Sea Beach Quotes & Sayings

To me the sea is a continual miracle; The fishes that swim - the rocks - the motion of the waves - the ships, with men in them, what stranger miracles are there? — Walt Whitman

12. They had spent a lot of time on the beach, as did everyone for miles around when the sun decided to shine. Theirs was no ordinary beach; it was a gorgeous swathe of golden sand, framed by granite cliffs upon which stood the crumbling walls of an ancient castle. There were caves to explore too, hidden in the cliffs. Children and adults alike would venture deep into them, discovering a dark world that belonged predominantly to birds and sea creatures. — Shani Struthers

Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me ... I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a stormcloud ... On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank ... — Gustave Flaubert

We had a lazy voyage, stopping at Fiji and other islands, and finally arrived at Honolulu. It was far more sophisticated than we had imagined with masses of hotels and roads and motor-cars. We arrived in the early morning, got into our rooms at the hotel, and straight away, seeing out of the window the people surfing on the beach, we rushed down, hired our surf-boards, and plunged into the sea. — Agatha Christie

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer. — Virginia Woolf

I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
And walking up the long beach all alone
I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder
As you and I once heard their monotone.
Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
The cold and sparkling silver of the sea
We two will pass through death and ages lengthen
Before you hear that sound again with me. — Sara Teasdale

Now my second story. Three years later, on a clear, bright, calm Sunday afternoon at Bondi Beach, also not far from where we now stood, from out of nowhere there came four freak waves, each up to twenty-five feet high. More than 200 people were carried out to sea in the undertow. Fortunately, fifty lifeguards were in attendance that day, and they managed to save all but six people. I am aware that we are talking about incidents that happened many years ago. I don't care. My point remains: the ocean is a treacherous place. — Bill Bryson

It was beautiful, and that is a word I would not need to explain to the girls from back home, and I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language. The waves still smashed against the beach, furious and irresistible. But me, I watched all of those children smiling and dancing and splashing one another in salt water and bright sunlight, and I laughed and laughed and laughed until the sound of the sea was drowned. — Chris Cleave

Today, Aaron decided, he would begin to grieve in earnest. He would walk the lonely beach, mocked by gulls, uncaring, his every step a stately rebuke to the malign forces that had blighted his fate. His was the tragedy of a man who couldn't have his own way, and he intended to make known his anguish in the solemn solitude that only a stretch of sand, a suspiring sea, and a beetling cliff could provide. — Joseph Caldwell

Her [Gilberte's] face, grown almost ugly, reminded me then of those dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out, wearies one with its faint shimmering, everywhere the same, encircled by an immutable low horizon. — Marcel Proust

The enormous vermilion sun was dropping toward the sea, its reflected glow making a blazing path across the water to the very beach, where the last ripple was spangled with garnets. Otherwise, the sea was periwinkle purple, spilling and whispering and sidling with an easy going prattle of foam round the steeper rocks. — L.M. Boston

A flush came into the sky, the wan moon, half-way down the west, sank into insignificance. On the shadowy land things began to take life, plants with great leaves became distinct. They came through a pass in the big, cold sandhills on to the beach. The long waste of foreshore lay moaning under the dawn and the sea; the ocean was a flat dark strip with a white edge. Over the gloomy sea the sky grew red. Quickly the fire spread among the clouds and scattered them. Crimson burned to orange, orange to dull gold, and in a golden glitter the sun came up, dribbling fierily over the waves in little splashes, as if someone had gone along and the light had spilled from her pail as she walked. — D.H. Lawrence

I'm not the beach-going type. the thought of being crowded into an endless sea of sun worshipers was the opposite of tempting - give me wizard school any day. — Katie Alender

Living at a beach, near a river mouth, taught him the impotence of impatience at events moving at nature's pace. — Tony Bishop

Undertow"
"I set out one night
When the tide was low
There were signs in the sky
But I did not know
I'd be caught in the grip
Of the undertow
Ditched on a beach
Where the sea hates to go
With a child in my arms
And a chill in my soul
And my heart the shape
Of a begging bowl — Leonard Cohen

How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I've always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I've always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown. — Athol Fugard

I do not see how it is possible for a man to die worth fifty million of dollars, or ten million of dollars, in a city full of want, when he meets almost every day the withered hand of beggary and the white lips of famine. How a man can withstand all that, and hold in the clutch of his greed twenty or thirty million of dollars, is past my comprehension. I do not see how he can do it. I should not think he could do it any more than he could keep a pile of lumber on the beach, where hundreds and thousands of men were drowning in the sea. — Robert G. Ingersoll

Poseidon held out his arms and gave me a hug. I realized, a little embarrassed, that I'd never actually hugged my dad before. He was warm - like a regular human - and he smelled of a salty beach and fresh sea air. — Rick Riordan

But Amy Pond. Oh! The Sea had briefly been able to touch her mind - it knew that the Doctor was the most important thing in the world to her, and it had given a copy of him to her. If they spent enough time together, the copy would become every bit as good as the real Doctor. It stood there now, wheeling her down to the beach, one hand resting lightly on her shoulders, drawing all it could from her. — James Goss

This beach I voyage on leads me through the earth's immortal consistencies. Each form I encounter obeys the principles of perfection and trial, a timelessness in the making. The proportions of truth are at hand. Existence is celebrated in a splinter of driftwood, worn by wind-driven sand into the shape of an arrow. The onshore waves jostle each other, busy with their eternal changing, mixing crab shells, sand grains, and fish bones together. The trim little shorebirds feeding at the water's edge are acutely aware of one another, under the light and shadow leaning and drifting over all awareness. Wither own mysteries behind their beady eyes, their quick, advantageous movements, they follow the great, unifying sea." ~ John Hay. Bird of Light. — John Hay

With your teacher, she said, playing with intimacy, and she was white and smooth. Not miserable and not knowing anything, not abandoned, not dirty-kneed like Joana, like Joana! Joana got up and she knew that her skirt was short, that her blouse was clinging to her minuscule, hesitant bust. Flee, run to the beach, lie face-down in the sand, hide her face, listen to the sound of the sea. — Clarice Lispector

Sundown. The distressed sloop, its mainmast shattered by lightning, its sails ripped by the winds of the open sea, drifted into the small, quiet beach of a private island in the Lesser Antilles — Robert Ludlum

Don't look so worried. I've sailed the seven seas, and I've never had an unsuccessful adventure yet!"
"Really? You've sailed all seven seas?" asked Darwin admiringly.
"Every last one!"
"What are the seven seas? I've always wondered."
"Aaarrr. Well, let's see ... " said the Pirate Captain, scratching his craggy forehead. "There's the North Sea. And that other one, the one near Mozambique. And ... what's that one in Hyde Park?"
"The Serpentine?"
"That's the one. How many's that then? Three. Um. There's the sea with all the rocks in it ... I think they call it Sea Number Four. Then that would leave ... uh ... Grumpy and Sneezy ... "
Darwin was starting to look a little less impressed.
"Would you look at that big seagull!" said the Pirate Captain, quickly ducking into a beach hut. — Gideon Defoe

Like unto ships far off at sea, Outward or homeward bound, are we. Before, behind, and all around, Floats and swings the horizons bound, Seems at its distant rim to rise And climb the crystal wall of the skies, And then again to turn and sink, As if we could slide from its outer brink. Ah! it is not the sea, It is not the sea that sinks and shelves, But ourselves That rock and rise With endless and uneasy motion, Now touching the very skies, Now sinking into the depths of ocean. Ah! if our souls but poise and swing Like the compass in its brazen ring, Ever level and ever true To the toil and the task we have to do, We shall sail securely, and safely reach The Fortunate Isles, on whose shining beach The sights we see, and the sounds we hear, Will be those of joy and not of fear! — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was ... young. — Anne Rivers Siddons

In front of us lay a smooth sandy beach, beyond which rose gradually a high wooded country, and behind us was the sea, studded with numerous islands of every variety of form. — George Grey

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow. — Bob Dylan

Below on the beach, the surf also seemed the same, although the sea was more transparent. In the light of day, the hollow formed by the terrace and the cave seemed as tiny as a nest. They themselves were merely a man and a woman lost in the immensity. — Marek Halter

Have you ever walked along a beach? You walk towards something in the distance. For the longest while it never seems to get any closer even though you are walking and walking. Then all of a sudden, you are there. You've arrived at last. That's what grief is like. Meanwhile we are running with you in the spray of the surf at the edge of the shore where the sand meets the sea. We are cheering you on. — Kate McGahan

Julia follows the beach, the sand that is so white it makes her doubt the beaches in Heaven could possibly be any whiter, the water like peacock feathers lapping at the shore, vivid green blue going hyacinth out where the sea starts getting deep. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon. — Margaret Mahy

The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost. — Eugene O'Neill

So Musa was a simple god, a god of few words. His thick beard and strong arms made him seem like a giant who could have wrung the neck of any soldier in any ancient pharaoh's army. Which explains why, on the day when we learned of his death and the circumstances surrounding it, I didn't feel sad or angry at first; instead I felt disappointed and offended, as if someone had insulted me. My brother Musa was capable of parting the sea, and yet he died in insignificance, like a common bit player, on a beach that today has disappeared, close to the waves that should have made him famous forever. — Kamel Daoud

The distant sea, lapping the sandy shore with measured sound; the nearer cries of the donkey-boys; the unusual scenes moving before her like pictures, which she cared not in her laziness to have fully explained before they passed away; the stroll down to the beach to breathe the sea-air, soft and warm on the sandy shore even at the end of November; the great long misty sea-line touching the tender-coloured sky; the white sail of a distant boat turning silver in some pale sunbeam: - it seemed as if she could dream her life away in such luxury of pensiveness, in which she made her present all in all, from not daring to think of the past, or wishing to contemplate the future. — Elizabeth Gaskell

I had no idea where I was going, but at that point, walking straight into the sea didn't seem like such a bad idea. For months I'd been torturing myself, wondering if Archer kissing me had just been part of his act. But he was right, he hadn't kissed me. I had kissed him, and he'd just...responded.God, I was a moron.
Archer caught up with me,but I kept looking straight ahead.
"Mercer-"
"Look,forget it," I said. "Just show me whatever it was you dragged me out here to see."
"Fine," he replied, his voice clipped.
We walked down the beach in total silence. In the moonlight, our shadows stretched out before us, almost touching. — Rachel Hawkins

Beauty - what is beauty, forsooth? Form and color; that is, surface only. Fortune - what is fortune? Nothing is ever a pleasure or a real profit to him who has to labour for it. Truth - you die in the pursuit, and the sea beats the beach as it did a thousand years ago. The stolid are alone happy. — Richard Jefferies

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

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There is a red sandy beach in the Minas Basin in Nova Scotia that is unlike any other shore landscape I have ever seen. The world's highest tides wash its shores, and the soft cliffs of Blomidon Provincial Park are constantly crumbling away; whole trees will occasionally slide down to the sea to decay slowly in the wind and brine. — John Burnside

When this is over ... we will got to the rainforest, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will. — Jodi Picoult

All that I desire in life are three ...
A wilderness: A beach on the sun-drenched sea,
A puff of opium,
And thee. — Roman Payne

A school of porpoises broke the surface of the water twenty feet from where we had sat down[...]Each individual porpoise made a sound slightly different from that of any other, so that the school, all twelve of them, flaring and sliding and dancing so near us, formed a kind of woodwind section on the sea's surface or even a single instrument, something unknown and astonishing to man, a celebration of breath itself, of oxygen and sea water and sunlight. They had the eyes of large dogs and their skin was the loveliest, silkiest green imaginable. — Pat Conroy

I could never stay long enough on the shore; the tang of the untainted, fresh, and free sea air was like a cool, quieting thought. — Helen Keller

She lies with me, and I am home. I am filled with so much joy I could fly right up there above the beach, the sea, our world, with her. I can't bear it, it is so beautiful.
It all falls away.
I loved, I am love, I am free. — Kate Lord Brown

Limitless and immortal, the waters are the beginning and end of all things on earth. — Heinrich Zimmer

I have watched the river and the sea for a lifetime. I have seen rivers rob soil from the roots of trees until the giants came foundering down. I have watched shores slip and perish, the channels silt and change; what was beach become a swamp and a headland tumble into the sea. An island has eroded in silent pain since my boyhood, and reefs have become islands. Yet the old people used to say, People pass away, but not the land. It remains forever. Maybe that is so. The land changes. The land continues. The sea changes. The sea remains. — Keri Hulme

Love is tricky. It is never mundane or daily. You can never get used to it. You have to walk with it, then let it walk with you. You can never balk. It moves you like the tide. It takes you out to sea, then lays you on the beach again. Today's struggling pain is the foundation for a certain stride through the heavens. You can run from it but you can never say no. It includes everyone. — Amy Tan

January snow lay thick on the ground - crusty, pitted, and hardened, some of it like the bubbly honeycomb of air-dried sea foam in the tide wrack down at the beach, the sort of snow that stays so long you get used to the intrusion of that world of uninvited white, a hooded subverted landscape, sparkling in the low flame of a sallow sunrise on a winter morning. — Paul Theroux

City Point is so beautiful, she says. In the night they cannot see the garbage that litters the beach, the seaweed and driftwood, the condoms that wallow sluggishly on the foam's edge, discarded on the shore like the minuscule loathsome animals of the sea. Yeah, it's something, he says slowly. — Norman Mailer

So this was the reverse of dazzling Nauset.
The flip of the coin - the flip of an ocean fallen
Dream-face down. And here, at my feet, in the suds,
The other face, the real, staring upwards. — Ted Hughes

You sea! I resign myself to you also-
I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me.
We must have a turn together,
I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
Cushion me soft, rock me billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you. — Walt Whitman

It may be just one facet of your personality, or it may not even be a facet but only a pretension. You can show this false face with no problem when sometimes you meet on a sea beach, sometimes in a garden, sometimes under the moon and the stars, but when you really start living together then the reality starts surfacing. The real person is a hell and all that sweet talk that had happened under the stars becomes just lies. — Rajneesh

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

Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? — Herman Melville

Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, beach because they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight. But the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country's edge - an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless. — Toni Morrison

Percy smiled at her - that sarcastic, troublemaker smile that had annoyed her for years but eventually had become endearing. His sea-green eyes were as gorgeous as she remembered. His dark hair was swept to one side, like he'd just come from a walk on the beach. He looked even better than he had six months ago - tanner and taller, leaner and more muscular. Annabeth was too stunned to move. She felt that if she got any closer to him, all the molecules in her body might combust. She'd secretly had a crush on him since they were twelve years old. Last summer, she'd fallen for him hard. They'd been a happy couple for four months - and then he'd disappeared. — Rick Riordan

I didn't go nightclubbing much as a teenager in Bournemouth because my friends and I didn't have the money - but we spent a lot of time on the beach, having barbecues, and running into the sea in the middle of the night. — Amanda Holden

beach. They were perfectly safe. Michael's head crested the dune again. Then his shoulders, the rump of his blue jeans, the short barrel of his machine gun. He was crawling on his belly along the top of the dune, crushing the sea grass, filling his shirt and the pockets of his pants with sand. She would have to remember to shake him out before he got into the car. — Alice McDermott

While wandering a deserted beach at dawn, stagnant in my work, I saw a man in the distance bending and throwing as he walked the endless stretch toward me. As he came near, I could see that he was throwing starfish, abandoned on the sand by the tide, back into the sea. When he was close enough I asked him why he was working so hard at this strange task. He said that the sun would dry the starfish and they would die. I said to him that I thought he was foolish. There were thousands of starfish on miles and miles of beach. One man alone could never make a difference. He smiled as he picked up the next starfish. Hurling it far into the sea he said, "It makes a difference for this one." I abandoned my writing and spent the morning throwing starfish. — Loren Eiseley

Night.
The beach and the sea are in darkness.
A dog passes, going toward the sea wall.
No one walks on the boardwalk, but, on the benches lining it, people sit. They relax. Are silent. Separated from one another. They do not speak.
The traveler passes. He walks slowly, he goes in the same direction as the dog.
He stops. Returns. He seems to be out for a walk. He starts off again.
His face is no longer visible.
The sea is calm. No wind.
The traveler returns. The dog does not return. The sea begins to rise, it seems. Its sounds getting closer. Muffled thudding coming from the river's many mouths. Somber sky. — Marguerite Duras

I love the beach. I love the sea. All my life I live within - in front of the sea. — Rafael Nadal

The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember? — C.S. Lewis

The house had a private walk down to a private spit of beach, and in the mornings the four of them would troop downhill and swim - even he did, in his pants and undershirt and an old oxford shirt, which no one bothered him about - and then lie on the sand baking, the wet clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea. — Hanya Yanagihara

Where did my friend go? Was there a place they all gathered, the lost and self destructive? Was there a room they put them in? Necks burnt with rope or holes in their skulls. Beach-water bloated. I will know this at the end of my conversation with life. I will speak and laugh until my tongue falls out and then I will know this. I will know because he will tell me when I see him. How will I enter the theatre? With a hole in my head or exploded by sea. Wrists. — Brendan Cowell

Smell the sea and feel the sky. — Van Morrison

Once, on ancient Earth, there was a human boy walking along a beach. There had just been a storm, and starfish had been scattered along the sands. The boy knew the fish would die, so he began to fling the fish to the sea. But every time he threw a starfish, another would wash ashore. "An old Earth man happened along and saw what the child was doing. He called out, 'Boy, what are you doing?' " 'Saving the starfish!' replied the boy. " 'But your attempts are useless, child! Every time you save one, another one returns, often the same one! You can't save them all, so why bother trying? Why does it matter, anyway?' called the old man. "The boy thought about this for a while, a starfish in his hand; he answered, "Well, it matters to this one." And then he flung the starfish into the welcoming sea. — Loren Eiseley

If you're a beach person or a golfer, Key West is not for you. Most of the sand has been imported, and the water is shallow until you've waded far out, and all the way the sea floor is covered with yucky algae and sea grass. — Edmund White

Gather a shell from the strewn beach And listen at its lips: they sigh The same desire and mystery, The echo of the whole sea's speech. — Dante Gabriel Rossetti

That's all it was, the dream was just Jock and me and the stick and the beach and the sea and the sky and time passing by, and that was all, there was nothing else. And that was happiness. — Ninni Holmqvist

Me was the glittering desolation of the sea, the awful solitude upon which I had already suffered so much; behind me the island, hushed under the dawn, its Beast People silent and unseen. The enclosure, with all its provisions and ammunition, burnt noisily, with sudden gusts of flame, a fitful crackling, and now and then a crash. The heavy smoke drove up the beach away from me, rolling low over the distant tree-tops towards the huts in the ravine. Beside me were the charred vestiges of the boats and these four dead bodies. — H.G.Wells

Love the sea? I dote upon it
from the beach. — Douglas William Jerrold

It always seemed that I learned more about myself the more I ventured into the forest or hiked along a beach or up a mountain. But for me, it was always the ocean that I found most attractive. Perhaps it's the enigma of waves that pull me to the sea whenever I feel lost. Unlike a mountain, they are a powerful force that's ever-changing--a piece of nature that defies analysis. And I was sick of being analyzed by a world of ancient beliefs. — Kathleen Gasperini

I have spent many hours on the beach collecting sea glass, and I almost always wonder, as I bend to pick up chunk of bottle green or a shard of meringue white, what the history of the glass was. Who used it? Was it a medicine bottle? A bit of a ship's lantern? Is that bubbled piece of glass with the charred bits inside it from a fire? — Anita Shreve

I also really loved the sea when I was young, when I lived in Sicily, but unfortunately the sea here has been reduced to a trash dump. It's a horrible pain going to the beach; you risk getting an infection or getting tar all over you. — Dacia Maraini

When I was a boy, playing at the beach, I remember a game I loved, which was an omen of my future life. I would dig a channel with high sides in the sand for the sea to fill. But when the water flooded the path I created for it with such violence that it destroyed everything in its way: my castles made of pebbles, my dikes of sand. It swept away everything, destroying it all, then disappeared, leaving me with a heavy heart, yet not daring to ask for pity, since the sea had only responded to my call. It's the same with love. You call out for it, you plan its course. The wave crashes into your heart, but it's so different from how you imagined it, so bitter and icy. — Irene Nemirovsky

But it is rather derogatory that your dwelling-place should be only a neighborhood to a great city,
to live on an inclined plane.I do not like their cities and forts, with their morning and evening guns, and sails flapping in one's eye. I want a whole continent to breathe in, and a good deal of solitude and silence, such as all Wall Street cannot buy,
nor Broadway with its wooden pavement. I must live along the beach, on the southern shore, which looks directly out to sea,
and see what that great parade of water means, that dashes and roars, and has not yet wet me, as long as I have lived. — Henry David Thoreau

To split the very sea into ours and theirs. Border at the Beach
And More White Sheets — Eileen Granfors

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

The sea! The sea! The open sea!, The blue, the fresh, the ever free! — Bryan Procter

I don't like the beach. I think we have no business at the beach at all, as a species. We don't belong in the sea. The sea is full of things that bite us, sting us, hurt the soles of our feet, and it's extremely cold. When are we gonna take the hint that the things that live in the sea don't like us? — Billy Connolly

I sought the sea. There was a small comfort in it
in how it never ended, how there were other lands beyond it that I would never see. I tried to see the realm, like that. Like the dead people had only gone elsewhere, to a place I could not see
a place just over the sides of the earth, which is as real as the beach that I sat on. — Susan Fletcher

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

You have the beach but not the sea? No use! You have the sea but not the beach? No use! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The Classical Study (3)

The Master has forgotten his hat.
Without his hat he cannot fly.
Without his hat his dreams escape
up.

Without his hat he cannot tip
his hat to that woman passing by
whom he remembers
from somewhere, as in a dream,

a room in a dream or maybe a beach,
a beach by the sea,
blindingly white,
hatless, he and she. — Michael Palmer

And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun. — Cormac McCarthy

Out of sight of land the sailor feels safe. It is the beach that worries him. — Charles Davis

These are the forgeries of jealousy; And never, since the middle summer's spring, Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, By paved fountain or by rushy brook, Or in the beached margent of the sea, To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind, But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport. — William Shakespeare

Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served. — Herman Melville

Even now I ask myself, what would have happened if I had gone to the cove with Tansy that Thursday afternoon, instead of going to the beach? If I had stayed away from the boat at the jetty, hidden from sight? If I had thrown the pearl back in the sea at the first opportunity when I had seen the look in Rammell's eyes? But then I reason that it probably wouldn't have made any difference. The Fates had spun my destiny, and I was tight roping along the threads that tangled in the sky, regardless of the drop below. — Rosie Pugh

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

I find myself at the extremity of a long beach. How gladly does the spirit leap forth, and suddenly enlarge its sense of being to the full extent of the broad, blue, sunny deep! A greeting and a homage to the Sea! I descend over its margin, and dip my hand into the wave that meets me, and bathe my brow. That far-resounding roar is the Ocean's voice of welcome. His salt breath brings a blessing along with it — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Only the ocean kept the same rhythm. Crashing in and slowly pulling back out, it never lied, never changed. It tried to teach them a life of romantic consistency. — Lawren Leo

The sight of land, far away, brought you back to the reality the sea had made you forget. As you drew nearer to the beach, you would leave behind the waking dream the waves had thrown you into — Edouard Leve

see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, — Katherine Mansfield

I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown. — Cherie Lunghi

We drove out along the coast road. There was the green of the headlands, the white, red-roofed villas, patches of forest, and the ocean very blue with the tide out and the water curling far out along the beach. We drove through Saint Jean de Luz and passed through villages farther down the coast. Back of the rolling country we were going through we saw the mountains we had come over from Pamplona. The road went on ahead. Bill looked at his watch. It was time for us to go back. He knocked on the glass and told the driver to turn around. The driver backed the car out into the grass to turn it. In back of us were the woods, below a stretch of meadow, then the sea. — Ernest Hemingway,

She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach - just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. "I thought a lighthouse is out at sea. — Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

At Oreanda they sat on a beach not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist; white clouds rested motionlessly on the mountaintops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing advance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement towards perfection. — Anton Chekhov

She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough! — Virginia Woolf