is obvious because of their white skin. In other words, they were black at one time but their skin changed to white. This phenomenon can be understood in view of the total world population. Over two-thirds of the population of the world consists of colored people. That is a ratio of 2-1. Two out of Noah's three sons remained black. We know this to be true because many of the people throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the islands in the Pacific Ocean are yellow, brown or, black. — Rudolph R. Windsor

I look up at the sky, wondering if I'll catch a glimpse of kindness there, but I don't. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the Pacific. And they have nothing to say to me. Clouds are always taciturn. I probably shouldn't be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is inside of me. Like staring down into a deep well. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative often self-centered nature that still doubts itself
that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation. I've carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I'm not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I've carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect. — Haruki Murakami

wearing only a bathing suit interjected, "We would never swim in the Pacific Ocean, Carolyn. The waves at Santa Monica Beach are so lame. You don't have to worry at all. We just want to roast marshmallows. — Brighton Hill

At this moment in history, millions of 'working dads' are desiring to do what they do not feel they have the right to do: be more devoted as a dad, less devoted as a worker. This feeling is far more ubiquitous among men executives than women executives in many areas of the world because, for instance, Asia-Pacific women executives today are more than six times as likely to not have children than men executives are. The Asia-Pacific executive man is about six times as likely to be a working dad as an executive woman is to be a working mom. — Warren Farrell

I balked. Another vampire? I guess it made sense; the states of the Pacific Northwest were known for their lenient monster laws. — The Harvard Lampoon

In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand who holds the conch that is, who should be listened to and when. — Max De Pree

On Friday the 13th of April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup, will fly so close to Earth, that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, it's named Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death. If the trajectory of Apophis at close approach passes within a narrow range of altitudes called the 'keyhole,' the precise influence of Earth's gravity on its orbit will guarantee that seven years later in 2036, on its next time around, the asteroid will hit Earth directly, slamming in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. The tsunami it creates will wipe out the entire west coast of North America, bury Hawaii, and devastate all the land masses of the Pacific Rim. If Apophis misses the keyhole in 2029, then, of course, we have nothing to worry about in 2036. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Somewhere beyond the battening, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding. — Thomas Pynchon

I'm so alive.
As I stand facing the beauty of the never-ending Pacific Ocean, a late afternoon breeze blows down from the hills behind. As always, it is a beautiful day. The sun is making its final descent. The magic is about to begin. The skies are ready to burn with brilliance, as it turns from a soft blue to a bright orange. Looking towards the West, I stare in awe at the hypnotic power of the waves. A giant curl begins to take form, then breaks with a thundering clap as it crashes on the shore. — Dave Pelzer

The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer - and yet also, like most things, so very simple - was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go. — Cheryl Strayed

Perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet ... It took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the Pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space. Do we not see in the firmament the lights carried along the shore by night, as Columbus did? Let us not despair or mutiny. — Henry David Thoreau

I think this is the first time I've altered a book based on what you guys told me. So it's an occasion! Soon I'll be putting up polls to choose between plots, and then it's a short stop to accepting anonymous contributions and stapling them together while I sip margaritas on the deck of a Pacific cruise ship. — Max Barry

Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean. — William H. Seward

But every tomorrow has led to today - to us being alone, hungry, and cold on an unknown island somewhere in the South Pacific. — Jennifer Arnett

Everyone is always leaving each other, chasing down the next seeming opportunity - home or body. Where does it stop? Does it ever? I want to believe it all leads to something grander than the imagination, grander than the end-stop of the Pacific. Or is that it: You get to the place where you land; you are tired now; you settle. You settle. You build a home and raise a family. There are years of eating and arguing, working and waking. There are years of dying. No one knows what the last image will be. — Bich Minh Nguyen

I wonder what it's like to be from a state that is spread across a few islands way out in the Pacific Ocean, only added to the United States in 1959. Not only that but to be the birthplace of America's first black president? Pretty cool, I bet. — Henry Rollins

My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, even now. — Mona Simpson

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like
dolphins through the grey sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. — Robinson Jeffers

There are still to be found , or designing men, who stand ready to advocate the paradox of perpetual peace between the states, though dismembered and alienated from each other ... The genius of republics, say they, is pacific; the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men, and to extinguish those inflammable humours which have so often kindled into wars. Commercial republics, like ours, will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other. They will be governed by mutual interest, and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord. — Alexander Hamilton

The Pacific had great hope that when the former President Mitered decided to halt nuclear testing, we had put behind us the issue of nuclear states testing their weapons in our Pacific region. — Jenny Shipley

V-J Day, or Victory in Japan Day, marks the date of the Japanese surrender that ended fighting in the Pacific. — Doc Hastings

My entire life has changed in the span of three weeks, but as the seals howl against the Pacific, everything around me remains exactly the same. — Sarah Ockler

You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody. — U.G. Krishnamurti

I joined the Navy hoping to be submariner and ended up in the sub service aboard a tender in the Pacific. — Tony Curtis

Lester wanted to rise up out of this like a cloud, to drift over the valley and shore to the Pacific, to dissolve into its huge green expanse like rain. — Andre Dubus III

You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be. Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but-the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do. — H.G.Wells

We have listened here to the delegates who have recalled the terrible human suffering, and the great material destruction of the late war in the Pacific. It is with feelings of sorrow that we recall the part played in that catastrophic human experience by the old Japan. — Shigeru Yoshida

Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den.
I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there. — Alice Sebold

I lived in New York City for a while and miss it like it's a person. Although I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, I'm a New Yorker at heart. A stroll through Central Park, a visit to the MET, a show on Broadway. There is no other city like it in the world! — Zoe McLellan

First, separate ground, sea and air warfare is gone forever. This lesson we learned in World War II. I lived that lesson in Europe. Others lived it in the Pacific. Millions of American veterans learned it well. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Just be happy that something traveled 5,000 miles across the Pacific and, for once, it wasn't your job. — Bill Maher

We have a right to expect that the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific slope, the Rocky Mountains, and great plains States will take the lead in the preservation and right use of forests, in securing the right use of waters, and in seeing that our land policy is not twisted from its original purpose, but is perpetuated by amendment, by change when such change is necessary in the life of that purpose, the purpose being to turn the public domain into farms each to be the property of the man who actually tills it and makes his home in it. — Theodore Roosevelt

Most American Hispanics don't belong to one race, either. I keep telling kids that, when filling out forms, they should put "yes" to everything - yes, I am Chinese; yes, I am African; yes, I am white; yes, I am a Pacific Islander; yes, yes, yes - just to befuddle the bureaucrats who think we live separately from one another. — Richard Rodriguez

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other. — Tom Brokaw

Monday nights always brought in the worst kind of crazy. Tonight that crazy came in the form of Paul Cross, town hermit. One of them, anyway. This was the Pacific Northwest. — Tara Kelly

The nation did not begin to realize the extraordinary possibilities of the vast Western territory until its attention was thus suddenly and definitely concentrated on the Pacific by the annual addition of over fifty million dollars to the circulating medium. — John Moody

The first job I ever had was right here in San Francisco with Southern Pacific. — Steven Burd

The South Pacific is memorable because when you are in the islands you simply cannot ignore nature. You cannot avoid looking up at the stars, large as apples on a new tree. You cannot deafen your ear to the thunder of the surf. The bright sands, the screaming birds, and the wild winds are always with you. — James A. Michener

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides me; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of it surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garland crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
-MARK TWAIN in an 1889 Dinner Speech at Delmonico's in New York to honor two baseball teams that had just returned from touring the Pacific, including Honolulu. — John Richard Stephens

Along the Oregon coast an arm of the Pacific shushes softly against rocky shores. Above the waves, dripping silver in the moonlight, old trees, giant trees, few now, thrust their heads among low clouds, the moss thick upon their boles and shadow deep around their roots. In these woods nights are quiet, save for the questing hoot of an owl, the satin stroke of fur against a twig, the tick and rasp of small claws climbing up, clambering down. In these woods, bear is the big boy, the top of the chain, but even he goes quietly and mostly by day. It is a place of mosses and liverworts and ferns, of filmy green that curtains the branches and cushions the soil, a wet place, a still place. — Sheri S. Tepper

Why is physical love bad and spiritual love good? I don't understand. I can't help feeling that they are the same. I would like to boast that I am she who could destroy her body and soul in Gehenna for the sake of a love, for the sake of a passion she could not understand, or for the sake of the sorrow they engendered. — Osamu Dazai

We depend on our rivers and dams for energy, transportation, irrigation and recreation and I will continue this year to fight for what's best for the Pacific Northwest. — Cathy McMorris Rodgers

When a director at Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the nation's largest utilities, testified that all of its control systems were getting hooked up to the Internet, to save money and speed up the transmission of energy, Lacombe asked what the company was doing about security. He didn't know what Lacombe was talking about. — Fred Kaplan

We will do everything in our power to make sure cross-strait stability becomes the driving force for peace in the Asia-Pacific region. — Tsai Ing-wen

There's something about the Pacific Northwest, the scale of it, and the fact that not so long ago people came here and died getting here, and then died the first winter they were here. There's this breathtaking beauty, just a little bit of moss on the tree, just this little thread of danger, and the sinister. And I really like that. — Chelsea Cain

Sometimes I like to play the soundtracks to famous musicals so we can all sing along. South Pacific is one of my favorites. Our neighbors must hate us. — Louise Brown

It is not simply that these two cities are perched side by side at the edge of the Pacific; it is that adolescence sits next to middle age, and they don't know how to relate to each other. In a way, these two cities exist in different centuries. San Diego is a post-industrial city talking about settling down, slowing down, building clean industry. Tijuana is a preindustrial city talking about changing, moving forward, growing. Yet they form a single metropolitan area. — Richard Rodriguez

To tell the truth, in Pacific 231 I was on the trail of a very abstract and quite ideal concept, by giving the impression of a mathematical acceleration of rhythm, while the movement itself slowed . I first called this piece Mouvement symphonique. On reflection I found that a bit colorless. Suddenly, a rather romantic image crossed my mind, and when the work was finished, I wrote the title Pacific 231, which indicates a locomotive for heavy loads and high speeds (a type unfortunately disappeared, alas, and sacrificed to electric traction). — Arthur Honegger

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box. — Joyce Carol Oates

The art of the great historic civilizations never impress us as much as an Eskimo harpoon or a mask from the South Pacific. The contact is physical, and the feeling we experience is very much like acute anxiety. Inner or outer space, the world below or beyond, becomes a great weight pressing down upon us. Each work is a solid block of time, time standing still, time more massive than a mountain, despite the fact that it is as intangible as air or thought. The handiwork of primitive peoples reveals the time before time. — Octavio Paz

I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina. — Sarah Hall

The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument may be distant from our shores, but it will help us understand how healthy marine ecosystems work and how we can revive troubled seas closer to home. — Frances Beinecke