Sea Women Quotes & Sayings

Terrible is the force of the waves of sea, terrible is the rush of the river and the blasts of hot fire, and terrible are a thousand other things; but none is such a terrible evil as woman. — Euripides

This earth eats men and women, and yet we are sent to eat the world, this place that tries to fool
us with tomorrow. Wait until tomorrow, which we outwit by enjoying only this
now. We gather at night to celebrate being human. Sometimes we call out low
to the tambourine. Fish drink the sea,
but the sea does not get smaller! We
eat the clouds and evening light. We are slaves tasting the royal wine. — Rumi

Out of the brown mouth into a slanted easterly rain they head south along the shore, pushed toward it on a light chop, all but the pilot huddling under plastic sheeting that covers lumber, nails, window casings and plantains - the women sharing a seat, Reese behind them and the boatman behind him in a narrow-running balance. The land retreats as the dory crosses a wide bight toward the next point, rising and dropping on larger waves while a seaside village of thatch and palm passes thin and blurry in the drizzled distance. Two miles later another village appears, much the same but longer along the curve and then, past the point, the coast is tangled in mangrove, grass and sea grape. The passengers peer out of the plastic at a rain-erased horizon as the dory slices and slows in equal measure and the boatman bails with a cut jug the rolling puddle at his feet. — Michael Jarvis

Meanwhile, in the expansiveness of her joy, the Moon filled all of the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous poison; and all of that living light thought and said: You will be eternally subject to the influence of my kiss. You will be beautiful in my manner. You will love what I love and who loves me: water, the clouds, silence, and the night; the immense, green sea; formless and multiform water; the place where you will not be; the lover you will not know; monstrous flowers; perfumes that make you delirious; cats who swoon on pianos, and who moan like women, with a hoarse, gentle voice! — Charles Baudelaire

As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single wave. They all have it; they all lose it. — Virginia Woolf

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Most of all, I like the quiet, rounded tugs. They remind me of women. As I watch them work I see them as kindly, no-fuss boats which patiently tend much larger, grander and more important-looking ships. They make sure these ships get to the right place as the right time, shepherding them with a pull or a push as needed. Their power is not immediately obvious but it is there - inside. I watch them a lot and never tire of seeing their unsung but absolutely essential work. The silent strong women of the sea. — Hazel Hawke

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

When one sees one of the romantic creatures before him he imagines he is looking at some holy being, so wonderful that its one breath could dissolve him in a sea of a thousand charms and delights; but if one looks into the soul
it's nothing but a common crocodile. — Anton Chekhov

He believed in it, as certain good women believe in the leviathan-by faith, not by reason. — Jules Verne

Have you ever sailed across an ocean, Donald? On a sail boat surrounded by sea with no land in sight. Without even the possibility of sighting land for days to come. To stand at the helm of your destiny. I want that, one more time. I want to be in the Piazza Del Campo in Sienna. To feel the surge as ten race horses go thundering by. I want another meal in Paris, at L'Ambroisie in the Place Des Vosges. I want another bottle of wine. And then another. I want the warmth of a women in the cool set of sheets. One more night of jazz at the Vanguard. I want to stand on summits and smoke cubans and feel the sun on my face for as long as I can. Walk on the wall again. Climb the tower. Ride the river. Stare at the frescoes. I want to sit in the garden and read one more good book. Most of all I want to sleep. I want to sleep like I slept when I was a boy. Give me that. Just one time. — Anonymous

Oh for women at sea to obviate the eternal crosscat-harpings,' he said to himself, 'to do away with the grumlinfuttocks, and to inject a little civilization, even of an equivocal nature, even at the risk of moral deviation. — Patrick O'Brian

The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there right from the start in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips. There was pride in that smile and confidence in the set of her fine nose. Without understanding why I knew beyond question that a lot of people would mistake her pride for arrogance and confuse her confidence with impassivity. I didn't make that mistake. My eyes were lost swimming floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady even stare. Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be if the sea were perfect. — Gregory David Roberts

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming
Diana and Helen
and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea. — John Cheever

But, then again, the actions of the most insignificant men or women can be as a single raindrop that rolls a pebble that dislodges a clod that tumbles a rock and, before you know it, the whole mountainside has crashed down, sweeping palaces and pigsties, princes and paupers into the sea. So maybe there are demons at work, even in the smallest mischief — Karen Maitland

Summer came whirling out of the night and stuck fast. One morning late in November everybody got up at Cloudstreet and saw the white heat washing in through the windows. The wild oats and buffalo grass were brown and crisp. The sky was the color of kerosene. The air was thin and volatile. Smoke rolled along the tracks as men began to burn off on the embankment. Birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases, and beneath them in the streets, the tar began to bubble. The city was full of Yank soldiers; the trams were crammed to standing with them. The river sucked up the sky and went flat and glittery right down the middle of the place and people went to it in boats and britches and barebacked. Where the river met the sea, the beaches ran north and south, white and broad as highways in a dream, and men and babies stood in the surf while gulls hung in the haze above, casting shadows on the immodest backs of the oilslicked women. — Tim Winton

My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made. — Iain Banks

My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump lips. I can remember this is not how they were; I knew them, I knew them! Only six years have passed and yet I mythologize them as if it is six thousand. I am not culpable. Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown. — Aliya Whiteley

She knew that by the morning she would be suffering from arse-ache. She smiled, remembering how, as a child, this was what she thought women were suffering from when their husbands went missing at sea. Arse-ache-heartache, they could sound the same to her. — Graham Higson

The library was a great sprawling complex with rolls and rolls of paper tucked into many shelves. Between the reading rooms were courtyards with living fountains and singing birds and butterflies that would transform into handsome young women to guide or entertain anyone who stayed there any length of time. I saw one among the stacks, explaining an older style of calligraphy to the newly appointed Heavenly Marine Official of the South China Sea. In another wing, a librarian stepped from her chrysalis for the first time, reciting T'ang Dynasty poetry to the flowers. That's how I knew I was in the right section. — Larissa Lai

there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; — F Scott Fitzgerald

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow? — Audrey Niffenegger

This is a story that could only have taken place in the tropics, where the climate draws sea rovers, pirates, and desperadoes from all corners of the world. They come and go, these adventurers, bedazzled and dazzling, and they leave women behind, lovers, who repeat outlandish tales, murmuring to themselves unheard, and if heard, not believed ... — Margaret Cezair-Thompson

Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Women who loved him. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Over and over. — Richard Flanagan

A man fishes for two reasons: he's either sport fishing or fishing to eat, which means he's either going to try to catch the biggest fish he can, take a picture of it, admire it with his buddies and toss it back to sea, or he's going to take that fish on home, scale it, fillet it, toss it in some cornmeal, fry it up, and put it on his plate. This, I think, is a great analogy for how men seek out women. — Steve Harvey

During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifles salvoes. The workers bared their breast and cried, "Shoot!" A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and 30 to 40 corpses, among them women and children, remained on the ground. On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went to strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in mass demonstration. — Rosa Luxemburg

]Sardis
often turning her thoughts here
]
you like a goddess
and in your song most of all she rejoiced.
But now she is conspicuous among Lydian women
as sometimes at sunset
the rosyfingered moon
surpasses all the stars. And her light
stretches over salt sea
equally and flowerdeep fields.
And the beautiful dew is poured out
and roses bloom and frail
chervil and flowering sweetclover.
But she goes back and forth remembering
gentle Atthis and in longing
she bites her tender mind — Sappho

We believe that the creation of a woman was the crowning and final and most glorified moment of human creation. That we start with light & dark and land & sea and we move through fish & fowl & beasts of the field and we get to Adam and it's still not good enough. And only when Eve was created
this is our theology [ ... ]
that is our theology, that the crowning creation and the glory of the human experience came with the creation of Eve. — Jeffrey R. Holland

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google....Sure, there's a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante's inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shallows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities. — Ali Smith

Elsa's mother no longer spoke to her of men and love, but of duty and fate and accepting one's burden. As far as Elsa could tell, if love really was the inherited female domain, then women were saddled with the biggest burden of all. It was pressing down upon them, the way the sea pressed down upon the creatures of the deep. — Kathy-Diane Leveille

We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around. — Siri Hustvedt

Five men and two women, strangers to one another on the eve of that final growing season, now bound by the unspoken promise that the least of them was greater than the sum of all of them. — Rick Yancey

I know all his sounds because I never sleep. Up all night, sleep all day there are names for women like me. Women like me don't sleep. We know that the night is no friend of us. Night does things, brings people, swallows you up. Night never makes you forget but it enters dreams to make you remember. Night is a game where I wait, I count off until I see the little pink streak cut through our window and I go outside to see the sun rise over the sea. And congratulate myself for making it, because I swear, every night. Every night. — Marlon James

All men are liars, fickle, chatterers, hypocrites, proud or cowardly, despicable, sensual ; all women faithless, tricky, vain, inquisitive, and depraved. The world is only a bottomless cesspool, where the most shapeless sea-beasts climb and writhe on mountains of slime. But there is in the world a thing holy and sublime - the union of two of these beings, imperfect and frightful as they are. One is often deceived in love, often wounded, often unhappy ; but one loves, and on the brink of the grave one turns to look back and says : I have suffered often, sometimes I have been mistaken, but I have loved. It is I who have lived, and not a spurious being bred of my pride and my sorrow — Alfred De Musset

There are a lot of women at my gigs. The first show I headlined was a sea of women, which I can't complain about. I'm pleased these 18-year-old girls like my music. — Tom Odell

Then I stood alone at the edge of the sea I had longed for so often; but though I was alone, I found it cheering, and breathed the air that is like no other, and smiled to hear the soft song of the little waves. Land - Nessus, the House Absolute, and all the rest - lay to the east; west lay the sea; I walked north because I was reluctant to leave it too soon, and because Triskele had run in that direction, along the margin of the sea. There great Abaia might wallow with his women, yet the sea was older far, and wiser than he; we human beings, like all the life of the land, had come from the sea; and because we could not conquer it, it was ours always. The old, red sun rose on my right and touched the waves with his fading beauty, and I heard the calling of the sea birds, the innumerable birds. — Gene Wolfe

As for reading, I doubt whether she did much better by the sea-side than she had done in the town. Men and women say that they will read, and think so - those, I mean, who have acquired no habit of reading - believing the work to be, of all works, the easiest. It may be work, they think, but of all works it must be the easiest of achievement. Given the absolute faculty of reading, the task of going through the pages of a book must be, of all tasks, the most certainly within the grasp of the man or woman who attempts it. Alas! no; if the habit be not there, of all tasks it is the most difficult. — Anthony Trollope

I think female solitude is a mental condition as well as a physical state. You can be married and a spinster. I think spinster is an identity every woman can claim, if she will ... I feel like a lot of women, or a lot of feminists, joke about taking to the sea or living alone in a cottage as this kind of fun freedom. — Mallory Ortberg

Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he begins to talk about England. You can't know Albion, he says, unless you can go back before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar's legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers; beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual. These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember, do believe them. — Hilary Mantel

In the beginning, said a Persian poet Allah took a rose, a lily, a dove, a serpent, a little honey, a Dead Sea apple, and a handful of clay. When he looked at the amalgram it was a woman. — William Sharp

All he asked of her was basic civility and an ounce of propriety, but she was like one of her sea creatures, goaded by the slightest disturbance into puffing up and flashing warning colors. — Shipstead, Maggie

The power of a woman was different, he decided: sly, fearless, changeable as the moods of the sea, but he knew instinctively that that was the power against which his own would be measured. — Dalene Matthee

In boot camp, I was warned about the double standards in the Navy. Petty Officer Hunter told us that Navy men were horny animals eager to stick their dicks in something warm and wet. That was socially acceptable. However, females were held at a higher standard. Females serving sea duty was a new concept, only a decade or two old when I enlisted. I was one of the first women allowed on destroyers. Therefore to show our gratitude for being granted one inch towards male equality, we had to work a hundred times harder for a worthy image.
Hunter informed us that we had to work hard to establish a decent reputation at our command. If we acted like a slut, we would be treated like a slut. One slip would permanently brand us. — Maggie Young

We journey towards a home that does not halo our head with a special sun.
Mythical women applaud us. A sea for us, a sea against us. — Mahmoud Darwish

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. — F Scott Fitzgerald

All the way home, his wound pulsing with every hearbeat, he had cursed himself for a fool. How could he think she loved him? He had never been loved in his life, save perhaps by Erik and the other men who had served with him across the sea, and that was the love of comrades. He had never known the love of women, just their embrace. Twice he had found tears running down his face ... — Raymond E. Feist

Blythe was Viktor's in. He'd arranged a casual meeting and swept her off her feet. He was good with women. He knew exactly how to read them and what they wanted and needed. He was good at providing. — Christine Feehan

Cities were like women, he insisted; each one had its own unique scent. Oldtown was as flowery as a perfumed dowager. Lannisport was a milkmaid, fresh and earthy, with woodsmoke in her hair. King's Landing reeked like some unwashed whore. But White Harbor's scent was sharp and salty, and a little fishy too. "She smells the way a mermaid ought to smell," Roro said. "She smells of the sea. — George R R Martin

Cocktail hour at the embassy consisted of lots of charming men and women in suits and LBDs drinking Buck's Fizz and being friendly to one another, and so what if half of them had gill slits and dorsal fins under the tailoring, and the embassy smelled of seaweed because it was on an officially derelict oil rig in the middle of the North Sea, and the Other Side has the technical capability to exterminate every human being within two hundred kilometers of a coastline if they think we've violated the Benthic Treaty? — Charles Stross

Being friends is different from being lovers. It's a sea change. — Barbara Delinsky

She loved your mother', Taliesin said gently. 'This is her farewell.'
As he spoke, a chanted melody began inside the chamber, a song without words. Yet it spoke of the beauty in the heart of the flame, of the passing glory of the white bird on the wing, and the blossom of the sea spray under the shining prow. It sang of a mother with her baby, of the hard love between men and women, and the gentle rest that comes at last to all. — Rosalind Miles

Judas paused at the edge of the Venetian ballroom, letting the colors swirl in front of him. Crimson reds, deepest golds, indigos that matched the evening sea, blacks that ate the light, and the pearly radiance of bare shoulders. Nowhere did the women dress as brightly, and display — James Rollins

Our melanin will always make us marvelous ...
Just imagine what that sea of sisterhood would look like. Magic! — Alexandra Elle

It soon got so cold that the men rushed to close the doors. When they had shut them and the room was again silent, they saw that several women had begun to cry. The women said it was because of the numbing air that had washed over their bare shoulders, but even strangers embraced sadly as they coasted into the new year and felt its strength commencing. They cried because of the magic and the contradictions; because time had passed and time was left; because they saw themselves as if they were in a photograph that had winked fast enough to contradict their mortality; because the city around them had conspired to break a hundred thousand hearts; and because they and everyone else had to float upon this sea of troubles, watertight. Sometimes there were islands, and when they found them they held fast, but never could they hold fast enough not to be moved and once again overwhelmed. — Mark Helprin

...He untied her robe and parted it. She heard his intake of breath... before he murmured, "Beautiful."
"You probably say that to all the women you rescue from the sea," she said. — Terry Spear

Every single thing [ ... ] he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of grass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women. — Virginia Woolf

On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees - where there are any trees - all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks ... I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair, - bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed; - for the sea is devouring the land. — Lafcadio Hearn

Why did she want to go to sea and live the rough unglamorous life of a seaman? 'Because they told me Negro women couldn't get in the union. You know what I told them?' I shook my head, although I nearly knew. 'I told them, "You want to bet?" I'll put my foot in that door up to my hip until women of every color can walk over my foot, get in that union, get aboard a ship and go to sea. — Maya Angelou

If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it. — George Bernard Shaw

It is time to float on the waters of the night.
Time to wrap my arms around this book
and press it to my chest, life preserver
in a sea of unremarkable men and women,
anonymous faces on the street,
a hundred thousand unalphabetized things,
a million forgotten hours. — Billy Collins

He tried to look at her face in the hope that she was not pretty. Beautiful women depressed him. They were like Mercedes, BlackBerry phones and sea-view homes. — Manu Joseph

The Tao can't be perceived. Smaller than an electron, it contains uncountable galaxies. If powerful men and women could remain centered in the Tao, all things would be in harmony. The world would become a paradise. All people would be at peace, and the law would be written in their hearts. When you have names and forms, know that they are provisional. When you have institutions, know where their functions should end. Knowing when to stop, you can avoid any danger. All things end in the Tao as rivers flow into the sea. — Laozi

The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy. — A.S. Byatt

There are many wild beasts on land and in the sea, but the beastliest of all is woman. — Menander

Women are like the fish in the sea, they are the ones who give life to the sea, that make the sea joyful. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I detected instantly that she didn't like me. It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he's smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signalling that Mary detesting me. — Alan Bradley

You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged, you might say, the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves. — John Cheever

We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty. — G.K. Chesterton

There are plenty of fish in the sea, if I run out of women. — Joey Comeau

The best I can say, it's like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell ... It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's all there is.
A woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark ... I go back into the dark! Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who'll ask the dark its name? — Ursula K. Le Guin

In the New World, "spinster" gained a more precise meaning: in colonial parlance, it indicated an unmarried woman over the age of twenty-three and under the age of twenty-six. At twenty-six, women without spouses became thornbacks, a reference to a sea-skate with sharp spines covering its back and tail. It was not a compliment — Rebecca Traister

Revolting. If women were so careless to become pregnant at such a time, let women sort it out. — Ruta Sepetys

I have observed, on board a steamer, how men and women easily give way to their instinct for flirtation, because water has the power of washing away our sense of responsibility, and those who on land resemble the oak in their firmness behave like floating seaweed when on the sea. — Rabindranath Tagore

No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers ... Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn't the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children? The way, the only way to stop this evil is for the red man to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was first, and should be now, for it was never divided. We gave them forest-clad mountains and valleys full of game, and in return what did they give our warriors and our women? Rum, trinkets, and a grave. — Tecumseh

What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang? — Countee Cullen

The Seventh Sense
Women
who build nations
learn
to love
men
who build nations
learn
to love
children
building sand castles
by the rising sea — Audre Lorde

Darwin may have been quite correct in his theory that man descended from the apes of the forest, but surely woman rose from the frothy sea, as resplendent as Aphrodite on her scalloped chariot. — Margot Datz

I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. — Virginia Woolf

I was thinking", he answered absently, "about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life. — Willa Cather

Those who cannot conquer must bend the knee. They must find strength, or serve those of us who have. You are my generals. I will send you out: my hunting dogs, my wolves with iron teeth. When a city closes its gates in fear, you will destroy it. When they make roads and walls, you will cut them, pull down the stones. When a man raises a sword or bow against your men, you will hang him from a tree. Keep Karakorum in your minds as you go. This white city is the heart of the nation, but you are the right arm, the burning brand. Find me new lands, gentlemen. Cut a new path. Let their women weep a sea of tears and I will drink it all. — Conn Iggulden

I like the pleasant things most women enjoy, even if I do wear breeches and boots on an expedition, even sleep in them at times ... but I powder my nose before going on deck, no matter how rough the sea is. — Louise Boyd

They came here on Sunday, 30th June, 1940, after bombing us two days before. They said they hadn't meant to bomb us; they mistook our tomato lorries on the pier for army trucks. How they came to think that strains the mind. They bombed us, killing some thirty men, women, and children - one among them was my cousin's boy. He had sheltered underneath his lorry when he first saw the planes dropping bombs, and it exploded and caught fire. They killed men in their lifeboats at sea. They strafed the Red Cross ambulances carrying our wounded. When no one shot back at them, they saw the British had left us undefended. They just flew in peaceably two days later and occupied us for five years. — Mary Ann Shaffer

The sea is not a whore, for she is free and joyous, but she is a woman. She obeys the moon, as women do, and her depths contain both treasures and horrors, and men try to bend her to their will and rarely succeed, no matter how much money they spend in the attempt. The sea does as she wishes, and anyone who would be her lover must be her partner, not her master. — Susan Palwick

At noon I observed a bevy of nude young native women bathing in the sea, and I went and sat down on there clothes to keep them from being stolen. — Mark Twain

It is difficult to grasp the immensity and significance of the extreme reverence paid to the Goddess over a period of (at least) seven thousand years and over miles of land cutting across national boundaries and vast expanses of sea. Yet it is vital to do just that to fully comprehend the longevity as well as the widespread power and influence this religion once held. — Merlin Stone

Miss West is never idle. Below, in the big after-room, she does her own laundering. Nor will she let the steward touch her father's fine linen. In the main cabin she has installed a sewing-machine. All hand-stitching, and embroidering, and fancy work she does in the deck-chair beside me. She avers that she loves the sea and the atmosphere of sea-life, yet, verily, she has brought her home-things and land-things along with her
even to her pretty china for afternoon tea. — Jack London

Fish in the sea are luminous so that they can recognise one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them? — Angela Carter

In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right? — Paul Gauguin

I've seen your stormy seas and stormy women, And pity lovers rather more than seamen. — Lord Byron

I feel I must fight for [my music], because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea. — Ethel Smyth

I'll never be a poet,' said Amory as he finished. 'I'm not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never right anything but mediocre poetry. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he's become tight-lipped as an oyster. But he can feel the worlds pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward. — Karen Russell

her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buff-coloured folders. It wasn't quite the 'interesting job' she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. ('One day a woman will be Prime Minister,' Pamela said. 'Maybe even in our lifetime.') Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress. Since '36 she'd been working in the Air Raid Precautions Department. 'You've not heard rumours then?' Pamela said. 'I'm a lowly squaw, I hear nothing but rumours.' 'Maurice can't say what he does,' Pamela grumbled. 'Couldn't — Kate Atkinson

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband - I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid - I see these sights on the earth; 5
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny - I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea - I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these - All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent. — Walt Whitman

In 'Deadliest Catch,' we have men in ships in rough seas catching crabs. With 'Whale Wars,' we have men and women from a dozen different nations going out to sea in rough weather to help save the whales. We also have icebergs, whales, penguins, and dramatic ship-to-ship confrontations. — Paul Watson

The times today are too dangerous for the young and the smart to be not bothered. Know the truth. Remember, "We can deny the truth. But, we can't avoid it." We have been there; we have all been there. Ask a female friend who is fighting for a better pay scale, ask the father of an immigrant who is nervous about the future of his daughter, ask a gay friend who is fighting for the right to marry, ask an African-American friend who wants her younger brother to be unafraid and proud, ask a homeless worker in Bangladesh whose house just got swept by rising sea levels, ask a young child in Beijing who breathes an air polluted by fossil fuels, ask a child labor in India who works ten hours and twelve hours to get two square meals a day. And, when you ask, you will know. You will know why we need to take it personally. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

I have heard what poets write about women. They rhyme and rhapsodize and lie. I have watched sailors on the shore stare mutely at the slow-rolling swell of the sea. I have watched old soldiers with hearts like leather grow teary-eyed at their king's colors stretched against the wind.
Listen to me: these men know nothing of love.
You will not find it in the words of poets or the longing eyes of sailors. If you want to know of love, look to a trouper's hands as he makes his music.
A trouper knows. — Patrick Rothfuss

I have not much faith in women in fiction ... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before. — Willa Cather

Over time, I have realized that at 20, you can wear too much makeup and people assume you're a slut. Do it at 40 and they think you're a sea witch. — Melodie Ramone