The Ship Who Sang Quotes & Sayings

The clockwork men and women fated to maneuver the oars twenty-four hours per day until the ship reached its destination had turned their silent voices to song as they bent their backs to row. They sang not in any human language but in the secret language of the mechanicals. A shanty sung in the click-tick-click of clockwork bodies, the crash of tapped feet, the clatter of metal hands gripping banded wooden spars. — Ian Tregillis

Ms. Wrack's mother, Mrs. Wrack, had been a mermaid: a proper one who lived on a rock and combed her hair and sang. But sailors had never been lured to their doom by her, partly because she looked like the back of a bus and partly because modern ships are so high out of the water that they never even saw her — Eva Ibbotson

But Ship Who Sang remains my favorite story. I really rocked folks with that and still cannot read it aloud myself without weeping at the end. — Anne McCaffrey

Suzanne had a room on a waterfront street in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later I sang it for Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights were lost in New York City, but it is probably appropriate that I don't own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea. — Leonard Cohen

When a storm was coming on, and they anticipated that a ship might sink, they swam before it, and sang most sweetly of the delight to be found beneath the water, begging the seafarers not to be afraid of coming down below. — Hans Christian Andersen

As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course. — Salman Rushdie