Quotes & Sayings About Sand And Ocean

The bright blue sky remained cloudless, and the aquamarine ocean still crashed gently onto the white sand beach, but the scene was suddenly warped. Twisted, as I processed Thad's words. — Lynne Matson

She wishes her grandmother had not been so protective, and that she understood better what passes between a man and woman. As it is, she simply enjoys the feelings and wonders if they are what lightning is made of, for everything comes back to the weather. Tears like rain. Smiles like the sun. Hair as dry as sand and fear like the dark ocean. — Sara Sheridan

Don't just leave your footprints in the sand only to be washed away as the ocean waves come crashing to the shore. You want to impact the lives of others in such a way that you'll be remembered forever. You want to instill values and wisdom in the hearts and minds of others that will never be forgotten. So they may teach their children to carry on from generation to generation. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

Suddenly, Lisa pulled her face out of the water and her legs started flailing, the long flippers on her feet dropping so low their movement raised sand from the ocean floor. Hank lifted his head to check on her.

"What's wrong?"

"Holy crap," she sputtered. She stared at him with wide blue eyes. "I think I found Nemo! — Elle Rush

But in this life, he is dog. His life is ocean, stick, ball, sand, grass, ride in the truck, sleep by the bed, look deep into the eyes of humans, lure them outdoors, greet them with a burst of joy when they come home, love them. Fill this brief life with more. And more. — Jacqueline Sheehan

As I lay there watching Robin sleep beside me, I realized that she was right all along. I didn't need to live in a castle - a shack in the woods with her would do just fine. And for that matter, I didn't need to be prince of the ocean either, because with her by my side ... I was king of the pond. — Sebastian Cole

beast. But first I detour toward the lanai and plop myself on a chaise. The sun is high up in the afternoon sky, not a cloud in sight. People have crowded the beach, just little colorful dots against the white sand. The ocean stretches as far the horizon without any islands visible ahead, — Kendal Taylor

I want a woman, Dad. I want somebody to love me. I wanna to be free again. I wanna walk in the backyard on the grass. I wanna put my bare feet in the ocean. I wanna run along the sand and feel it on my feet. I wanna stand up in the shower with the hot water streaming down my legs, in the morning...I wanna explode, Dad. I wanna get out of this fucking body I'm in. I wanna be a man again...I just wanna be a man again. — Ron Kovic

When I lie back and close my eyes, this farthest lip of beach right next to the end of the ocean feels like being up close to an enormous breathing being, the bass drum surf thump reverberating through the sand. Living out here with no lights, alone, you would indeed become sensitive to seasons, rhythms, weather, sounds- right up next to the sea, right up under the sky, like lying close to a lover's skin to hear blood and breath and heartbeat. — Paul Bogard

Oh, her beauty
the tender maid! Its brilliance gives light like lamps to one travelling in the dark.
She is a pearl hidden in a shell of hair as black as jet,
A pearl for which Thought dives and remains unceasingly in the deeps of that ocean.
He who looks upon her deems her to be a gazelle of the sand-hills, because of her shapely neck and the loveliness of her gestures. — Ibn Arabi

Whoever deemed the ocean an invigorating place needed to reconsider the reality of crashing waves, sunburn, and sand wedged up into places no one should have it. — Natalia Jaster

If I were to sit on the ocean floor and look toward the sky,
I might see a whale or electric eel or octopus pass by.

And if I decided to jump straight up and reach with open arms,
I might feel the pleasure of ocean flight propel me 'mid their swarms.

But if I were seated upon the shore and looking toward the stars,
I might see a comet or falling star near Mercury or Mars.

Then if I decided to jump straight up and reach with open hands,
I might feel despair when my feet refused to leave the shoreline sand.

And so I return to the ocean depths where swimming creatures fly,
For there I can soar with the whales and fish that daily touch the sky. — Richelle E. Goodrich

To build refuges of my own making is to construct fortresses of sand at ocean's edge, where the relentless tides of time will leave my most magnificently constructed walls as perfectly flat sand. And now that I am subject to the very tides that destroyed these walls of mine, I am left with the reality that my single and sole refuge can only be the God who created both tides and sand. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

When i was a kid we took a trip to the beach, and I just remember being annoyed by the smell of sunscreen, the squawk of seagulls, and the way that the sand would cling on to my wet feet. Then of course, if I tried to wash them off in the ocean, they would just get wetter and the sand would cling more. Talk about a no-win situation. — Alicia Thompson

Plunge a sponge into Lake Erie. Did you absorb every drop? Take a deep breath. Did you suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere? Pluck a pine needle from a tree in Yosemite. Did you deplete the forest of foliage? Watch an ocean wave crash against the beach. Will there never be another one? Of course there will. No sooner will one wave crash into the sand than another appears. Then another, then another. This is a picture of God's sufficient grace. Grace is simply another word for God's tumbling, rumbling reservoir of strength and protection. It comes at us not occasionally or miserly but constantly and aggressively, wave upon wave. We've barely regained our balance from one breaker, and then, bam, here comes another. — Max Lucado

There are times when Los Angeles is the most magical city on Earth. When the Santa Ana winds sweep through and the air is warm and so, so clear. When the jacaranda trees bloom in the most brilliant lilac violet. When the ocean sparkles on a warm February day and you're pushing fine grains of sand through your bare toes while the rest of the country is hunkered down under blankets slurping soup. But other times, like when the jacaranda trees drop their blossoms in an eerie purple rain, Los Angeles feels like only a half-formed dream. Like perhaps the city was founded as a strip mall in the early 1970s and has no real reason to exist. An afterthought from the designer of some other, better city. A playground made only for attractive people to eat expensive salads. — Steven Rowley

Want to know what I'm thinking about?" Gat asked. "Yes," I said. "No," said Johnny. "I'm wondering how we can say your granddad owns this island. Not legally but actually." "Please don't get started on the evils of the Pilgrims," moaned Johnny. "No. I'm asking, how can we say land belongs to anyone?" Gat waved at the sand, the ocean, the sky. Mirren shrugged. "People buy and sell land all the time." "Can't we talk about sex or murder?" asked Johnny. — E. Lockhart

Oh yeah it does, most definitely it has an ocean, only it's purple, and the sand is blue and the sky is hella green. — Jandy Nelson

I remember when I was little the ocean was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen. I was fascinated by the way the waves rolled up and washed away the sand, leaving their imprint on the world. Sometimes I would stand right at the edge and let it crash against my feet as I considered taking one more step and my feet would eventually move forward. One more step and it'd take me away - — Jessica Sorensen

Those of us who are in tune with nature and animals know it is our way of life, Bram. There is a connection to all living things, a vibration of Life. Animals were not given a power of choice. A lion does not try and eat legumes, nor an elephant meat. We believe the best way to communicate with nature, God, is through a liaison: the animals ... Nature hears one voice and obeys it. That is why ten or ten thousand birds may rise from the surface of a lake at the same time and yet never touch one another. Man only hears his own voice. He constantly bumps into another. Even his voice mirrors his erratic walk, jealousy, hate, ego, pride, lying, cheating. He makes his own judgements and falls prey to his greed. Remember, the moon is reflected on one drop of water as is the entire ocean
so it is with God. He is reflected ins each living thing
in a grain of sand as the entire shore, one star as the whole universe. Each animal as in all creatures. -Jagrat — Ralph Helfer

I think of the feel of water. The way it is when you wade into the ocean and a small wave cascades against you, swirling sand over you and awakening every pore. — Jessica Park

Shark!" I yelled as my feet hit the wet sand. "There's a shark out there! Everyone get out of the water!"
Man, you want to see humans move fast? Scream that on a crowded beach and watch what happens. Its amazing the fear people have for a scaly, sharp toothed predator. I watched the water empty in seconds, parents scooping up their children and heading to shore, desperate to get out of the ocean, and found it a little ironic. They were so terrified of the big, nasty monster out in the water, when there was a bigger, nastier, deadlier one right here on the beach. — Julie Kagawa

Sometimes in the dusk he runs up and down on the sand, flinging stones at the ocean and screaming, Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! He feels better afterwards. — Margaret Atwood

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow. What are brief? today and tomorrow. What are frail? spring blossoms and youth. What are deep? the ocean and truth. — Christina Rossetti

I need the sun, sand and ocean to rejuvenate my spirit, the food to enliven my body and all of the familiar places, friends and family to revitalize my soul. I go for replenishment. For a kind of love that I truly know. For a place of belonging, always. — Grace Gealey

You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.
You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your throbbing vein. How can you say Shams is gone when he is everywhere and in everything? — Elif Shafak

The afternoon sun was bright above the cloud, lending to the scene a silvery glow that leached the sea of colour and picked out points of white light in the sand. The very raindrops seemed to shimmer in the air; the wind, blowing chill from the ocean, carried with it a pleasant, rusty smell. All this did much to dispel Devlin's torpor, and in very little time at all he was red-cheeked and smiling, his white brimmed hat clamped tight to his head with the palm of his hand. He decided to make the most of his perambulation, and return to Hokitika via the high terrace of Seaview: the site of the future Hokitika Gaol, and Devlin's own future residence. — Eleanor Catton

Every particle of the world is a mirror. In each atom blazes forth the light of a thousand suns. Open the heart of a raindrop and you will find a hundred oceans. In a grain of sand lies the seed of a thousand beings. — Mahmud Shabistari

You know why I'm scared of the ocean?" She shook her head. "It's not just because I'm scared of drowning. Though I guess I am. It's because of all that space. It's because everywhere I look, I see blue, and I have no idea where it begins. When I'm out there, I stay as close as I can to the sand, because at least then I know where it ends." She didn't speak for a while, just continued walking a little bit ahead of him. Maybe she was thinking about fire, the thing she had told him she most feared. Marcus had never seen so much as a picture of her father, but he imagined that he had been a fearsome man with a scar covering one whole side of his face. He imagined that Marjorie feared fire for the same reasons he feared water. — Yaa Gyasi

One year, on vacation in Hawaii, I was relaxing at a beach, watching whales in the distance, when a fisherman, obviously a local, drove up in his pick-up truck. He got out with a dozen fishing rods. Not one. A dozen. He baited each hook, cast all the lines into the ocean, and set the rods in the sand. Intrigued, I wandered over and asked him for an explanation. "It's simple," he said. "I love fish but I hate fishin'. I like eatin', not catchn'. So I cast out 12 lines. By sunset, some of them will have caught a fish. Never all of 'em. So if I only cast one or two I might go hungry. But 12 is enough so some always catch. Usually there's enough for me and extras to sell to local restaurants. This way, I live the life I want." The simple fellow had unwittingly put his finger on a powerful secret. The flaw in most businesses, that keeps them always in desperate need - which suppresses prices - is: too few lines cast in the ocean. — Dan S. Kennedy

As it turned out, the sachem had been dead wrong.
The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old women in charge of the children, he had apologized for this error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come.
They would come with languages that sounded like a dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred place and worship a dull, unimaginative god.
They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth's soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable.
It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples. — Toni Morrison

And then I went out to the ocean. Do you know what it was like? The waves broke, and each time they did, as they slapped against the sand, I could feel it all through my body. And each time they broke, and each time they thudded down, they said, you have only one life, you have only one life. — Mark Helprin

Every man was conscious of his own insignificance, aware that he was but a grain of sand in that ocean of humanity, and yet at the same time had a sense of power as a part of that vast whole. — Leo Tolstoy

The children had had an argument once about whether there was more grass in the world or more sand, and Roger said that of course there must be more sand because of under the sea; in every ocean all over the world there would be sand, if you looked deep down. But there could be grass too, argued Deborah, a waving grass, a grass that nobody had ever seen, and the colour of that ocean grass would be darker than any grass on the surface of the world, in fields or prairies or people's gardens in America. It would be taller than tress and it would move like corn in the wind. (The Pool — Daphne Du Maurier

The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks. — Neal Stephenson

Storms bring the detritus of other people's lives into our own, a reminder that we are not alone, and of how truly insignificant we are. The indiscriminating waves had brutalized the shore, tossing pieces of splintered timber, an intact china teacup, and a gentleman's watch - still with its cover and chain - onto my beloved beach, each coming to rest as if placed gently in the sand as a shopkeeper would display his wares. As I rubbed my thumb over the smooth lip of the china cup, I thought of how someone's loss had become my gain, of how the tide would roll in and out again as if nothing had changed, and how sometimes the separation between endings and beginnings is so small that they seem to run together like the ocean's waves. — Karen White

The Great Point lighthouse rose at the far end of the barrier beach, a tall white steeple to the sky, with a working light flashing at the top. Here was the end of the island, the great point where the Atlantic Ocean met Nantucket Sound in a froth of waves. All along the point, enormous fat seals lolled on the sand, occasionally lumbering in and out of the water, grunting and lounging like a tribe of overfed Roman emperors. — Nancy Thayer

In the passing of an instant everything stopped and there he stood at the bottom of the ocean in perfect stillness. He gazed into a strange and eerie light that seemed to draw closer as the fear in his heart faded. An amazing tunnel was extending towards him, smooth shiny walls in the night. Reaching his hand out to touch it he wondered; if he were to die in that moment, where would the life inside him go? His heart, bursting with unspent love and the breathtaking happiness in his soul, just disappearing into the ocean. Two more handfuls of salt dissolving in a world barely able to justify its own existence.

He heard a rushing sound as the sea inhaled again just before it struck him in the chest. A wall of sand and stones that blew him off his feet and sent him back out, his last thought escaping him in a long trail of bubbles.

'Stop fighting now Thomas - it's over. — Kevin Keely

If my love were an ocean,
there would be no more land.
If my love were a desert,
you would see only sand.
If my love were a star-
late at night, only light.
And if my love could grow wings,
I'd be soaring in flight. — Jay Asher

Well, if you did, you'd be wrong. It is much, much smaller. Try this: Imagine you're still holding that tiny grain of sand. Now not just the beach you are on, but all the beaches all over the planet, all of them, all down the coast of California and the East Coast from Maine down to Florida and on the Indian Ocean and off the coasts of Africa. Imagine all that sand, all those beaches everywhere in the world and now look at that grain of sand you're holding and still, still, our entire solar system - forget our planet - is smaller than that compared to the rest of the universe. Can you even comprehend how insignifi- cant we are? — Harlan Coben

That's your favorite word, huh? Weird. Everything's weird. The sky, the ocean, the sand. The whole world is weird."
He grinned at me. "You're a weirdo. Better?" - Andy and Luke — H.R. Willaston

I saw you dancing out the ocean
Running fast along the sand
A spirit born of earth and water
Fire flying from your hands — Elton John

It was as if some great ocean of destruction had rolled its unyielding tide through the city and then, upon its terrible recession, left behind only a shoreline of concrete sand and crushed humanity. — Jay Posey

The ocean to my right was maroon, the sky above it silver. There were sand trails through the thick purple ice plant that grew along the roadside ... but now the sky is the color of peaches ...
It was a ball of bright saffron sinking into the sea, turning the water purple, the sky orange and green. — Andre Dubus III

Take my hand
and ...
feel the sand
beneath your aimless feet
towards the sparkling waves — Munia Khan

First crush, first kiss, first time I saw the ocean
And dug my toes in the sand
Baseball and summer nights, casting out when the fish first bite,
First time I got a Chevy in my hands
I thought nothing can touch that by a mile
I thought nothing can make that moment seem so worthwhile — Scotty McCreery

As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there's something below it, I won't know it. But that's part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn't the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I'm perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me. — Maggie Stiefvater

The sand was smooth. The damp morning fog had hardened its top layer and the heat of the day had set it so that with every footstep the surface cracked, the crunch almost audible. The heels and balls of their shoes made a path of shallow divots, but it was far easier to walk on than the usual loose and gritty beach.
In minutes, the wind worked to sweep their footprints clean and offer a flat, clear expanse all the way to the ocean where the sand became wet and sparkled invitingly with seawater. — Victoria Kahler

You don't need to be the tide to rise and fall,
you don't have to be a wave to touch the shore;
just be a little sand-grain and feel them all — Munia Khan

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

And no one will remember us, who we were or what happened here. Sand will blow across Pacific Avenue and against the windows of the Moonstone, and new people will arrive and walk down the beach to the great ocean. They will be in love, or they will be lost, and they will have no words. And the waves will sound to them as they did to us the first time we heard them. — Bill Clegg

So sweep away the sand an' dry the ocean, an' just pack the moon an' stars up in a cardboard box. And stop the clouds from chimin', block the sun from shinin',an' paint the sky a deeper shade of blue, 'cause my world's over without you. — Kenny Rogers

Love is hanging out at the ocean, watching my wife and little girls play in the sand. I know, I threw up a little too, but it's true. — Patrick Fabian

But the sound frightened Isaac. The thudding, he knew, was caused by great deep-ocean swells falling upon the beach. Most days the Gulf was as placid as a big lake, with surf that did not crash but rather wore itself away on the sand. The first swells had arrived Friday. Now the booming was louder and heavier, each concussion more profound. — Erik Larson

And in the summer we would line up three sand dollars John and I had found on our second date when we walked along the ocean holding hands, both of us taut with the knowledge the we had found The One- though neither of us admitted it until much later. It was the same beach where I scattered his ashes. It is good we don't know our own futures. — Elizabeth Berg

A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.
Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.
Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again. — Anna Akhmatova

The sky above us seems huge, vast. It's clear and crisp and visibility is so good that, when I look up, I feel like I'm staring at an inverted, endless ocean. I'm sure the blue is the colour of water above sand and the tiny, wispy clouds look like waves breaking over distant swells. I envy the birds I see overhead, zipping joyfully from left to right and so far above the death and decay that pollute the lower levels. A day like this should be enjoyed completely. I should be able to forget what dwells in the towns around us, I should find it in myself to dismiss what happened at that crossing, I should. — Jack Croxall

A black-crowned night heron stood on an apron of wet sand, looking across the channel. The feather plume at the back of his head lifted in a faint breeze. Out there the channel churned its cyclonic eddies counterclockwise. Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that well up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning. — Gretel Ehrlich

Think of your attacks as the ocean during a storm. Waves come and crash. They beat on the sand over and over. Slamming into anything on its way. But then, the storm retreats. The water is calm and the waves slowly come and go. Every attack rises and falls. You either have to hold on," he squeezes my shoulders, "or stop it before the storm comes. — Lindsay Paige

As long as it's a regular day, not too rough to begin with, the ocean is pretty smooth once you make it out past the first set of waves. That's why people are afriad to swim in the ocean. They try to jump over those waves and get slammed down to the bottom and pulled across the sand like a piece of shell. You've got to go throught them, dive under just when they're rising up for you, set your direction, close your eyes, and just swim like hell. Once you get throught that, you'll find there isn't a better place for swimming because it's the ocean and it goes on forever. You don't have to see anyone if you don't want to. If you look out, away from the beach, it's easy to imagine that there's no one else but you in the whole world, you and maybe a couple of sea gulls. — Ann Patchett

And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense - no - but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I walk in the direction she tells me. I feel my pores opening, sweat and heat radiating out of my body. A firefly dances in the distance, leaving tracers, and if I turn my head from side to side, I see long yellow-green streaks that cut through my vision and burn in front of my retinas even after the light that sparked them has gone.
I emerge from the mango grove into a field. In the distance unseen trucks pass with a sound like the ocean licking the sand. A tracery of darkness curls into a starry sky, a solitary pipal tree making itself known by an absence of light, like a flame caught in a photographer's negative, frozen, calling me. — Mohsin Hamid

I sat with my toes buried in the warm yellow sand staring out towards the back door of The East. Pacific Ocean Blue was playing in the background and it had left me in a state of Bohemia as the waves crashed ashore; roaring as loud as lions. — David Louden

She was supposed to build sand castles on the beach and put her toes in the ocean, Madame says. — Lauren DeStefano

Some people describe certain physical connections as being like electricity. Sparks flying. When Chris and I touch, it's different. I think of the feel of water. The way it is when you wade into the ocean and a small wave cascades against you, swirling sand over you and awakening every pore.
Slow motion, I think decidedly. He can make things happen in slow motion. — Jessica Park

Netfali's breath caught in his throat at the sight of the infinite colors and the gentle curve of the faraway horizon. He had never imagined the height of the white spray breaking against the rocks, the dark sand, or the air that whispered of fish and salt. He stood, captivated, feeling small and insignificant, and at the same time as if he belonged to something much grander. — Peter Sis

We were right to come here, if only because the ocean reminded you that impossible things were possible. Miles and miles of the deepest waters that moved like clockwork were possible. Creatures like jellyfish and sea urchins were, too. Millions and jillions of the tiniest grains of sand to form one long, soft beach - yep, even that was possible. — Deb Caletti

Like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor? — Robin McKinley

If that's all you've got, I'm not too worried," he taunted me. I dipped my hand in the wet sand, grabbing a handful. I slowly raised it above his head threatening to release it. Before I even noticed, he caught my wrist and pulled it back down. Holding my eyes, he delicately threaded his fingers through mine, while the wet sand squished out. The gesture was somehow very intimate and a shiver ran down my spine. The wet sand ran down my arm but I didn't even notice. We stayed like that, hand in hand, facing the ocean for what seemed like hours. — Kristen Day

I was meant to land wherever he settled, like the ocean washing seashells onto the shore. Jack was the shell, in constant motion and movement, being tossed around from place to place by the ebb and flow of something more powerful than he. And I was the sand, gripping and holding on to him, comforting his tumble with each push and pull of the tide, yet always constant. When I walked into the waiting — J. Sterling

SEA OF LIFE

This is not the end, my friend.
Just as the ocean sings songs to infinity
Our friendship too will flow onward
Until the day one of us
Turns and leaves
And the seasons will turn too
As our shells
As they return back to sand
And the tides that brought us
Forth
Will take us back
Again.

I will never leave you, my friend.
Every time you see a wave rushing to
Meet another,
Two friends unite.
Every time you see a wave crashing,
Two friends depart.
The journey will go on, my friend.
Our memories are recorded
In seashells
To show and tell
The lessons learned
In these heavens and hells
Part of this sea of life -
And when the tide is right,
We shall cross paths again
When the ocean sings our song.

Poetry by Suzy Kassem — Suzy Kassem

Mother is the rock, I am the ocean. I have to pout and roll my eyes for hours until she finally wears down and crumbles into a thousand grains of beach sand. It takes a lot of energy. I don't think I have it in me. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are. — Sarah Dessen

We spent afternoons kicking around in the sand, picking through the seaweed for shells, making headdresses of washed-up fishing ropes and hats from Styrofoam cups. Beach rats, we were called.

We stopped brushing our hair, and it hung in tangles spun by the salt air. We sprayed Sun-In across our heads and let it turn our hair orange in patches. Our skin peeled, and we didn't much care.

We woke up to the feel of sand in our sheets. We covered ourselves in baby oil and iodine and let the sun bake our skin. We smelled like Love's Baby Soft perfume, like summer all year long. We were tanned, with freckles across our noses. — Ilie Ruby

There was one painting, I remember, that showed a broad, clean sweep of sky and the ocean drawn out to the horizon, and the sand littered with seashells and crabs and mermaid's purses and bits of seaweed. A boy and girl were standing four feet apart, not facing each other, not acknowledging each other in any way, just standing,looking out at the water. I always liked that painting. I liked to think they had a secret. — Lauren Oliver

The cycle hit the beach and spun out. Emma went into a rolling crouch as she flew free of it, keeping her elbows in, pushing the air hard out of her lungs. She turned her head as she hit the sand, slapping her palms down to roll herself forward, absorbing the impact of the fall through her arms and shoulders, her knees folding up into her chest. The stars wheeled crazily overhead as she spun, sucking in her breath as her body slowed its rolling. She came to a stop on her back, her hair and clothes full of sand and her ears full of the sound of the wildly crashing ocean ... — Cassandra Clare

IGNORANCE

I didn't know love would make me this
crazy, with my eyes
like the river Ceyhun
carrying me in its rapids
out to sea,where every bit
of shattered boat
sinks to the bottom.

An alligator lifts its head and swallows
the ocean, then the ocean
floor becomes
a desert covering
the alligator in
sand drifts.

Changes do
happen. I do not know how,
or what remains of what
has disappeared
into the absolute.

I hear so many stories
and explanations, but I keep quiet,
because I don't know anything,
and because something I swallowed
in the ocean
has made me completely content
with ignorance. — Jalaluddin Rumi

Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land.
So the little minutes, humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages of eternity. — Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney

I am convinced, by repeated observation, that marbles, lime-stones, chalks, marls, clays, sand, and almost all terrestrial substances, wherever situated, are full of shells and other spoils of the ocean. — Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon

If you took all the sand from all the beaches, all the desserts, and all the oceans and called that the Universe, our whole solar system would be less than one grain of sand. — Seth Shostak

For me exotic means beaches, palm trees and sand and frolicking in the ocean — Priyanka Chopra

Strolling down a white-graveled walk to the cliff above the ocean, he let his eyes rove aimlessly over the expanse of sea and sand: The icy-looking whitecaps, the blinking, faraway sails of boats, the sweeping, constantly searching gulls. Desolation. Eternal, infinite. Like Dostoevski's conception of eternity, a fly circling about a privy, the few signs of life only emphasized the loneliness. — Jim Thompson

Her caramel skin and curly beach sand hair spreads in wavy chops like the choppy storm waves on the ocean. Her fluffy rose colored lips glisten with eyes emerald green and almond shaped set deep into her face and yet when she looks at you with those same deep set eyes, it feels like they jump out, speaking to you. — Ami Blackwelder

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in no other way, become present to us in sensuous form. The knowledge and use of this magic goes back very far: the rune; the chant; the incantation; the spell; the kenning; sacred words; forbidden words; the naming of the child, the plant, the insect, the ocean, the configuration of stars, the snow, the sensation in the body. The ritual telling of the dream. The physical reality of the human voice; of words gouged or incised in stone or wood, woven in silk or wool, painted on vellum, or traced in sand. — Adrienne Rich

Ninety-nine and nine-tenths of the earth's volume must forever remain invisible and untouchable. Because more than 97 per cent of it is too hot to crystallize, its body is extremely weak. The crust, being so thin, must bend, if, over wide areas, it becomes loaded with glacial ice, ocean water or deposits of sand and mud. It must bend in the opposite sense if widely extended loads of such material be removed. This accounts for ... the origin of chains of high mountains ... and the rise of lava to the earth's surface. — Reginald Aldworth Daly

The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means "the shores where the sea breaks its back." The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder. — Corey Ford

In front of us, the ocean stretched for eternity. Around us, reggae mussy floated through the air. In our drying clothes and still-damp hair, we ate junk food and talked.
At some point we finished and went for a long walk in the sand. We picked up shells, laughed, and talked. Before I knew it, the sun was going down and we went back to the van. We lay side by side, stretched out on the blanket. When the sun dropped completely below the horizon, we let the moon illuminate us. — Shannon Greenland

To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end. — Alan Watts

The beach looked beautiful this time of night. She'd always loved the ocean, spending many of her summers on its sand and in its waters, but she'd never witnessed it like this. Completely night, and completely alone. The waves crashed against the shore, the moon's light shimmering off the currents like glitter, stars speckling the sky above and wind rustling her hair as she took it all in. Sitting here in solitude, it felt as if it existed just for her. The water, the moon, the stars, the wind - all a beautiful masterpiece constructed only for her viewing. — Connie L. Smith

My battered heart will always be
where the ocean meets the sand, I
will break over and over
Every day. That is the best and
worst part of me. — Clementine Von Radics

But the waves kept moving, with the white wake of the ship traced in them for an instant, and then smoothed over by the water. And it was as if my own footsteps were being erased behind me, the footsteps I'd made as a child on the beaches and pathways of the land I'd left, and the footsteps I'd made on this side of the ocean, since coming here; all the traces of me, smoothed over and rubbed away as if they had never been, like polishing the black tarnish from the silver, or drawing your hand across dry sand.
On the edge of sleep I thought: It's as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as being innocent.
And then I slept. — Margaret Atwood

The air was cool and soft. The desert looked empty from our great height, enough to believe the geographers and travel writers who tell of the terrible desert life, the stillness, harshness, and death. I lay against the cold sand, tiny grains dancing fast and furious across my skin. I saw insects and scorpions, the line of a snake. Mohammed said the dunes moved millimeters a day. They inched across the desert floor toward the ocean. I smiled. The geographers were blind. — C. Lynn Murphy

Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other's lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave. — Elizabeth Alexander

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be. — Anne Lamott

He was the ocean and I was the sand,
i lived content in stillness and he washed a shore everytime, as a better man. — Nikki Rowe

I see an ocean that's spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand. — Lauren DeStefano

...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand... — Pat Conroy

Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom
so deep that not even light could touch it.
And yet, down in those impossible depths, she thought she could see tiny lights sparkling. She stared uncertainly at the tiny glimmerings. They seemed almost like scattered grains of sand lit from within; in some places they clustered like colonies, faint and twinkling.
Like stars ... — Fuyumi Ono

I'll paddle board, swim in the ocean, roll in the sand, soak up the sun, eat good food, be with friends and family and go fishing with my dad. — Behati Prinsloo