ocean

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.

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")

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.

Tidal waves surge forward,And in their wake, Stale water is replenished.(Haiku from Chapter Thirty, SHADOWWATER)

The ocean filled the footprints where a boy and cat had stood.

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.

all my life i have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.

My room was in one of those turrets and at night I could hear the sea and the faint rustle of eelgrass in the soft wind. The weather was perfect that summer. No storms. Blue skies and just the right amount of wind every day. The sailors were in heaven.

I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me. The sea.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever i find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet... I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

The professor pointed out how he could drop a keel and a propeller into the water, in case he came down at sea, and after cutting the gas bag loose he'd have a seaworthy boat. He had everything on board for survival at sea, including fancy fishing gear, flares and weather balloons for distress signals, and both shortwave radio equipment and a low-frequency system for round-the-world communications."Boy! This is somethin' right out of Jules Verne...only better, maybe," said Homer.You are right, Mr. Snodgrass," said the professor. "It is ze only way to travel. You don't go so fast, but it beats swimming! Yes? And we have everysing for safety and comfort at sea, if we have to come down. Ze only thing we have to worry about is piranhas. Oh, zey are terrible! Zey will eat everysing in sight!""Piranhas?" Homer gasped. "I thought they were only found in South American Rivers?""Oh?" said the professor. "Do ze piranhas know zat, Mr. Snodgrass?

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.

What she really loved was to hang over the edge and watch the bow of the ship slice through the waves. She loved it especially when the waves were high and the ship rose and fell, or when it was snowing and the flakes stung her face.

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.

When the ship approached the equator, I stopped going out on deck in the daytime. The sun burned like a flame. The days had shortened and night came swiftly. One moment it was light, the next it was dark. The sun did not set but fell into the water like a meteor. Late in the evening, when I went out briefly, a hot wind slapped my face. From the ocean came a roar of passions that seemed to have broken through all barriers:'We mus procreate and multiply! We must exhaust all the powers of lust!' The waves glowed like lava, and I imagined I could see multitudes of living beings - algae, whales, sea monsters - reveling in an orgy, from the surface to the bottom of the sea. Immortality was the law here. The whole planet raged with animation. At times, I heard my name in the clamor: the spirit of the abyss calling me to join them in their nocturnal dance. ("Hanka")

Every man is an island, and every heart seeks the ferry to cross the main...

We'd be trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean. I realize that if we boosted one another, maybe we'd get a little closer.

Do you ever think about the ocean?" Nick asked me."What about it?" I said."Like what could live down there? Like how there's as much life down there as up here? Maybe more?""God Lives Underwater," said someone. "That's the name of a band. They're awesome.""But seriously," Nick said, "it's like an alternate universe. Right here on our own planet.""Right here, a hundred feet from us," said Sheila."Right here in my hair," said one of the girls who had swum, pulling some sea gunk out of her wet hair.Everyone laughed quietly at that. Nick drank his beer. The wood crackled as it burned. We all stared at the black ocean.