She's Like The Ocean Quotes & Sayings

When I finally made it across the dune, I found her gazing at the ocean and holding a weathered fence post as if it were the mast of a sailboat.
'That was quite a sprint you did on that soft sand,' I said, huffing and puffing. She smiled, but didn't respond. So I clarified, 'That sand is hard to get through.'
She laughed. 'It's easier to get through the tough stuff if I give it a little muscle.'
I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and said coyly, 'I think there's a life lesson there.'
'Nah,' she refuted. 'I've exercised my whole life. Lots of practice. It comes naturally now.'
Like I said. — Emily Colson

I'll wish for more wishes," I offer. Morpheus laughs. "Oh, of course you would. Just like Alice did. She asked for an endless supply of wishes. Then her tears wouldn't stop falling. That's how the ocean was born in the first place. We almost never got that fountain stopped. If you try to outsmart magic, there's always a price to be paid. — A.G. Howard

She was crouched in the corner of the room, eating something off the floor. It was the old woman dressed in endless black. When she looked up this time there was no question she was there for me. She had the face of my mother but much older, her ancient decayed mouth coming closer for her good-night kiss. I steeled myself against her putrid smell, the mouthful of bitter dust, but as her lips touched mine it was like biting into a purple black plum whose fruit was brilliant red, like an explosion of intense joy. Its childhood smell wrinkled my nose with pleasure, its sweet juices ran down my chin, turning into a beautiful black ocean where I floated safely, not lost as I had imagined, but securely tucked away deep in space. — Mary Woronov

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

Rita Vargas caught her breath - the dark was spilling out of the mountains as the sun vanished in the west. The deep purple/blue shadows spread out on the water of the Caribe. The ocean was shadowy, yet at the same time, glowing. The massif green on one side, and velvety black on the other. And below, the lights of the cities scattered and burned, white, yellow, white, looking like gems. Stars.
She still recalls it as one of the most beautiful sights she'd ever witnessed, as if the coast of Veracruz were somehow welcoming its sons home. It would have astounded the dead if the could have looked out the windows. Why would they ever have left such a beautiful home for the dry bones and spikes of the desert? If they could have seen what she saw, they might have stayed home. — Luis Alberto Urrea

Attention words. A single word wasn't enough. Not even for a particular segment. The brain had defenses, filters evolved over millions of years to protect against manipulation. The first was perception, the process of funneling an ocean of sensory input down to a few key data packages worthy of study by the cerebral cortex. When data got by the perception filter, it received attention. And she saw now that it must be like that all the way down: There must be words to attack each filter. Attention words and then maybe desire words and logic words and urgency words and command words. This was what they were teaching her. How to craft a string of words that would disable the filters one by one, unlocking each mental tumbler until the mind's last door swung open. — Max Barry

She didn't hear anything except a muted fuzzy silence. It was the first time in days and days she hadn't heard the ocean and the rain and the wind. She closed her eyes. Quiet. That would have been enough. For the scientist to have given her this minute of peace would have been enough. Then she heard a coo. Another longer coo, sliding from high to low. Oh, it was saying. Oh. Is it you? In answer came more ghostly, plaintive calls. The dolphins sang to each other. The songs pierced her chest like hot sticks, each call sharper than the last. She hoped Doug could hear them. She began to cry. — Diana Wagman

She watched hungrily for visitors from out of town, threw open her arms at the slightest hint of a wind and at night she struggled Jacob-like against the ocean pressing down on her. — Junot Diaz

Do you ever go out there when it's like this?" she said softly. "When it's almost dark and there's no one else in the water?"
"I do. It's nice being alone out there."
"It doesn't make you feel lonely?"
"The ocean is a great companion. — Robin Bielman

From here she could see miles of dark emerald forest with just a few birds erupting from its depths like flying fish skimming an ocean ...
'Annabel!' Ewan called.
She looked down. He was standing in water, after all. So without a moment's trepidation, she launched herself from the downed carriage, coming home to his arms with all the security and the pleasure of child leaping from the second stair. — Eloisa James

You can come out, and we will end it, cleanly, or you can die in there, of hunger and of fear. And when you are dead your circle will mean nothing, and we will tear out your heart and take your soul for a keepsake."
"P'raps it will be like that," I said, to the darkness and the shadows, "and p'raps it won't. And p'raps if it is, it would have been like that anyway. I don't care. I'm still going to wait here for Lettie Hempstock, and she's going to come back to me. And if I die here, then I will die waiting for her, and that's a better way to go than you and all you stupid horrible things tearing me to bits because I've got something inside me that I don't even want!" (Ocean at the End of the Lane) — Neil Gaiman

She began to whisper something in my ear. It's the strangest thing about poetry - you can tell it's poetry, even if you don't speak the language. You can hear Homer's Greek without understanding a word, and you still know it's poetry. I've heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn't know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind's eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean. — Neil Gaiman

The ocean was the best place, of course. That was what she loved most. It was a feeling of freedom like no other, and yet a feeling of communion with all the other places and creatures the water touched. — Ann Brashares

Disgust rose in Samantha like vomit. She wanted to seize the over-warm cluttered room and mash it between her hands, until the royal china, and the gas fire, and the gilt-framed pictures of Miles broke into jagged pieces; then, with wizened and painted Maureen trapped and squalling inside the wreckage, she wanted to heave it, like a celestial shot-putter, away into the sunset. The crushed lounge and doomed crone inside it, soared in her imagination through the heavens, plunging into the limitless ocean, leaving Samantha alone in the endless stillness of the universe. — J.K. Rowling

What good is science if not expand one's soul so that she behaves like an ocean that holds the trash. What good is intelligence if not enlarge one's personality so that he was increasingly able to understand other people? — Emha Ainun Nadjib

Right now, our mother
our mother
all of our mothers, Mother Earth is hurting. And she needs a generation of thoughtful, caring and active kids like all of you to protect her for the future. You can help us win the battle to clean up our air, our water, our land, to protect our forests, our oceans and our wildlife. — Leonardo DiCaprio

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

In the tell-me-again times, ( ... ) when my mom and I lived in a little apartment in a little building downtown, I slept in her bed. It was a raft on the ocean, a cloud, a forest, a spaceship, a cocoon that we shared. I could stretch out like a five-pointed star and then she'd bundle me back up in her arms. I'd wake in the morning tangled in her hair. — Erica Lorraine Scheidt

She saw the deepness that was at the edge of France and it made the beach under her feel like a ledge on a cliff. — J.M. Ledgard

The ocean was a molten gold. A drum roll sent the crowd into a frenzied cheering which reached a fevered pitch when the ocean swallowed the sun in a kinetic bolt of color representing the entire spectrum of light. Matt studied Shelly as she watched awed. The child-like delight on her face was captivating. — Meryl Sawyer

Like the person who felt the draw of the ocean but couldn't swim, she felt the pull of another but didn't know how to respond and stay safe. — Scarlett Cole

She loved the dry, crackling heat, the way the sky at sunset looked like a sheet of fire, and the overwhelming emptiness and severity of all that open land that had once been a huge ocean bed.
pg. 21 — Jeannette Walls

The night engulfed her with silence, and the horizon pulled her further into an alternate universe. Civilization left behind, she waited for him as the boat made its way deep into the ocean, then slowed. A million stars twinkled overhead.
She never heard his footsteps.
Like a wild stallion mounting his mare, he pressed his hard body against hers and dragged her legs apart. She gasped and held on tight as he yanked her up, spread her wide, and plunged deep inside. — Jennifer Probst

In the beginning, fifty hours sounded like a bleak ocean of time, more hours than Sawtooth wanted to spend with himself, let alone with another person. Now he needs the girl to sit and measure time with him, the way the neighbor woman needs her prescription mirror so that she doesn't forget her own face. — Karen Russell

There, see how the ocean swallows those little pebbles. We are helpless and insignificant, like the pebbles. The war comes, chases us from our homes, makes us refugees, and then swallows us up along with all our hopes and dreams. We just sink down to the bottom. Only then do we have peace. What's the sense of trying? What's the sense of studying?" She stared at the dark water, taking short breaths as her eyes filled with tears of sadness and helplessness. — Sook Nyul Choi

One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this. The woman whom you never hoped to meet now sits before you and she talks and looks exactly like the person you dreamed about. But the strangest of all is that you never realized before that you had dreamed about her. Your whole past is like a long sleep, which would have been forgotten had there been no dream. And the dream too, might have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which every thing is washed away, but that which is new and more substantial even than life: Reality. — Henry Miller

Amy sighed. Just when she started to almost like Ian again - after all, he'd flown across the ocean and had been working around the clock to help - his snob quotient went through the roof. — Jude Watson

There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory. Isabel is part of him, wherever she is, just like the war and the light and the ocean. Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone. He watches the ocean surrender to the night, knowing that the light will reappear. — M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans

Dale Chihuly." She pulls out her phone and moves close to show me a picture of his work. "It's an eleven meter-long chandelier at the Victoria and Albert Museum."
It looks like one of those tanges she drew, only it's hanging from a ceiling. Blue and yellow. A sideways ocean.
"It looks to me like a feeling pulled straight out from under your skin," she says. — Cath Crowley

It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above. — Junot Diaz

On a summer morning she woke to a sense of returning health. She had been lying like a waste shore, at low spring-tide, covered with dry seaweeds, withered jelly-fishes, and a multitudinous life that gasped for the ocean: at last the cook washing throb of the great sea of bliss, whose fountain is the heart of God, had stolen upon her consciousness, and she knew that she lived. — George MacDonald

Because the truth is that now that he's here, she can't imagine it any other way. Now that he's here, she worries that crossing an entire ocean with someone between them might be something like torture. — Jennifer E. Smith

And she was...what? A governess? A false governess whose life history began in 1816 when she'd stepped off the ferry, seasick and petrified, and placed her feet on the rocky soil of the Isle of Man.
Anne Wynter had been born that day, and Annelise Shawcross...
She had disappeared. Gone in a puff like the spray of the ocean all around her. — Julia Quinn

Only yonder magnificent pine-tree ... holds her unchanging beauty throughout the year, like her half-brother, the ocean, whose voice she shares; and only marks the flowing of her annual tide of life by the new verdure that yearly submerges all trace of last year's ebb. — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Like a shot from a movie, the morning sun shone brilliantly around him like a god - his dark hair glinted warmly in the light, and his eyes gleamed bluer than the south Pacific Ocean.
Taylor's mind went blank. And suddenly, she couldn't remember why the hell she ever had been angry with Jason Andrews.
But then he spoke.
"Sleeping in this morning, Ms. Donovan?" he drawled.
Moment over. — Julie James

Tell me, Miss Hathaway ... what would you do if you were invited on a midnight ride across the earth and ocean? Would you choose the adventure, or stay safely at home?"
She couldn't seem to tear her gaze from his. The topaz eyes were lit by a glint of playfulness, not the innocent mischief of a boy, but something far more dangerous. She could almost believe he might actually change form and appear beneath her window one night, and carry her away on midnight wings ...
"Home, of course," she managed in a sensible tone. "I don't want adventure."
"I think you do. I think in a moment of weakness, you might surprise yourself."
"I don't have moments of weakness. Not that kind, at any rate."
His laughter curled around her like a drift of smoke. "You will. — Lisa Kleypas

Faith's way of walking is to cast all care upon the Lord, and then to anticipate good results from the worst calamities. Like Gideon's men, she does not fret over the broken pitcher, but rejoices that the lamp blazes forth the more. Out of the rough oyster-shell of difficulty she extracts the rare pearl of honor, and from the deep ocean-caves of distress she uplifts the priceless coral of experience. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

Lily liked the fog, and didn't even mind the cold wind. She reckoned that Ocean Beach, the dunes there, and the Sunset were the closest San Francisco was going to come to the foreboding, wind-swept moors of England, where she had aspired to suffer romance and heartache when she was a kid. The foghorn, however, rather than a lonesome lament that conjured images of Heathcliff's dark figure, waiting with clenched jaw on the moor for her to bring light and warmth into his life, sounded like a distressed moose tied up in her neighbor's garage, having his nut sack singed with jumper cables at a precise interval calculated to keep her from falling asleep. Which, in turn, made her think of what complete douche bags people could be when all you wanted to do was borrow a defibrillator. Then she was awake and angry. — Christopher Moore

am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone." "Gone where? — Rosemary Rawson

I hate it when storm clouds roll in, heralded by dazzling claps of thunder and lightning that boast an ocean of tears. This majestic performance of bad temper manages to overshadow my pathetic attempts at pouting. No one broods like Mother Nature, hence she steals all the attention I was sulking after. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Once Henry had heard a crying noise at sea, and had seen a mermaid floating on the ocean's surface. The mermaid had been injured by a shark. Henry had pulled the mermaid out of the water with a rope, and she had died in his arms ... "what language did the mermaid speak?" Alma wanted to know, imagining that it like almost have to be Greek. "English!" Henry said. "By God, plum, why would I rescue a deuced foreign mermaid? — Elizabeth Gilbert

Lynn said, "The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but see-through both at the same time. What did I just say?"
"The sky is special."
"The ocean is like that too, and people's eyes."
She turned her head toward me and waited. I said, "The ocean and people's eyes are special too."
That's how I learned about eyes, sky, and ocean: the three special, deep, colored, see-through things. I turned to Lynnie. Her eyes were deep and black, like mine. — Cynthia Kadohata

I think she was afraid to love sometimes. I think it scared her. She was the type to like things that were concrete, like the ocean. Something you could point to and know what it was. I think that's why she always struggled with God. And I think that's why she also struggled with love. She couldn't touch it. She couldn't hold on to it and make sure it never changed. — Carrie Ryan

She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.
I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same? — Neil Gaiman

A people believe in a god' - she completes the circle -' and the god tells them what to believe. It's a cycle, like water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and into rain, which falls and flows into the ocean. But it is different in that ideas have weight. They have momentum. Once an idea starts, it spreads and grows and gets heavier and heavier until it can't be resisted, even by the Divine. — Robert Jackson Bennett

I came to California to study oceanography." "That sounds like a perfectly good reason," she said. "Well" - he flicked his pen in short strokes around the hedgehog's face - "as it turns out, I don't actually like the ocean." Georgie laughed. Neal's eyes were laughing with her. "I'd never seen it before I got here," he said, glancing quickly up at her. "I thought it seemed cool." "It's not cool?" "It's really wet," he said. "And also outside." Georgie kept laughing. Neal kept inking. "Sunburn ... ," he said, "seasick ... " "So now what are you studying?" "I am definitely still studying oceanography," he said, nodding at his drawing. "I am definitely here on an oceanography scholarship, still studying oceanography." "But that's terrible. You can't study oceanography if you don't like the ocean." "I may as well." He almost smiled again. "I don't like anything else either. — Rainbow Rowell

She fell into his arms like the rainfall over an ocean. — Akshay Vasu

Here's what hurst the most," Kafuku said. "I didn't truly understand her--or at least some crucial part of her. And it may well end that way now that she's dead and gone. Like a small, locked safe lying at the bottom of the ocean. It hurts a lot."

Tatsuki thought for a moment before speaking.

"But Mr. Kafuku, can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them? — Haruki Murakami

Why do you like jellyfish so much?" I asked.
"I don't know. I guess I think they're cute," she said. "But one thing did occur to me when I was really focused on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don't you agree? Two thirds of the earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what's beneath the skin. — Haruki Murakami

In a state that continued to be saddled with a sternly limited governmental structure devised when the South was just emerging from the bruising experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction, she also had to contend with fact that national politics and changing demographics had left her swimming for her life as a liberal Democrat in an ocean of conservative Republicans. In a failed presidential campaign, Texas's Republican senator Phil Gramm once boasted that the best thing a politician can have is money. It helps, of course, and yet he was proved quite wrong: the biggest advantage a politician can have is that people like you. — Jan Reid

You must ceremonially commit your life to the ocean. You must marry her, knowing she is like all women, fickle and deadly but irresistibly seductive and enigmatic. — Jacob K. Ray

She let herself fall backwards into the music, and it was like falling in a dream, without fear.
It was like being a raindrop falling into the ocean that had started you. — L.J.Smith

What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn't how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It's the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I was here, Mrs. Buntline made me come out on the back porch and look at the sunset. So I did, and I said I liked it very much, but she kept waiting for me to say something else. I couldn't think of what I was supposed to say, so I said what seemed like a dumb thing. "Thank you very much," I said. That is exactly what she was waiting for. "You're entirely welcome," she said. I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution. — Kurt Vonnegut

Mary fell asleep early, but her dreams were most unpleasant. She was a mouse running across the kitchen floor, and Elizabeth was a sharp-clawed cat waiting silently to pounce. Then she was a wild deer being chased by famished dogs. Elizabeth was a laughing huntsman in black velvet, urging the ravenous pack onward with a whip. And then Mary was her true self, barefoot and in a bedgown, attempting to escape by night. But the castle was dark and the halls were a winding maze. Mary ran down long shadowy corridors, panting and out of breath, but at every turn she ran into blank walls or locked doors. At last she managed to yank open a door, expecting to breathe the sweet air of freedom. But the way was blocked by laughing faces, all of them growing larger and larger while Mary got smaller and smaller. There was Elizabeth ... and Dudley ... and Cecil ... and Walsingham ... and their loud laughter filled her ears, drowning her pleas like ocean waves. — Margaret George

The weather is certainly unpredictable here,isn't it?"
"It's always unpredictable when the MacLeans are involved."
She turned to look at him. "You've heard the rumors of the curse?"
"I've heard them and believe them." He moved beside her. "Don't you?"
The pocket she needed to reach was on his other side, blast it. "Do you think one of the MacLeans might be angry now?"
He looked over her head to the gathering clouds, a frown settling between his eyes. "Yes," he said quietly. "One of them is growing more furious by the moment."
A fresh wind now tossed the treetops about, the grass rippled like an angry ocean, and the clouds filled the entire sky. — Karen Hawkins

The flames of the fire leapt up and surrounded her, consuming her, becoming her. Heat filled and flushed her, breaking the bottle and she soared up and up. She came to stand in a sun's center. But that even faded and she rode pillion with Emmerich as he crossed the field on his black battle charger, her hands gripping his sides. The edges of his chain-mail bit into her skin and she could hear his labored breath. She could smell his particular scent: horse and leather, sweat and musk. Men roared like the ocean and rushed like waves to slam against the opposing force meeting them outside the walls. — Suzanna J. Linton

She's like a bullet through an ocean,
I still remember how you moved so slow,
You tried to kill me with a shot gun,
Bang!
Now we're even,
We don't stop till someone's bleeding! — Pierce The Veil

She watched the gap between ship and shore grow to a huge gulf. Perhaps this was a little like dying, the departed no longer visible to the others, yet both still existed, only in different worlds. — Susan Wiggs

I don't hate it here," she said automatically. Surprising herself, she realized that as much as she'd been trying to convince herself otherwise, she was telling the truth. "It's just that I don't belong here."
He gave her a meloncholy smile. "If it's any consolation, when I was growing up, I didn't feel like I belonged here, either. I dreamed about going to New York. But it's strange, because when I finally escaped this place, I ended up missing it more than I thought I would. There's something about the ocean that just calls to me. — Nicholas Sparks

As they came out from the shelter of the trees and the Great Meadows stretched out before them, Kit caught her breath. She had not expected anything like this. From that first moment, in a way she could never explain, the Meadows claimed her and made her their own. As far as she could see they stretched on either side, a great level sea of green, broken here and there by a solitary graceful elm. Was it the fields of sugar cane they brought to mind, or the endless reach of the ocean to meet the sky? Or was it simply the sense of freedom and space and light that spoke to her of home? — Elizabeth George Speare

She remembers sprinting over the thin after-waves that slid over each other like sheets of glass. When she ran with the waves it looked like she wasn't moving. When she ran against them it looked like she was flying. She refuses to believe her brother will never know these things. Somewhere, they will find sand. — Isaac Marion

She wanted to explain everything to him - how certain notes of the Moonlight Sonata shredded her heart like wind inside a paper bag; how her soul felt as endless and deep as the sea churning on their left; how the sight of the young Muslim couple filled her with an emotion that was equal parts joy and sadness; and above all, how she wanted a marriage that was different from the dead sea of marriages she saw all around her, how she wanted something finer, deeper, a marriage made out of silk and velvet instead of coarse cloth, a marriage made of clouds and stardust and red earth and ocean foam and moonlight and sonatas and books and art galleries and passion and kindness and sorrow and ecstasy and of fingers touching from under a burqua. — Thrity Umrigar

Her expression almost never changed. Made it hard to tell what she was thinking. But also made her seem separate from the rest of the world. It was like she lived so deep in the ocean even light
couldn't reach her. Like a fish that couldn't see the dark lonely depths, because it was always dreaming about sunlight. — Yukari Yashiki

The sky was full - of blue and sun. The ocean reflected it and was flat and glossy like a fancy ballroom floor. To Martha, this was the most beautiful sight, a miracle. The ocean made her feel insignificant and slightly afraid, but in an exhilarating way. Her inclination was not to walk or dance across the water's surface. Nor to swim through it. She wanted to *be* the ocean — Kevin Henkes

Turtle is putting seaweed all over me. It is the big turtle. She is so big that she can regurgitate
seaweed over me. It comes out of her mouth like
coming from a spoud of a fountain, which is actually a very nice feeling. It is not sticky at all. It is just
a very nice clean feeling and it is a wonderful ocean smell
about it. — Sandra Harner

Her happiness floated like waves of ocean along the coast of her life. She found lyrics of her life in his arms but she never sung her song. — Santosh Kalwar

Again the water rose, they both took a breath; again they were submerged and his leg hooked over something, an old pipe, unmoving. The next time, they both reached their heads high as the water rushed back, another breath taken. He heard Mrs. Kitteridge yelling from above. He couldn't hear the words, but he understood that help was coming. He had only to keep Patty from falling away, and as they went again beneath the swirling, sucking water, he strengthened his grip on her arm to let her known: He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing through each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean - oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look she wanted to hold on. — Elizabeth Strout

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

I admit,
I was afraid
to love.
Not just love,
but to love her.
For she was a stunning
mystery. She carried things
deep inside her that no one
has yet to understand,
and I,
I was afraid to fail,
like the others. She was the ocean
and i was just a boy
who loved the waves
but was completely
terrified to
swim. — Christopher Poindexter

Normally, Alexis would have been put off by such a blatant gesture, but his eyes, his bright, soft blue eyes, had her melting. It was any wonder how a wave could withstand such a look from eyes like that and continue to build towards him.
His eyes were her ocean in those brief seconds. She felt herself swimming within them, trying to answer the questions they held while finding answers to her own. — Lindsay Chamberlin

It's been a long time since I dared to get close to anyone, and I didn't realize letting down my guard could ache like this. I'm facedown in the ocean, and she's the lifeboat. — Sarina Bowen

She had not been his and now she was his. Or she had always been his and just now knew it. Cora's attention detached itself. It floated someplace past the burning slave and the great house and the lines that defined the Randall domain. She tried to fill in its details from stories, sifting through the accounts of slaves who had seen it. Each time she caught hold of something - buildings of polished white stone, an ocean so vast that there wasn't a tree in sight, the shop of a colored blacksmith who served no master but himself - it wriggled free like a fish and raced away. She would have to see it for herself if she were to keep it. — Colson Whitehead

To her it was like being alone in the ocean, holding a kite string in one hand and an anchor chain in the other and finding the balance so she wouldn't sink. — Kate Evangelista

He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall. — Alice Hoffman

The sea was like another member of the household, a recalcitrant child at times, a soothing aunt at others. She crooned them awake; she crooned them to sleep. Everywhere, there was the smell of salt. — Hala Alyan

Something that small shouldn't be so powerful, but I swear there's this pull between us, and every time I touch her, every time I even look at her, it gets stronger. Like she's an ocean tide, and I'm caught up in her current. And there's no point in fighting my way to the surface because I don't know which way is up or down. I don't know anything except that I want her. — Cora Carmack

How would it alter Juliet's love perception to learn the sea is but a rounded jug of water? Would her sensuous analogy turned simple simile unveil to her the limits of herself? Or would she forget the ocean, that deplorable casket, and turn on the true bottomless tumbler, the only running tap: the sky? It may have lost the title 'heavens' when its gods were dethroned, but its infinity reigns. So long as you walk, it reigns. So long as I talk and you listen, there's a voice and ears to keep it active, moving, and reason to say: look! infinity lives. And when we and the other consciousnesses pass, though it in part dies with us, still it reigns. It will, in a sense, plod on, like a lifeless coffin through its own space, sails set for nothing, unstoppable when trailing its fabric. — Richard Ronald Allan

The light was luminescence and gloom, like the sky at midnight speckled with stars. All she could smell was the ocean... — Samantha Lee Churcher

There's nothing.
Nothing to hold on to while the current takes me.
Whatever I might have had until today, I've lost.
I feel my love for her, swelling; bloating into something that's about to explode, like an abscess that's been allowed to rot for too long, but the pain drowns it so completely I know I'm never coming back out. This feeling, that you're choking and that your body is underwater, immersed in the ocean, a dense flood that overpowers your breathing abilities, and your will to survive gets drowned right along with it. And as I'm drowning I see her face and hear her voice - and it doesn't give me hope, it terrifies me. I'm terrified because I know she's going to be the death of me. I'm terrified because I know I won't be able to cope. I'm terrified because the darkness is the only true friend I've ever had and if it wants to embrace me I don't have the power to make it stop. — Kady Hunt

loved a man for years who said her eyes looked like the ocean, because she always wanted to be somebody's poem, somebody's simile, somebody's lackluster metaphor. — Trista Mateer

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

My head, something happened to its insides. It was as if a storm at sea happened, but only for a moment, and only on the inside of my head. My ribcage, something definitely happened there. It was as if it unknotted itself from itself, like the hull of a ship hitting rock, giving way, and the ship that I was opened up inside me and in came the ocean.
He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.
But he looked really like a girl.
She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. — Ali Smith

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. — James Joyce

She felt like a creature born to reside on the bottom of the ocean floor, dark and flat and half-blind, slowly rising through the icy water to the glittering light above. — Lisa Jewell

My mother's desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of
the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start all over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end? — Alice Sebold

But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears. — Gregory David Roberts

...I always feel like a better person when I'm on the water." The air smelled cleaner here. The water seemed purer. She wanted to strip off her clothes and dive off the side of the boat and let the water baptize her a free woman. "The ocean is big", Ty said. "And we aren't. It's good to be humbled every now and then." "You ever go through a divorce?" she asked. "Not yet." "Trust me, I know from humble. — Tiffany Reisz

I couldn't help but suspect something he'd seen or encountered had changed his view of what had happened between them. It had somehow set him free. And he'd let it fly, that gorgeous blackbird of a love he'd been keeping in a cage. What was it like for him, every day standing outside in the wind and rain to stare at the ocean, yearning for some sign of her, never giving up hope? At The Peak perhaps she'd finally come into view, a ship coming neither toward him nor away, only riding that perfect line between heaven and earth, long enough for him to know that she had loved him, that what they had was real, before slipping out of sight, probably forever. — Marisha Pessl

I love you, Eve." She looked away from the sun, the ocean, and into his eyes. And it was wonderful, and for the moment, it was simple.
"I missed you." She pressed her cheek to his and held him tightly. "I really missed you. I wore one of your shirts." She could laugh at herself now because he was here. She could smell him, touch him. "I actually went into your closet and stole one of your shirts - one of the black silk ones you have dozens of. I put it on, then snuck out of the house like a thief so Summerset wouldn't catch me."
Absurdly touched, he nuzzled her neck. "At night, I'd play your transmissions over, just so I could look at you, hear your voice."
"Really?" She giggled, a rare sound from her. "God, Roarke, we've gotten so sappy."
"We'll keep it our little secret."
"Deal." She leaned back to look at his face. — J.D. Robb

A significant driver of opposition to abortion is the social construction of the Ideal Woman. In a culture that rarely, if ever, allows women simply to be people, value is ascribed based on a woman's relation to something other than herself. A woman on her own is like a bit of driftwood floating in the ocean. She is a broken object with no purpose, waiting either to wash up on the shore and be put to use as part of something else, or to sink and be forgotten forever. — Clementine Ford

Can learn a lot about people from the stories they tell, but you can also know them from the way they sing along, whether they like the windows up or down, if they live by the map or by the world, if they feel the pull of the ocean. She — David Levithan

She smiled. She was happy, yet sad. Life had never been more bittersweet. She looked at the
sunset. The pink sky was sinking into the deep blue ocean. It was almost as if the sky knew
it was making a mistake, digging its own grave. But for a moment there, at the very moment
before diving into the darkness of the sea, on the golden horizon, the sky shone brighter
than it ever had. It was glorious in its five seconds of fame. It was serendipitously happy,
like all its life had led to that moment. And then it died into the sea, content. — Thisuri Wanniarachchi

I stared at my sister. For once she was quiet. Her eyes were glassy and she looked deep in thought or far away, as if she had already crossed the ocean. I wished I knew more about her and less about the patterns of her sickness. She was so small, so busy surviving that we hadn't gotten the chance to be like other sisters, but her hands still fit well in mine. — Sara Novic

Whatever be the qualities of the man with whom a woman is united according to the law, such qualities even she assumes, like a river, united with the ocean. — Guru Nanak

Why can't Tashi come to school? she asked me. When I told her the Olinka don't believe in educating girls she said, quick as a flash, They're like white people at home who don't want colored people to learn. Oh, she's sharp, Celie. At the end of the day, when Tashi can get away from all the chores her mother assigns her, she and Olivia secret themselves in my hut and everything Olivia has learned she shares with Tashi. To Olivia right now Tashi alone is Africa. The Africa she came beaming across the ocean hoping to find. Everything else is difficult for her. — Alice Walker

I love Graham Larkin," she said quietly, her voice full of emotion, and there was a flicker of surprise on his face, and then his expression softened. "You're supposed to shout it," he said, smiling as she tugged on the brim of the cap, forcing him to lower his face, bringing him closer and closer until their lips met. And even though they were in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world, lost in a sea of concrete and wood and metal, she could almost swear he tasted like the ocean. — Jennifer E. Smith

I room with Louisa. Louisa is older and her hair is like a red-and-gold noisy ocean down her back. There's so much of it, she can't even keep it in with braids or buns or scrunchies. Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells better than any girl I've ever known. I could breathe her in forever.

My first night here, when she lifted her blouse to change for bed, in the moment before that crazy hair fell over her body like a protective cape, I saw them, all of them, and I sucked my breath in hard.

She said, "Don't be scared, little one."

I wasn't scared. I'd just never seen a girl with skin like mine. — Kathleen Glasgow

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

If India is to survive, she must be made young again. Rushing and billowing streams of energy must be poured into her; her soul must become, as it was in the old times, like the surges, vast, puissant, calm or turbulent at will, an ocean of action or of force. — Sri Aurobindo