The Ocean Short Quotes & Sayings

Baby, don't build a monument for me of your sadness. You wouldn't have wasted your tears when I was alive. Why make an ocean of them now when it's over? The future you dreamed is a dream. Dream something else. — Stephanie Roberts

The world is changing, but I am not changing with it. There is no e-reader or Kindle in my future. My philosophy is simple: Certain things are perfect the way they are. The sky, the Pacific Ocean, procreation and the Goldberg Variations all fit this bill, and so do books. Books are sublimely visceral, emotionally evocative objects that constitute a perfect delivery systemBooks that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on. Books that make us believe, for however short a time, that we shall all live happily ever after. — Joe Queenan

A basic conflict is thus arising over Europe between the interests of Atlantic sea-power, which demand the preservation of vigorous and independent political life on the European peninsula, and the interests of the jealous Eurasian land power, which must always seek to extend itself to the west and will never find a place, short of the Atlantic Ocean, where it can from its own standpoint safely stop. — Henry Kissinger

I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story. — August Wilson

As populations crowd toward the ocean's edge and the sea encroaches menacingly toward the land, John R. Gillis looks at the history of the world from a fresh perspective and enables readers to see it in a new light. That he has managed to do so in a single conceptual work is nothing short of astounding. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows. — Herman Melville

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains - flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it all ended. Almost. — Haruki Murakami

And now the solider toiled upward through an extremely steep ascent over rock outcroppings and ravines. At the top, they saw something few white men had ever seen: the preternaturally flat expanse of the high plains, covered only with short buffalo grass. 'As far as the eye could reach,' wrote Carter, 'not an object of any kind or living thing was in sight. It stretched out before us- one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared with the ocean in its vastness.' The scene was terrifying even for men with experience of the plains. 'This is a terrible country,' railroad worker Arthur Ferguson had written a few years earlier, 'the stillness, wildness, and desolation of which is awful... Not a tree to be seen... and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal. — S.C. Gwynne

I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn't go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god's knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery. The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don't share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death. — Marcus Speh

Consciousness is a vast ocean and thinking is the
waves & ripples on the surface of the ocean. Every wave & ripple has a very short lived life - it is very fleeting
Do not identify with your thoughts - continued indentification with the stream of thinking leads to a very serious dysfunction in ones sense of identity ... — Eckhart Tolle

It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. — Herman Melville

I cut a rap song once. It was a few years ago for my old show 'Buck Commander,' and it was a song called 'You're Short.' It was about my camera guy. We shot the video in Las Vegas, 'Ocean's Eleven' style! — Willie Robertson

You must often leave your country, not necessarily physically, but mentally often! Leave your own music; leave your own religion! Leave your own culture, your own books and ideas! Walk around in the world of others, listen to what they speak and learn what they think! In short, get out of your puddle, sail to the ocean! Move, friend, move out of your country! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Short of climbing aboard a time capsule and peeling back eight and one-half decades, James Cameron's magnificent Titanic is the closest any of us will get to walking the decks of the doomed ocean liner. Meticulous in detail, yet vast in scope and intent, Titanic is the kind of epic motion picture event that has become a rarity. You don't just watch Titanic , you experience it from the launch to the sinking, then on a journey two and one-half miles below the surface, into the cold, watery grave where Cameron has shot never-before seen documentary footage specifically for this movie. — James Berardinelli

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

Lines
I die but when the grave shall press
The heart so long endeared to thee
When earthy cares no more distress
And earthy joys are nought to me.
Weep not, but think that I have past
Before thee o'er the sea of gloom.
Have anchored safe and rest at last
Where tears and mouring can not come.
'Tis I should weep to leave thee here
On that dark ocean sailing drear
With storms around and fears before
And no kind light to point the shore.
But long or short though life may be
'Tis nothing to eternity.
We part below to meet on high
Where blissful ages never die. — Emily Bronte

Time was the invention of men who would confine the ocean and bottle the wind.
Eternity is too short to fulfill the promise of love my sould holds for you. — Kassandra Sims

But is life really worth so much? Let us examine this; it's a different inquiry. We will offer no solace for so desolate a prison house; we will encourage no one to endure the overlordship of butchers. We shall rather show that in every kind of slavery, the road of freedom lies open. I will say to the man to whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones [Prexaspes], and to him whose master makes fathers banquet on their sons' guts [Harpagus]: 'What are you groaning for, fool?... Everywhere you look you find an end to your sufferings. You see that steep drop-off? It leads down to freedom. You see that ocean, that river, that well? Freedom lies at its bottom. You see that short, shriveled, bare tree? Freedom hangs from it.... You ask, what is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body. — Seneca.

There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest future, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It's the ocean. — Edward Humes

With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species. — Kate Bernheimer

We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short-term benefit would be to destroy the very basis for our survival. — Dalai Lama

It wasn't Glen's jealousy that surprised him. "You owe Roy money?"
"Yep. Borrowed it to get my truck painted."
"Roy's a loan shark, too?"
"You ever see JAWS?" Snakebite asked.
Glen said he had.
"How 'bout THE GODFATHER?"
"Yeah."
"Well, if Michael Corleone waded out in the ocean and fucked that shark, then you'd have old Roy."
from the Tom Franklin short story "Grit" (page 31) from POACHERS:STORIES — Tom Franklin

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

Whilst I viewed those mountains, I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the--heretofore conceived--boundless Missouri. But when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific Ocean, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and the party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them. But, as I have always held it little short of criminality to anticipate evils, I will allow it to be a good, comfortable road until I am compelled to believe otherwise. (William Clark) — John Bakeless

In a few short years you might have to become a scuba diver and go hundreds of feet underwater - It will be the last refuge of pure aura and power on our planet, the oceans' depths. — Frederick Lenz

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

If our knowledge is, as I believe, only an island in an infinite sea of ignorance, how can we in our short lifetime find satisfaction in exploring our little island? How can we persuade ourselves to be exhilarated by our meager knowledge and yet not be discouraged by the ocean vistas? — Daniel J. Boorstin

I have read that long ago there was a land of glass castles that sank beneath the sea. It was not called Atlantis, but Lyonesse. This happened before history and across the ocean, but when I was little I wondered about that place, how it could be so beautiful and so lost. Sometimes it seemed that the land around my New England home was like that flooded country, with mud where the streets of gold should be and mayflies swarming where there should be lovely fishes, but here and there a shard of crystal to call the heart to beauty.
"Wetlands," in Phoebe. — Claudia Putnam

I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges. — Anton Chekhov

I walk outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and it maybe travels two blocks. A whale unleashes his cry, and it travels hundreds or even thousands of miles. Every whale in the ocean will at one time or another run into that song. And I figure whales probably don't edit. If they think it, they say it ... Whale talk is the truth, and in a very short period of time, if you're a whale, you know exactly what it is to be you. — Chris Crutcher

He looked out the open window. So this was what it was like. He looked through the green foliage, over the ocean, and felt around him the heat massing in the air, the current of coolness running through it, taking form in the thunderheads. He saw the black energy becoming creatured from a hundred kilometers away, roaring toward shore, feeding on itself. On the headland, trees bending to absorb the weight of the forward wind. — Nam Le

What was I so enthusiastic about? The American Dream - The opportunity for everyone to success, to get somewhere by their own efforts, and like many teenagers, I was also a fan of a certain brand of jeans that couldn't be bought in the GDR, but I had an aunt in the west who used to send them to me. I loved the vast American landscapes, where the air is full of spirit of freedom and independence. In 1990 my husband and I flew to America for the very first time, to California. We will never forget that view of the Pacific Ocean. It was nothing short of magnificent. — Stefan Kornelius

I will never turn my back on the ocean: Passion
I will paddle around the impact zone: No short cuts
I will take the drop with commitment: Courage, focus and determination
I will never fight a rip tide: The danger of pride and egotism
I will always paddle back out: Perseverance in the face of challenges
I will watch out for other surfers after a big set: Responsibility
I will know that there will always be another wave: Optimism
I will ride and not paddle into shore: Self-esteem
I will pass on my stoke to a non-surfer: Sharing knowledge and giving back
I will catch a wave every day, even in my mind: Imagination
I will realize that all surfers are joined by one ocean: Empathy
I will honor the sport of kings: Honor and integrity — Shaun Tomson

Some of them profess to be well acquainted with all the principal waters of the Columbia, with which they assured me these waters had no connection short of the ocean. — William Henry Ashley