Tide Pool Quotes & Sayings

Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You can visit them when the tide is out. Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are fanciful, give them names, such as George, Charlotte, Kenny, Mrs. Strunk. Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual entities, so you may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness - so to speak - are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures co-exist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other. — Christopher Isherwood

Led through lined and grimy streets down to the river and eastward, as he had expected, towards the Isle of Dogs. A raw wind blew up from the water, carrying the smell of salt, stale fish, the overspill of sewage and the cold dampness of the outgoing tide sweeping down from the Pool of London towards the estuary and the sea. Across the gray water endless strings of barges made their heavy way downstream, laden with merchandise for half the earth. Ships passed them outward bound, down towards the docks of Greenwich and beyond. — Anne Perry

The tide is coming in," he said. "The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast. — Seth Dickinson

I know what my heart is like Since your love died: It is like a hollow ledge Holding a little pool Left there by the tide, A little tepid pool, Drying inward from the edge. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

We're living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower. Soon it'll be nothing but a tide pool, then a thimble of water, then a micro drop. — Marisha Pessl

The Waterfall and the Sea
Her love and passion are a waterfall, fed from the wellspring of her heart,
gently tumbling into a pool, preparing herself to share her gifts.
His passion and love are like the sea, deep and wide, waiting mysteriously,
Patiently he awaits her calling out through time and space
She hears his call, her pool overflowing.
Her love and passion gushing over her banks she rushes toward him
Winding and twisting she finds her way, destined to reach his shores
He awaits her arrival and she opens her delta as his tide comes in
Their waters mingle every molecule of her river with his sea
Forever mixing and sharing their passion and love in that place between
The Waterfall and the Sea — Christopher Earle

The world is indeed only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened. — Gregory Bateson

Steinbeck wrote about the tide pools and how profoundly they illustrate the interconnectedness of all things, folded together in an ever-expanding universe that's bound by the elastic string of time. He said that one should look from the tide pool to the stars, and then back again in wonder. — Robyn Schneider

I found a tiny starfish
In a tide pool by the sand.
I found a tiny starfish
And I put him in my hand.

An itty-bitty starfish
No bigger than my thumb,
A wet and golden starfish
Belonging to no one.

I thought that I would take him
From the tidepool by the sea,
And bring him home to give you
A loving gift from me.

But as I held my starfish,
His skin began to dry.
Without his special seaside home,
My gift for you would die.

I found a tiny starfish
In a tide pool by the sea.
I hope whoever finds him next
Will leave him there, like me!

And the gift I've saved for you?
The best that I can give:
I found a tiny starfish,
And for you, I let him live. — Dayle Ann Dodds

In the tide pool I was riveted by fat pink sea stars sitting like satisfied gangsters and seemingly unconcerned by their exposure; gulls would peck at them but the sea stars simply grew replacement limbs. — Mary Ellen Hannibal

Fishing provides time to think, and reason not to. If you have the virtue of patience, an hour or two of casting alone is plenty of time to review all you've learned about the grand themes of life. It's time enough to realize that every generalization stands opposed by a mosaic of exceptions, and that the biggest truths are few indeed. Meanwhile, you feel the wind shift and the temperature change. You might simply decide to be present, and observe a few facts about the drifting clouds ... Fishing in a place is a meditation on the rhythm of a tide, a season, the arc of a year, and the seasons of life ... I fish to scratch the surface of those mysteries, for nearness to the beautiful, and to reassure myself the world remains. I fish to wash off some of my grief for the peace we so squander. I fish to dip into that great and awesome pool of power that propels these epic migrations. I fish to feel- and steal- a little of that energy. — Carl Safina

The speakers use all accents of sincerity and sweetness, and they continuously praise virtue; but they never speak as if power would be theirs tomorrow and they would use it for virtuous action. And their audiences also do not seem to regard themselves as predestined to rule; they clap as if in defiance, and laugh at their enemies behind their hands, with the shrill laughter of children. They want to be right, not to do right. They feel no obligation to be part of the main tide of life, and if that meant any degree of pollution they would prefer to divert themselves from it and form a standing pool of purity. In fact, they want to receive the Eucharist, be beaten by the Turks, and then go to heaven. — Christopher Hitchens

[ ... ] it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things - plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again. — John Steinbeck

Look at the stars. They are not arranged; instead they seem to be scattered through the heavens like sea spray. Yet you could never criticize stars for displaying poor taste, any more than you could criticize mountain ranges for having awkward proportions. These designs are spontaneous, and yet they demonstrate the wiggly patterns of nature that are quite different from anything you would call a mess. We can't quite put our finger on what the difference is between the two, but we certainly can see the difference between a tide pool and an ashtray full of garbage. We may not be able to define the difference, but we know they are different. — Alan W. Watts

I am choosing to flow with the current of life rather than lying in a tide pool experiencing the same things again and again. — Marilyn Barnicke Belleghem

Only the most ignorant still believe, like Saint Augustine, that time is a river. We others know it is a delta: that it branches out and seeks new routes, that it rejoins itself only to seek a thousand new courses. Some may be waterfalls, some no more than little stagnant pools passed by the tide, forever still...

This is one of those times. A pool. I sink down in it. I want to stay forever in this water. — Majgull Axelsson

What an amazing thing is the coming of spring to London. The very pavements seem ready to crack and lift under the denied earth; in the air is a consciousness of life which tells you that if traffic stopped for a fortnight grass would grow again in Piccadilly and corn would spring in pavement cracks where a horse had spilt his 'feed'. And the squares of London, so dingy and black since the first October gale, fill week by week with the rising tide of life, just as the sea, running up the creeks and pushing itself forward inch by inch towards the land, comes at last to each remote rock pool. — H.V. Morton

I have been speaking to you all of your life. In the gurgle of a tide pool, I breathed myself into you. I drew you down from the trees and I lifted you onto your feet. I freed your hands to become your tools so that you would cradle me in my old age, but you have turned on me. My strongest warrior for life, you have been transformed into an insatiable messenger of death. Only a few of my children are still listening when I howl to them, crying in the night, sending the oceans in great surges to cleanse my land -- to cleanse, and to warn you who no longer listen. I WILL BE HEARD. — Sarah Warden

She deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge. — Michael Chabon