Quotes & Sayings About Shells And Life

In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own. — Ken Thompson

Nothing happened. And everything did. Your whole life you can be told something is wrong and so you believe it. Why should you question it? But then slowly seeds are planted inside of you, one by one, by a touch or a look or a day skateboarding in a park, and they start to burst out of old hulls shells and they start to sprout. And pretty soon there are so many of them. They are named Love and Trust and Kindness and Joy and Desire and Wonder and Spirit and Soulmate. They grow into a garden so dense and thick that it starts to invade your brain where the old things you were once told are dying. — Francesca Lia Block

Most people look at cats and think what a life - all we do is lie around in the sun, never having to lift a finger. But cats' lives aren't that idyllic. Cats are powerless, weak little creatures that injure easily. We don't have shells like turtles, nor wings like birds. We can't burrow into the ground like moles or change colors like a chameleon. The world has no idea how many cats are injured every day, how many of us meet a miserable end. I happen to be lucky enough to live with the Tanabes in a warm and friendly family, the children treat me well, and I've got everything I need. But even my life isn't always easy. When it comes to strays, though, they have a very tough time of it. — Haruki Murakami

Sometimes life events break your heart. Even as you grieve, allow light to seep through the cracks, uplift, and illuminate a healing. Baby turtles emerge from the cracking of shells; new life can burst forth. Clear away all broken belongings as a metaphorical pathway fresh, loving experiences in uncharted waters. — Laura Staley

On all sides, as far as the eye could reach, rose the grass-covered heaps marking the site of ancient habitations. The great tide of civilisation had long since ebbed, leaving these scattered wrecks on the solitary shore. Are those waters to flow again, bearing back the seeds of knowledge and of wealth that they have wafted to the West? We wanderers were seeking what they had left behind, as children gather up the coloured shells on the deserted sands. At my feet there was a busy scene, making more lonely the unbroken solitude which reigned in the vast plain around, where the only thing having life or motion were the shadows of the lofty mounds as they lengthened before the declining sun. — Austen Henry Layard

Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

How strange it was to...watch her walk round the table and the chairs by the fire, pick up my shells from the shore along the mantelpiece, and smile at everything and examine it as if she were reading the story of my life in the intervening years. She ran her hand along the book spines on the shelves, stopping to greet an old friend as she took it down to read a little. — Elisabeth Gifford

The life of every man is a way to himself, an attempt at a way, the suggestion of a path. No man has ever been utterly himself, yet every man strives to be so, the dull, the intelligent, each one as best he can. Each man to the end of his days carries round with him vestiges of his birth - the slime and egg-shells of the primeval world. There are many who never become humans; they remain frogs, lizards, ants. Many men are human being above and fish below. Yet each one represents an attempt on the part of nature to create a human being. — Hermann Hesse

I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way. — Annie Dillard

Actually, however, life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself. But what a marvelously insidious, subtle image of life a coiling vital principle would be! And how many dreams the leftward oriented shell, or one that did not conform to the rotation of its species, would inspire! — Gaston Bachelard

Life is the name of all things that have shells separating them from the outside, the ability to sustain and reproduce themselves, and the capacity to evolve. — Koji Suzuki

There was once a bunny who lived by the ocean. Every day he would stroll along the sandy beach and pick up thoughts which had washed ashore. He would find them in shells, under rocks, and sometimes even tangled up in seaweed. "Oh, this is a good one," he would say, "We see chaos, but if we look carefully, if we look beneath the chaos, we find perfection." And into his bucket the thought would go. When the bunny had reached a ripe old age he gathered all the thoughts together and placed them carefully into a large silver cauldron heated by the fires of life. Using a straw broom, he stirred them thoroughly, and as he was stirring he listened carefully. Much to his surprise he heard the ocean singing a wordless song of incomparable beauty. The bunny closed his eyes and said, "Ah, it was all worth it."

--The Blue Monk of Niim — Various

Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits. — H.G.Wells

In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

But how many chose to ignore the direct attack they laid on what is fed to all of us as 'life,' with its well-defined roads to factory and pool-hall, to work and pleasure, both organized, both shells, both a continuation of existence by forced means, in the shadow of life? — Tom McDonough

I'll stay with you a little, my unforgettable delight, for as long as my arms and my hands and my lips remember you. I'll put my grief for you in a work that will endure and be worthy of you. I'll write your memory into an image of aching tenderness and sorrow. I'll stay here till this is done, then I too will go. This is how I will portray you, I'll trace your features on paper as the sea, after a fearful storm has churned it up, traces the form of the greatest, farthest-reaching wave on the sand. Seaweed, shells, cork, pebbles, the lightest, most imponderable things that it could lift from its bed, are cast up in a broken, sinuous line on the sand. This line endlessly stretching into the distance is the frontier of the highest tide. That was how life's storm cast you up on my shore, O my pride, that is how I'll portray you. — Boris Pasternak

There is great beauty in the notion of desire. Each of us is a child of the desire of our parents for each other. We are creatures of desire because we are creations of desire. The human heart discovers its most touching music when desire and love inform each other. When we love, we leave our separate solitudes and come toward union, where we complement each other. It is this ancient desire in every heart to discover and come home to its lost other half that awakens and activates its capacity for love and belonging. There are certain things that can happen to us only in solitude, and every life needs a rhythm of solitude in order to experience this. However, the experience of self-discovery, psychological integration, and spiritual growth can happen to us only when our desire draws us out of our shells and toward the precarious and life-giving sanctuary of another heart. — John O'Donohue

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 want to live my life without filters. I don't walk on egg shells. I say what I want and I'm a very free spirit. — Demi Lovato

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

Every time we open one door, we close another. It's lovely to spend Sunday morning with our new love, cooking breakfast and taking a walk together. But in the midst of our happiness, we may feel nostalgia for our former Sunday morning ritual of uninterrupted time alone at a favorite restaurant reading the newspaper. We need to acknowledge the presence of both excitement and loss, to feel their rhythm as they ebb and flow through a new relationship. If we try to deny our losses, they lead to resentments, a gnawing discomfort, and a desire to withdraw.

Yet we also need to remind our ego that love means letting go of our entrenched rituals, of comparing, of wanting life to stay the same...Entering a relationship and living in the heart of the Beloved means our life will change, our shells will crack open and we will never be the same again. — Charlotte Kasl

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. — Sylvia Plath

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

The only fruit which even much living yields seems to be often only some trivial success,
the ability to do some slight thing better. We make conquest only of husks and shells for the most part,
at least apparently,
but sometimes these are cinnamon and spices, you know. — Henry David Thoreau

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I'll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them. — Gustave Flaubert

The Economy was studying the purpose of The War, which is to purchase and not have. The customers of The War (all of us, that is) purchase life at a great cost and yet lose it. And The War was just as busily studying the purpose of The Economy, which is to cause people to purchase what they do not need or do not want, and to receive patiently what they did not expect. Having paid for life, we receive death. By now, in this nineteen hundred and eighty-sixth Year of Our Lord, we all have purchased how many shares in death? How many bombs, shells, mines, guns, grenades, poisons, anonymous murders, nameless sufferings, official secrets? But not the controlling share. Death cannot be marketed in controlling shares. — Wendell Berry

It would indeed be a great delusion, if we stated that those sports of Nature [we find] enclosed in rocks are there by chance or by some vague creative power. Ah, that would be superficial indeed! In reality, those shells, which once were alive in water and are now dead and decomposed, were made thus by time not Nature; and what we now find as very hard, figured stone, was once soft mud and which received the impression of the shape of a shell, as I have frequently demonstrated. — Agostino Scilla

In June we picked the clover,
And sea-shells in July:
There was no silence at the door,
No word from the sky.

A hand came out of August
And flicked his life away:
We had not time to bargain, mope,
Moralize, or pray. — Cecil Day-Lewis

It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles. It amuses me because it seems so much like my life at the moment, like most women's lives in the middle years of marriage. It is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations ... — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I just love mermaids. I was a mermaid in my past life. I just feel it when I go in the sea. I just feel a connection there between me, and the water, and the fish - they speak to me - and the shells - they ring out to me. — Ella Henderson

To think that in the midst of the last desperate agony of war, with several "Big Berthas" dropping shells into the city every twenty minutes, with food scarce and fuel unobtainable, more than three thousand men and women had sat at easels and maintained their faith that art could not be destroyed, but was and would remain the supreme achievement and goal of life! Lanny — Upton Sinclair

Throughout my life I had wandered alone, trying to find pieces of me in any place I could and when it came down to it, I was nothing but a shell of missed opportunities. — Matthew Carter

We are empty shells if we do not possess, if we do not fill our life with furniture, with music, with knowledge, with this or that. And that shell makes a lot of noise, and that noise we call living; and with that we are satisfied. When there is a disruption, a breaking away of that, then there is sorrow, because you suddenly discover yourself as you are-an empty shell, without much meaning. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

After my husband died, I felt like one of those spiraled shells washed upon the beach ... Poke a straw through the twisting tunnel, around and around, and there is nothing there. No flesh. No life. Whatever lived there is dried up and gone. — Lynn Caine

There is mud everywhere, slicking the asphalt and piling up in corners along with the detritus of daily life: pop cans, cigarette butts, used condoms and bullet shells. — Isaac Marion

He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight. — Jon Krakauer

I once held a belief that life made sense, that working toward a dream would birth substance. Nothing else mattered. I soon discovered that success is as long-lasting as any of life's novelties.
We've all been happy with new things, only to be disappointed later. Dolls and soldiers our parents toiled to give us found their way to pedestals, then to the back of closets.
I'd always dreamed of marrying a woman I loved and watching my children grow. I wonder if our lives should be filled with the pursuit of such dreams, those magical hopes interwoven into our story. Our stories are decorative shells for the crabs we really are, both protecting and exposing us to the manic outside. — Christopher Hawke

That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells - he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. — Ted Hughes

Coral reefs, the rain forest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species of the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid. — James Hansen

All I can say to people who hate their mothers for giving birth to them is "get the fuck out of your scaredy shells and kiss the world". — Jay Woodman

I once watched a small hermit crab crawl out of its shell and into a larger one nearby. Maybe we are no different. There were those before us and there will be some after us. All we can do is cultivate what is given to us. Maybe our lot in this life is to leave our shells better than when we found them so that the next soul will flourish here. — Jennifer Arnett

It's one thing for a person to live his life as a vacuous shell without fully comprehending the extent of his transgressions, but I was guilty of the greater sin; I knew what was right, and I chose to reject it. — Tarek Saab

In an effort to create safety and self-reliance in your life and relationships, you may have built walls around your heart and accumulated tension in your body. Although sometimes these walls of protection are useful, they can, over time, act like shells of fear that block your true love. These shells can keep in the love you want to offer fully and keep out the love that your heart yearns to receive. — David Deida

Being put in a box in the ground was bad enough, but being entombed like this, with layers of stone between you and the world? Kell would never understand the way these Grey-worlders sealed away their dead, trapping the discarded shells in gold and wood and stone as if some remnant of who they'd been in life remained. And if it did? What a cruel punishment. — V.E Schwab

My last chance had vanished into itself like a snail coiling up into his shell.
Insidiously I had lost my grip, and now this was it. I thought all this without much emotion. I really didn't care anymore. I couldn't hang on anymore. I didn't have the guts to kill myself, but I didn't want it to continue. I walked a couple of blocks, empty, listless, and wished I could cry.
... The diabolic hope, the purposeful pulsing of blood, the flight into coherence allowed for some rationalizing an afterlife. A new theology was evolving, one that had a faith-in-death clause. It was evolved when I kicked a dead waterbug on the pavement. It was dried out, hollowed, emptied, like some kind of shell. Maybe, I thought, its body is a shell, maybe all bodies are shells. We hatch and die. Our spirit or something like that is the yoke: it lives the real life, the true life.
It wasn't comforting. — Arthur Nersesian