OCEAN QUOTES IV
quotations about the ocean
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.
THOMAS GRAY
Elegy in a Country Churchyard
I turned away from the ocean
as not to fall for its plea
for it used to seduce and consume me
and there was this one night
a few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewells
and just like now I stood waving long after the ship was gone.
But I was younger then and easily fooled
and the ocean was deep and dark and blue
and I took my shoes off to let the water freeze my bones.
I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but still
I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the
difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I had
not yet learned how the task of moving on is as necessary as survival.
CHARLOTTE ERIKSSON
attributed, goodreads
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
Thanatopsis
I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more.
BARRY CORNWALL
The Sea
Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Tut! the best thing I know between France and England is the sea.
DOUGLAS JERROLD
Jerrold's Wit
Miles of ocean, and oh, the vastness of it, shadows and salt, fierce dark water filled with alien emptiness and the monsters that lived there. Imagine falling into that water and knowing it was below you, even as you treaded water, desperately trying to remain on the surface; the terror of the realization of what was under you--miles and miles of nothingness and monsters, blackness stretching away everywhere and the sea floor so far below--would tear your mind apart.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Lady Midnight
The ocean is powerful, but not invincible. It is rich, but not inexhaustible. For humans to thrive in the coming centuries, we will have to be smarter about how we approach the 70 percent of our planet the ocean covers.
GARY E. KNELL
"Securing a Bold, Blue, and Prosperous Future for Our Ocean", National Geographic, January 27, 2017
The great depths of the ocean are entirely unknown to us; soundings cannot reach them. What fanes in those remote depths, what beings live twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the waters, what is the organization of the animals we can scarcely conjecture?
JULES VERNE
Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Silmarillion