c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
...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, The Night Mark
Nothing from the ocean is meant to survive on land forever.
— Sarah Glenn Marsh, Fear the Drowning Deep
Oh my God, look!” I stand and hold out my hand for Sam to inspect. “Wow,” he says, taking the glass and holding it up to the sun. “Red is, like, the rarest color there is. You’re totally lucky you even saw it.” I take the deep red, half-dollar-sized piece from him and smile, looking out across the ocean. I told Matt in my letter before we left that I’d find a piece just for him, but now that it’s actually here, sparkling in my hand, I know he’d want me to do something else with it. I raise it above my head and throw it as hard and as far as I can into the sea. Let someone else have a lucky day, Anna. Sam laughs. “Hey, crazy, what’d you do that for? You’ll probably never see something like that again in your entire life.” “Right. But I did see it. And now someone else can, too.
— Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer
I do not know what inspires the image of a fish but it comes to me, wide eyed, open mouthed and gaping, glimmering, swimming towards me as though a creature of the darkness come to claim me. I imagine it in a twinkling blue pool. It swims through the dark currents of the sea, gliding above sea weed, beneath sunlight, augmenting and shying away from the surface. It belongs to this element between land and sky, sifts through it, a creature of the deep. My mind drifts, fades, but then comes back to the fish: its glimmering scales, its strange beady eyes. Its body is contained within the water. It opens its mouth, moving it open and closed as though it’s trying to speak a language I never learned. I think about the fish’s lungs, full of water. Is not the sea contained within the fish, too?
— Annie Fisher, The Greater Picture
A scientist said once that if the ocean were as clear as the sky, if we could see everything in it, no one would ever go in the sea.
— Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight
When you see a picture of the ocean, it's cut off at the edges. You know it goes on and on to the right and on and on to the left, but you never really know how it feels to see that until you actually do see it.
— Diane Chamberlain, Necessary Lies
This is why the oceans taste of salt. It is because of all the tears of mermaids for sailors who have died for their love. The oceans are salt with death and grief.
— Jaxy Mono, The Book of Dubious Beasts
They walked, and the long waves rolled and murmured rhythmically beside them; the fresh salty wind blew free and unobstructed in their faces, wrapped itself around their ears, and made them feel slightly numb and deliciously dizzy. They walked along in that wide, peaceful, whispering hush of the sea that gives every sound, near or far, some mysterious importance.
— Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
We spent afternoons kicking around in the sand, picking through the seaweed for shells, making headdresses of washed-up fishing ropes and hats from Styrofoam cups. Beach rats, we were called.We stopped brushing our hair, and it hung in tangles spun by the salt air. We sprayed Sun-In across our heads and let it turn our hair orange in patches. Our skin peeled, and we didn't much care.We woke up to the feel of sand in our sheets. We covered ourselves in baby oil and iodine and let the sun bake our skin. We smelled like Love's Baby Soft perfume, like summer all year long. We were tanned, with freckles across our noses.
— Ilie Ruby, The Salt God's Daughter
The enormous vermilion sun was dropping toward the sea, its reflected glow making a blazing path across the water to the very beach, where the last ripple was spangled with garnets. Otherwise, the sea was periwinkle purple, spilling and whispering and sidling with an easy going prattle of foam round the steeper rocks.
— L.M. Boston, The Sea Egg
Live in a cosmic ocean, singing sweet hallucinations, dreams of many worlds, all flowing into one.... inner / outer mirrored love.
— Jay Woodman
You are loved deeper than any ocean. Let your mind swim through it's depth because I will never let you drown.
— Shannon L. Alder
There are times when the ocean is not the ocean-not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. Those are the nights the light is needed most.
— M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans
And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. 'Do not look behind you...lest you be swept away.' That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot's wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday's met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.
— Barbara Davis
Do not think to swim below. The ocean is already pushing into ears, sinuses, temples, the softness of eyes, and the harpsichord strings behind the kneecaps.
— J.M. Ledgard
Ocean is ocean.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Away from the sea I languish, I suffocate, I die! Ah! I believe that the waves roll their foam in my veins, that in my hair the tempest blows. My raptures and my cries are the echo of the ocean, my beauty is but a reflection of its waves. I feel it beat, roar, and abate by turns. Away from the sea all is ennui and sadness.
— Deirdre Cavanagh, The Legend of the City of Ys
I mean, have you ever imaginedthe ocean is alive, and needs to tell us something important, and the only way it can talkis by making waves crash, and we just lounge there, drenched in cocoa butter, on towels with crappy novels and volleyballs, sipping spritzers, as the ocean uses all its strength to repeatthe same warning over and over?
— Jeffrey McDaniel
The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean.
— Ernest Hemingway
About Hollywood.I feel like it’s a big ocean, full of bottom feeders, midlevel fish, the occasional shark, and some wonderful savvy whales, the elders, and the ones who guide you on your way. If you’re lucky enough, you get to be a dolphin and have your waves broken by the passage of these elders before you, but at the same time, you get an occasional shark bite in the tail and maybe one of the bottom feeders comes up and takes a little nibble. But I see myself as cresting a series of waves, dipping down, sometimes, lower than I’d like, but mainly kind of happily staying above. (smiles and takes a long drag of her cigarette) And, of course, I try to avoid the fishnets.
— Anjelica Huston
Whoever deemed the ocean an invigorating place needed to reconsider the reality of crashing waves, sunburn, and sand wedged up into places no one should have it.
— Natalia Jaster, Trick
The thing about the ocean is that the surface won’t always tell you what is going on underneath.
— Jennifer Arnett, Into Her Chambers
Part of me felt like I was throwing my life away, for a guy I barely knew. But I wasn’t just doing it for him. Since my parents died, I’d had absolutely no control over my life. If I really thought about it, maybe I’d given up control long before—that day in Oregon when I almost drowned. Since then, I’d always relied on others to take care of me. Maybe it was time to take my life back into my own hands… even if it meant growing fins.
— D.S. Murphy
Well the sky always seemed like another ocean to me, you know? Like we live between two incredible oceans, and we'll never get to the bottom of either of them.
— Brian  Doyle, The Plover
Under the tossing ocean the voice of the waters was in my ears—a low, sweet voice, intimate, mysterious. Through singing foam and broad, green, glassy depths, by whispering sandy channels atrail with sea-weed, and on, on, out into the vague, cool sea, I sped, rising to the top, sinking, gliding. Then at last I flung myself out of water, hands raised, and the clamor of the gulls filled my ears.
— Robert W. Chambers, In Search of the Unknown
If you ever want to see how small you are in the plan of God, just stand at the edge of an ocean.
— Patrick Ness
Looking at the ocean makes me miss people, and hanging out with people makes me miss the ocean.
— Haruki Murakami, Wind/Pinball: Two Novels
The sky would be clear, colorless, mist blending together the air and the ocean, the waves whispering against the rocks.
— Kendall Kulper, Salt & Storm
Life is an ocean and waves are our paths.
— Diana Matoso
Hope – that silly, stupid creature that lived within me, no matter how often I tried to beat it to death – lifted its nose and sniffed at the air.
— Kendall Kulper, Salt & Storm
His mind has the clearness of the deep sea, the patience of its rocks, the force of its billows.
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
The ocean turns cold, dark, pressing around me, but the deeper I go the more the iron inside of me twists and pulls and I know that I’m tethered to the boat, that even now the men pull the rope tighter and drag me back to the surface.
— Kendall Kulper, Salt & Storm
Integrity is a high rock above which the stormy ocean of worldly troubles cannot rise.
— Alan Cohen
I was sixteen, still my mother’s prisoner, the night I became the whale.
— Kendall Kulper, Salt & Storm
It was like watching a man smile as he surrendered himself to drown in deep water.
— C.S. Pacat, Captive Prince
When I moved, the broker had told me there was something good for the brain about living near the sea, something about ions. But I often felt like the water was insulting me, like, "I'm beautiful and endless—what are you doing with your life?
— Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark
I am drawn to the ocean
—  I find solace in its mystery.
The waves hit the cliff with more intensity than the shore, because the ocean knows the cliff has that masculine intensity which won’t complain about her feminine energy.
— Nityananda Das, Divine Union
He was the ocean and I was the sand, i lived content in stillness and he washed a shore everytime, as a better man.
— Nikki Rowe
There's always hope. And oceans. Hope and oceans.
— Bryant A. Loney, To Hear The Ocean Sigh
Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people—what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by the mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Then all was quiet, except for that murmurous half telling, half withholding of tremendous secrets that the sea would keep up all night. Each little wave seemed to say, “I’ll tell you-” and then pull back with a smothered “Oh!” to be followed by another wave saying, “Then I will say-” but whatever it was remained unsaid and unsayable.
— L.M. Boston, The Sea Egg
I want to be near the ocean, Lincoln, the ocean! I want to feel the tides. And i want mountains, too, at least one mountain. Is that too much to ask? And trees. Not a whole forest, necessarily. I'd settle for a thicket. Scenery. I want scenery!
— Rainbow Rowell, Attachments
In ocean of tears, the heart of stone sinks. (Dans l'océan de larmes, - Le coeur de pierre donc coule.)
— Charles de Leusse
Laisha had got a glimpse of the vast ocean that lay before her. She could either eatch it recede from her sight or plunge into it. It was not possible to take the risk of plunging headlong into the ocean. No one viewed the ocean to be drowned into it. Everyone caught only a glimpse of it, exulted in having got this farand returned home with renewed zest. The knowledge that the ocean existed was overwhelming enough. One could wallow in the idea that there was indeed a further possibility, but one merely desisted. it was not right to acknowledge that one was also frightened of it.
— Anuradha Bhattacharyya
Which direction?" Robard asked. "Robard," I said exasperated, "we need a boat. I believe boats are kept at or near the ocean.
— Michael P. Spradlin
Can you imagine a waveless ocean while there is a big storm outside? And that calm ocean is the ocean of wisdom!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
You don’t need to be the tide to rise and fall, you don’t have to be a wave to touch the shore; just be a little sand-grain and feel them all
— Munia Khan
The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks.
— Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Time was unending when charmed, captivated, even delighted by the mystical motion of the ocean!
— Ray Palla, KRILL AMERICA
Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set.
— Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas
I can smell the ocean in the distance. The salt wraps around my body, making my skin feel tight, and already I want to shower. I can do big cities, and small cities, and the even the occasional mountaintop is cool. But oceans are ridiculous. They take up way too much space in this overcrowded world and are filled with creatures that have several sets of teeth, like one row of man-eating teeth isn’t enough. And just to add insult to injury, all that water isn’t even drinkable. If you ask me, the ocean is kind of a prick.
— Victoria Scott, The Liberator
The sensation of the ocean bearing my weight was the most carefree lightness I’d ever experienced. When we were halfway across the strait, the sound of an engine approached from a distance—it was probably the police coast guard. We quickly ducked under the surface of the water, exposing only the tips of our trunks so we could breathe.
— Xi Ni Er, The Earnest Mask
Jiko: "Surfer, wave, same thing.""That's just stupid, " I said. " A surfer's a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?"Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. "A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean. A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
The grotto itself comprises its own slick universe, and inside this universe spin countless galaxies: here, in the upturned half of a single mussel shell, lives a barnacle and a tiny spindle shell occupied by a still smaller hermit crab. And on the shell of the crab? A yet smaller barnacle. And on that barnacle?
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Some say the ocean roars,I hear it ever weeping.Weep, ocean, weep for those gone before.Weep, O sea, for the open graves that fill your shore.
— Craig Froman, An Owl on the Moon: A Journal from the Edge of Darkness
The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don't add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the fain suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup.
— Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
…They're dangerous as all gifts from the sea are
—  the sea offers death as well as immortality.
If I stay close to the sea, I will go on well.
— Charlotte Eriksson
From the way his face lit with curiosity to the slight tilt of his jaw, even the lingering scent of brine and breeze gave him away.
— Katherine McIntyre, By the Sea
The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don't add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the faint suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup.
— Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
…And the sound of the sea, like the wild-animal breath of the world itself, frightened them as it gasped and died at their feet.
— Leonardo Sciascia, The Wine-Dark Sea
Every man is an island, and every heart seeks the ferry to cross the main...
— Mykyta Isagulov
Maketa,” I said, throwing myself down in the sand. “I lost. The ocean won.”She smiled. “Was it a good feeling?”“Mm,” I said.“That’s good,” she said. “Have another rice ball?
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
RECURRENT CURRENTSLike the ocean, life ebbs and flows with the occasional ripKamil Ali
— Kamil Ali, Profound Vers-A-Tales
The sea reminds me of my finiteness, limitations, minuteness and powerlessness, because the sea is none of these.
— Michael C. Christen
It’s a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you’re never bothered by the noise the water makes by the commotion of the surface - it never seems too loud, or too wild.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi
I have left behind what tethered me to the lake. The sadness. The self-pity. The dark tentacles of the murky sea monster only I could see. And I have come to appreciate the ocean. How the sun and salt together can leave things weightless, easy, and smooth around the edges. Like sea glass and driftwood.
— Wendy Wunder, The Museum of Intangible Things
It is as if we find ourselves on a ship in the middle of the ocean, with the captain making the point that we are free to leave.
— Peter Cave, What's Wrong with Eating People?: 33 More Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles
The tides rolled up to crash against the shore while we sat feet from one another with the remnants of all we’d left unsaid driving us apart.
— Katherine McIntyre, By the Sea
In a world of seven billion people, where every inch of land has been mapped, much of it developed, and too much of it destroyed, the sea remains the final unseen, untouched, and undiscovered wilderness, the planet’s last great frontier. There are no mobile phones down there, no e-mails, no tweeting, no twerking, no car keys to lose, no terrorist threats, no birthdays to forget, no penalties for late credit card payments, and no dog shit to step in before a job interview. All the stress, noise, and distractions of life are left at the surface. The ocean is the last truly quiet place on Earth.
— James Nestor, Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves
Wait, the most positive and infinite word ever made. It can be for a moment,for a min,for an hour,for days, for years, for eternity ...and sometimes for another life .. But it never fails and never ends.One always waits for something or someone ... I am not a time which can not be stopped,Whenever you will want me .. I will be there !!!And this best explains the relation between a Wave and the Shore.
— Sagar Gosavi
Every time you dive, you hope you'll see something new - some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn't.
— James Cameron
If anyone can overcome a fear for the ocean, you can, little lady. Courage is being scared to death and saddlin' up anyway.
— Colleen Houck, Tiger's Voyage
Life is like the ocean. You can either be the ball floating on the waves, or make your own waves.
— Oliver Gaspirtz
Faith is knowing there is an ocean because you have seen a brook.
— William Arthur Ward
And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening. They emptied a big tin dish of juicy fragments of fish- the blood-ends the cook had collected overnight. They cleaned up the plates and pans of the elder mess, who were out fishing, sliced pork for the midday meal, swabbed down the foc'sle, filled the lamps, drew coal and water for the cook, an investigated the fore-hold, where the boat's stores were stacked. It was another perfect day - soft, mild and clear; and Harvey breathed to the very bottom of his lungs.
— Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous
One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end
— Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma
When my toes are sunk into warm sand and the ocean is lapping my feet, when I breathe in the scent of salt and hear the cry of a seagull, I know that I am returned to a place of restoration. I am home.I can heal here.
— Toni Sorenson
When I go to describe something as remarkable as what I saw that day, I could only say it was a place of dreams. The water is crystalline clear, a mixture of opalescent colors and frosted with white tips. It surges forward and crashes up against the rocks below us as the sun cast a fire-like glare in the distance. Adding to my reverie is the salty smell in the air that lingers and enlivens senses that seem to have been dormant before this moment. I don't recall moving in this dream-like state but my hand moves up and cups the wind as if trying to capture it's essence. If I could have pocketed every smell and sound of this place I would have and I would defended it with my life.
— Celia McMahon, Skye
The coast is an edgy place. Living on the coast presents certain stark realities and a wild, rare beauty. Continent confronts ocean. Weather intensifies. It's a place of tide and tantrum; of flirtations among fresh- and saltwaters, forests and shores; of tense negotiations with an ocean that gives much but demands more. Every year the raw rim that is this coast gets hammered and reshaped like molten bronze. This place roils with power and a sometimes terrible beauty. The coast remains youthful, daring, uncertain about tomorrow. The guessing, the risk; in a way, we're all thrill seekers here.
— Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
Jack gazed down at the black surface of the sea. He felt and affinity with the ocean, as if it were a kindred spirit. The knowledge that every drop of water had always been a drop of water, practically since the stars were formed. Water was infinite and immortal.
— David Llewellyn, Trace Memory
People are like waves of the ocean, some cover you with tides of refreshment, whilst others drown you in floods of turmoil
— Ali ibn Abi Talib
I looked upon the sea, it was to be my grave
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…
— Anne Carson, Red Doc>
Those who dare to dive into the oceans, often finds treasures; no one ever heard.Take a leap of faith, every soul is having a treasure inside them, you just have to dive till the very end of their misty soul.Something really precious is waiting for you there...
— Mohammad Shahzaib Ansari
Water on earth came from space. Everything which is there was once upon a time not there and everything which is there shall return again to wherever they come from! When you see a beautiful ocean, or beautiful anything, remember this and appreciate them well!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Crossing the ocean is secondary, planning how to pass the tides is the goal.
— Arlin Sailesh Kapadia
The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.
— Ross Macdonald, The Chill
It was one of those rare moments where one has a vision of the scope of the wild ocean. Not just small cylinders firing to keep a tiny engine running, but rather the giant, massive gears of nature, each one with its own reasoning, its own meta-logic, spinning in its particular circle in competition or in confluence with the gear below it. We zeroed in on the school, but our progress was painfully slow, It would have been foolish to speed into the tumult-we would have ruined our baits in the process and doomed our chances of hooking a tuna. But luckily, the commotion did not subside. If anything it only grew more frantic and exhuberant on our approach. Beneath the birds, beneath the dolphins, beneath the menhaden, there should have been an equally vast school of giant bluefin tuna, collaborating with vertebrates of the so-called higher orders of life to form the floor of the prey trap, sealing the baitfish in from below, while the dolphins and birds made up the trap's walls and ceiling. A strike from a giant tuna seemed inevitable.....as the boat moved forward, I saw seabirds gathering up ahead into a cloud, the size and violence of which I had never seen before. Gannets - big, albatross-like pelagic birds - flew hundreds of feet above the churning surface of the water. In a flock of many thousands, they whirled in unison and then, as if on command from some brigadier general of bird life, dropped in an arc, bird after bird, into the water beneath. The gyre of gannets turned in a clockwise direction, and down below, spinning counterclockwise, was the largest school of dolphins I'd ever seen. There in the angry blue-green sea, the dolphins had corralled a vast school of menhaden-small herringlike creatures that, when bitten, release globules of oil that float on the surface. Oil slicks flattened the water everywhere as the dolphins swirled around, using their exceptional intelligence and wolf-pack cooperation to befuddle and surround the fish, which in turn whirled in a clockwise direction.
— Paul Greenberg, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food
so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Although I was an imaginative child, prone to nightmares, I had persuaded my parents to take me to Madame Tussauds waxworks in London, when I was six, because I had wanted to visit the Chamber of Horrors, expecting the movie-monster Chambers of Horrors I'd read about in my comics. I had wanted to thrill to waxworks of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf-man. Instead I was walked through a seemingly endless sequence of dioramas of unremarkable, glum-looking men and women who had murdered people - usually lodgers and members of their own families - and who were then murdered in turn: by handing, by the electric chair, in gas chambers. Most of them were depicted with their victims in awkward social situations - seated about a dinner table, perhaps, as their poisoned family members expired. The plaques that explained who they were also told me that the majority of them had murdered their families and sold the bodies to anatomy. It was then that the word anatomy garnered its own edge of horror for me. I did not know what anatomy was. I knew only that anatomy made people kill their children.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.
— Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
All we can hope for is that he will fall into the ocean with a bar of soap in his pocket.
— Eoin Colfer, Airman
I was afraid of the sea when I was a girl. Someone said it went on forever and that frightened me. I wondered why my parents had chosen to live at the beginning and the end of the world.
— Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness
I had come to learn pretty quickly that life has its highs and lows just like the ocean does and sometimes you just have to see how far they'll carry you.
— C.A. Williams, The Crush
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
— Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and Other Great Stories
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, Submergence
Through all his years of roving, even on nights like this, he had remained blind to the beauty of the sea, and now his feeling toward it had settled into weary hatred. He knew its effects of blended color, its wide gradations of sound and action, the tireless charm of a sailing ship's effortless movement, the quality of silent distance and the wonder of the skies. Dimly at times, in moments of rare emotion, he had caught a glimpse of the mystic hand that beckons beyond the horizon and felt for a little while the fated urge of the wanderer. But that was in the beginning, long ago when he had first gone to sea, and he had forgotten it.("Fire In The Galley Stove")
— William Outerson, Monster Mix
I feel at peace when I’m on the water, we all do. It’s like in that moment, nothing else matters except the wave and our boards,” Jason said, watching her expressions as he explained. “We have all vowed that since the ocean gives us something so amazing, we should give something back. I guess it’s just our way of ‘doing good’.
— Lindsay Chamberlin, The Shoreline
Tidal waves surge forward,And in their wake, 			Stale water is replenished.(Haiku from Chapter Thirty, SHADOWWATER)
— Wendy Shreve, Shadowwater
Wherever people go to find peace - that's what I find in the ocean.
— Willow Aster, True Love Story
Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean…
— Epeli Hauʻofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works
After we became a couple, she composed our time together. She planned days as if they were artistic events. One afternoon we went to Tybee Island for a picnic; we ate blueberries and drank champagne tinted with curacao and listened to Miles Davis, and when I asked the name of her perfume, she said it was L'Heure Bleue.She talked about 'perfect moments.' One such moment happened that afternoon; she'd been napping; I lay next to her, reading. She said, 'I'll always remember the sounds of the sea and of pages turning, and the smell of L'Heure Bleue. For me they signify love.
— Susan Hubbard, The Society of S
The ocean filled the footprints where a boy and cat had stood.
— Lloyd Alexander, Time Cat
Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.
— Barry López, About This Life
He talks softly, patiently, as I sit on the window ledge and watch boats with colorful triangles for sails scratch the ocean.
— Lauren DeStefano, Sever
I see an ocean that’s spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand.
— Lauren DeStefano, Sever
This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean.
— Lauren DeStefano, Sever
Tell me once more about the eternal surf.
— Rob Bignell, Editor
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, The New Hunger
...you need to travel to see the ocean - I don't need the ocean - I have the sky...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Most people new to a city on the ocean would probably go to the beach during the day when there are people around. I, on the other hand, decided to try a midnight swim at the somewhat gamy Santa Monica pier, by myself. That is, until a nearby guard kicked me off the beach for my own safety.
— Kathy Griffin, Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
We were right to come here, if only because the ocean reminded you that impossible things were possible. Miles and miles of the deepest waters that moved like clockwork were possible. Creatures like jellyfish and sea urchins were, too. Millions and jillions of the tiniest grains of sand to form one long, soft beach—yep, even that was possible.
— Deb Caletti, Stay
Lex surfed wicked, like the devil. He wasn’t afraid of anything, seemed like. He grinned at West as the waves came up toward them like towers of green glass, an emerald city. We’re off to see the wizard, he shouted. He whooped. His body crouched ready to fly. He shone against the sun.
— Francesca Lia Block, Wasteland
It is almost startling to hear this warning of departed time sounding among the tombs, and telling the lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward towards the grave.
— Washington Irving, The Sketch Book
I stare at Hans. Hans is shaped like an industrial-sized refrigerator. His hands are like cinder blocks.He should not be afraid of a little thing like the ocean.
— Cyn Balog, Starstruck
The greatest rivers always find their way to the ocean. Like a ship reaching out to its motherland.
— Saleem Sharma
Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.
— Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing
Should you ever feel too lonely...listen for the roar of the sea- for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.
— Simon Van Booy, The Coming and Going of Strangers
When I walk down the beach and smell the salt water, hear the waves crashing against the shoreline, and feel the granular sand under my feet, I can't help but realize why I'm here on this green earth
— Wendy Joubert, Sea Witch
This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers
In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls.
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:  Essays and Arguments
The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way; for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions and the bickering and the prognostications and the turmoil, the disagreements and the fateful decisions and agreements and the plans and the programs and the threats and the counter threats, then you close your eyes and the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world and it combs and breaks and returns foaming and saying: "So soon?" E. B. White "On A Florida Key
— E.B. White
I'd rather die my way than live yours.
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
To find yourself, think for yourself.
— Socrates
I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I've just done what I damn well wanted to, and I've made enough money to support myself, and ain't afraid of being alone.
— Katharine Hepburn
The proverb warns that, 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
— Thomas Szasz
Bjarne Møller, my former boss, says people like me always choose the line of most resistance. It's in what he calls our 'accursed nature'. That's why we always end up on our own. I don't know. I like being alone. Perhaps I have grown to like my self-image of being a loner, too....I think you have to find something about yourself that you like in order to survive. Some people say being alone is unsociable and selfish. But you're independent and you don't drag others down with you, if that's the way you're heading. Many people are afraid of being alone. But it made me feel strong, free and invulnerable.
— Jo Nesbø, The Redeemer
Buffy Summers: (to Spike) "I could NEVER be your girl!
— Buffy the Vampire Slayer writers
It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
There, did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea.Ideas are bulletproof. Farewell.
— Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
Seek out the company of those who will never ask you to jump," the earth advised.Bertie remembered the rush of feathers as she soared above the audience. "I can catch myself.""Of those whose love will never fill your lungs with water-" the earth argued."But it did not kill me.""there should be more to love," said the earth, "than 'it did not kill me.' More than 'I survived it.
— Lisa Mantchev, Perchance to Dream
Well,” her mother said, looking at the engine, “at least that’s still there.”"Do you know anything about engines?" Stephanie asked."That’s why I have a husband, so I don't have to. Engines and shelves, that’s why men were invented."Stephanie made a mental note to learn about engines before she turned eighteen. She wasn't too fussed about the shelves.
— Derek Landy, Skulduggery Pleasant
I'll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. The mind is an attribute of the individual.The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind's moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
She did not date. She did not have time for men. Men were never, ever worth a great amount of energy. She was the kind of woman that looked down on what she called ‘settlers’, women who chose love and fleeting passion that turned to dull, lifeless marriages over a career and independence.
— Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney, Autumnal Dancer
You are your own refugeThere is no otherYou cannot save anotherYou can only save yourself.
— Guillaume Musso, Seras-tu là?
I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it.
— Victoria Claflin Woodhull
she didn't need anyone. At Wheeler, even when she stood out with her pink hair and quilter army-surplus jacket and combat bots, she did this without apology. It was a great irony that the very fact of a relationship with her would diminish her appeal, that the moment she came to love me back and depend on me as much as I depended on her, she would no longer be a truly independent spirit. No way in hell was I going to be the one to take that quality away from her.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
I don't want to have to earn love by giving up my ability to make decisions that determine how I live.
— Eloisa James, When the Duke Returns
If the light's not in you, you're in the dark.
— Marty Rubin
Remember, Montag, we're the happiness boys. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
We do not deny any nation's legitimate interest in security. But protecting the security of one nation by robbing another of its national independence and national traditions is not legitimate. In the long run, it is not even secure.
— Ronald Reagan, The Quest for Peace, the Cause of Freedom
All my life, I thought I was this independent woman. I was on all the right committees, made speeches for all the right causes, traveled all over the world. I had my little part-time job, I made all my own decisions, but . . . there was always someone there to fall back on when things went bad. Funny, how after so many years of marriage you don’t think about how much you depend on the other person until . . . well, until they’re gone. And then of course there’s just the whole system in the city. Your doctor, your pharmacist, your plumber, your vet . . . there’s always someone there. You never have to find out . . . how much you can’t do.
— Donna Ball, A Year on Ladybug Farm
...Goddamn himself for letting his independence slip away from him. He didn't even know how it had happened, how he had lost the ability to function on his own, or what the hell he was going to do about it now.
— Kimberly Gardner, Too Soon For Love
...it was easy to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important is would be to further rely on oneself
— Robert Kurson
Develop your soul into independence!
— Enock Maregesi
Marry me, Lada. It is the perfect solution." Lada laughed. Mehmed's smile grew, until he realized her laugh was not a sweet breeze of delight, but a brutal desert wind carrying stinging sand in its wake. "I will never marry.
— Kiersten White, And I Darken
True autonomy is preceded by the experience of being dependent. True liberation can be found only beyond the deep ambivalence of infantile dependence.
— Alice MIller, The Drama of the gifted child
Sharif Miyan: "I wish I did, though. Own some land, that is. My family owned it once when I was a young man. It's all gone now." Sharif Miyan's eyes had a faraway look in them, as if he could still see the land.Avi: "Where did it go?"Sharif Miyan: "We lost it during Partition. My family owned many farms in Punjab---the one in Pakistan."Avi: "But land does not go anywhere, does it?"Sharif Miyan: "You are right. Land does not. It's not the people who go away. I know where my land is in Punjab. I can see it. I can walk on it. But it is not mine. Isn't that terrible? I can never forget the day when those landgrabbers held my family at gunpoint and told me to leave. I didn't think I would have to leave the country.
— Rohit Gore, A Darker Dawn
…But so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means.
— E.M. Forster, Howards End
It is not difficult to stand above the conventions when we leave no hostages among them; men can always be more unconventional than women, and a bachelor of independent means need encounter no difficulties at all.
— E.M. Forster, Howards End
Independence is to have full control of your life to be able to make your own choices and design your destiny.
— Nabil Basma
Elinor retreated to the terrace where the night air on her skin felt like a hot bath. She was hurt, it had been such an onslaught. All the things she'd achieved in the past four years, the independent life she'd built for herself, seemed to count for nothing here. The only thing that mattered to her mother was finding a husband. As for painting, well, nice little hobby, very suitable, but you won't have much time for that when the children arrive.
— Pat Barker, Life Class