Ocean Quotes

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

The thing about the ocean is that the surface won’t always tell you what is going on underneath.

~ Jennifer Arnett

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

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

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

The sky would be clear, colorless, mist blending together the air and the ocean, the waves whispering against the rocks.

~ Kendall Kulper

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

His mind has the clearness of the deep sea, the patience of its rocks, the force of its billows.

~ Charlotte Brontë

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

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

It was like watching a man smile as he surrendered himself to drown in deep water.

~ C.s. Pacat

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

I am drawn to the ocean, I find solace in its mystery.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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

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

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

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

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

In ocean of tears, the heart of stone sinks. (Dans l'océan de larmes, - Le coeur de pierre donc coule.)

~ Charles De Leusse

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

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

Time was unending when charmed, captivated, even delighted by the mystical motion of the ocean!

~ Ray Palla

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

…They're dangerous as all gifts from the sea are, the sea offers death as well as immortality.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

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

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