Ocean Quotes

The ocean will swallow you whole and burp you out and not notice you were even there.

~ Nicola Yoon

Just outside Dover we stopped at an inn and I snatched a taste of dainty fried fish named smelts, and some herrings served with their tails in their mouths. Afterwards, me and Mr Loveday went out to take a view of the ocean. The wind was blowing so strong it whistled through my teeth and the sea was horrible; a vast plain of water ceaselessly moiling like a simmering pot. At last my head cold had cleared enough to taste the sea on my tongue; it had a strange salted vegetable tang.

~ Martine Bailey

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.

~ Ruta Sepetys

We all have an innate feeling of being separate from the world, peering out at life from behind our own little self. But how can we truly be separate from the same world that created us? You can no more disconnect from the universe and it's inhabitants than a wave can extricate itself from the ocean.

~ Dan Harris

The sea was like another member of the household, a recalcitrant child at times, a soothing aunt at others. She crooned them awake; she crooned them to sleep. Everywhere, there was the smell of salt.

~ Hala Alyan

The sea, as much as the light, gives this curve of coast it's flavor. The light takes it's color from the sea, sometimes seems to be emerging from it. And the sea here is ever-present. On clear days it coats the air with a transparent tinge of palest blue that salts and sharpens every detail.

~ James D. Houston

The ocean will always betray me. No matter how beautiful it is.

~ K.b. Ezzell

My alar is like the ocean in storm. (Devi)

~ Patrick Rothfuss

Life is like a ocean, jump right on.

~ Cliff Hannold

Life is like an ocean, jump right on.

~ Cliff Hannold

Life is like an ocean, jump right in.

~ Cliff Hannold

I think of the horizon at midnight, the sky and sea blurring together.

~ Sophie Hardcastle

The ocean stands for God, the sole substance, and individual beings are like waves - which are modes of the sea. Each wave has its own shape that it holds for a certain time, but the wave is not separate from the sea and cannot be conceived to exist independently of it. Of course, this is only a metaphor; unlike an infinite God, an ocean has boundaries, and moreover the image of the sea represents God only in the attributes of extension. But maybe we can also imagine the mind of God - that is to say, the infinite totality of thinking - as like the sea, and the thoughts of finite beings as like waves that arise and then pass away.

~ Clare Carlisle

June would always be Charlotte's favorite month on Quinnipeague. She loved the frothy roil of the sea as it recovered from a day of rain, and in those early mornings, before the fog lifted and sun warmed the island, there was nothing, nothing better than a wood fire, wool socks, and hot chocolate made from scratch.

~ Barbara Delinsky

The ocean here is weird. It's the wrong kind of blue.

~ Nicola Yoon

I will cross the border, set across the ocean. I will break down walls, reject rules just to be with you. I will, I promise that I will resist the resilience. I will give love life and a place to blossom.

~ S. O'sdae

Farther out beyond the reef, where the coral gives way to the true deep, at a certain time of day a tribe of flat silver fish gather in their thousands. To be there is to be surrounded by living shards of light. At a secret signal, all is chaos, a thousand mirrors shattering about him. Then the school speeds to sea and the boy is left in sedate water, a tug and pull of the body as comfortable as sitting in his father’s outspread sarong being sung to sleep.

~ Nayomi Munaweera

Something grey surged out of the ship’s wake, and Mouana reached for her pistol, then swore softly as she saw it was only a porpoise. The animals were playing in the engine wash, spinning in the air as they arced through the crashing foam. They were not albino, nor rotten, nor tentacled—just porpoises. The sight of the things brought hope back again; whatever mess they were in, at least they weren’t in Ocean.

~ Nate Crowley

Let only the young come, Says the sea. Let them kiss my face And hear me. I am the last word And I tell Where storms and stars come from.

~ Carl Sandburg

...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand...

~ Pat Conroy

The ocean is a rolling field of the bluest crop I've ever seen, filling our view two days after escaping the guards. The sea touches the horizon, swaying and moving like a living, breathing being beneath a lid of white clouds and sunshine. It's possibly the most beautiful thing in the world.

~ Erin Summerill

...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

Nothing from the ocean is meant to survive on land forever.

~ Sarah Glenn Marsh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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