Ships Quotes

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

~ Fernando Pessoa

All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.

~ Erin Morgenstern

A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Why ships won't use roads, is why cars won't travel on oceans. When the position is wrong, the leader won't be right.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Waves crack with wicked fury against me ship's hull while ocean currents rage as the full moon rises o're the sea. (Cutthroat's Omen: A Crimson Dawn)

~ John Phillips

SS Seawise GiantSeawise GiantOrdered in 1974 and delivered in 1979, the longest ship ever built was the supertanker Seawise Giant. Larger than the largest Cruise Ship afloat, the Oasis of the Seas, which is 1,186 feet long. She was over 1,504 feet long and weighed in at 260,941 gross tons. Having a beam of 220 feet and drawing 79 feet of water, she was so large that she couldn't navigate through the Panama Canal the Suez Canal or even the English Channel. After having been sunk during the 1980 -1988 Iran–Iraq War she was raised, renamed a few times and used for oil storage until she was ultimately scrapped in India, in 2010.Read “The Exciting Story of Cuba” by Captain Hank Bracker

~ Hank Bracker

Maria didn’t fear the sea but, as taught by her father, she respected its power. In her experience the ocean had no intent to drown travellers.

~ Sara Sheridan

It’s a general rule – a law of space, as it was a law of the sea in the old days, that ships had to respond to distress calls. Unless of course it places their own lives in danger. Bearing this thought in mind, as you can probably tell by my writing, my fingers are beginning to tremble slightly.

~ Christina Engela

The human mind prefers something which it can recognize to something for which it has no name, and, whereas thousands of persons carry field glasses to bring horses, ships, or steeples close to them, only a few carry even the simplest pocket microscope. Yet a small microscope will reveal wonders a thousand times more thrilling than anything which Alice saw behind the looking-glass.

~ David Fairchild

Ships are my arrows, the sea my bow, the world my target.

~ Robert Thier

If nothing else, it's pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.

~ Emily St. John Mandel

Turn over the rudder in God's name, and sail with the wind heaven sends us.

~ Catherine Of Siena

When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.

~ Clark Zlotchew

Now comes the reign of iron — and cased sloops are to take the place of wooden ships.

~ John Adolphus Bernard Dahlgren

Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lostmemories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreamsplay when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomachin a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in thedarkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?”She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Did Bach ever eatpancakes at midnight?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

History doesn’t start with a tall buildingand a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is takingus for suckers and is playing a mean game.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

She leaves my side and heads deeper intothe apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… acopper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their rightmind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what youshould name it.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longing for ocean travel.

~ Bill Bryson

It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn’t matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book – word by word – or crossing a country – step by step – each minute had to be lived moment by moment.

~ Sara Sheridan

It was as if she was a dream, like London, which he could not entirely grasp and of which he was not worthy. He wanted to be part of it but had forgotten how. It seemed extraordinary and strange that this paragon among women had condescended to travel on his ship. In fact, she’d insisted upon it. Her presence was at once otherworldly and familiar, none of which explained why his brain ceased to function when he was in her company.

~ Sara Sheridan

Ships have feelings.

~ Ann Leckie

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.

~ Alastair Reynolds

In many ways, the steamships of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had become the secular equivalent of medieval cathedrals. They were the source of endless pride to the communities and nations that built them, and were just as much an expression of men's hopes and dreams of technical perfection as the great churches had once been of hopes for spiritual purity.

~ Daniel Allen Butler

I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral.

~ Joseph Conrad

Cry no tears for us, my friend.” I pry at her fingers, panicking to be released in fear that she may drag me into death with her. She croaks again, “Lend no aches to the dreams of yesterday.” From the corpse of Warren, his greyish gums smack from whatever goo has settled in his mouth, “Allow the tide sweep free the bay.” Then together they sing in zombie choir, “And home the ships sailing send.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Now he sat alone; on a disabled starship about fifty years from anywhere on conversion drive – assuming he still had that. Insurance was a good thing – a very good thing - but it wasn’t going to help him much out here. The highlight of his afternoon was going to be staring at the blinking bridge instrumentation – which just happened to be running on the emergency batteries and actually blinking, like for real. Moreover, since his mutinous crew had made off with the Short Shit, the ships only shuttle, he was facing quite a problem

~ Christina Engela

We all came in on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

It's one thing if your hobby is to put ships inside a bottle, but a deer in the headlights!... That's a real talent

~ Josh Stern

We clear the harbor and the wind catches her sails and my beautiful ship leans over ever so gracefully, and her elegant bow cuts cleanly into the increasing chop of the waves. I take a deep breath and my chest expands and my heart starts thumping so strongly I fear the others might see it beat through the cloth of my jacket. I face the wind and my lips peel back from my teeth in a grin of pure joy.

~ L.a. Meyer

The sea is a lonely and hostile place, Captain,' Jansen said coldly. 'It is always best not to make enemies of those who might be your friends. You never know when your ships may cross

~ Jocelyn Murray

Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

The dangers of the sea should always take precedenceover the violence of the enemy’Rear-Admiral Ben Bryant CB, DSO and two bars, DSC

~ Ben Bryant