Oceanic Quotes

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

Wild waves rise and fall when they arrive And that’s what makes the calm sea alive

Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.

Flight of my mind rises beneath the seagull’s wings …then ocean is my motherland I feel.

Into the sea I’d love to sink When with both eyes a shark can blinkIs he a brave fish or a marine man?Through those closed eyelids my heart will he scan?

When the tidal waves wildly behavingMy bare feet on the shore busy savingThe calm warmth leaking out of the sandTo let my heart feel peacefully tanned!

Sharks are the lions of the sea.They glamorize the oceanic glory.

He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity—proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive—a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

Oceanic farness treasures tomorrowMingled tears lost in the sea of sorrowOur immortal love will lead us a way When pale days remain cloudy and grey

Take my handand…feel the sandbeneath your aimless feettowards the sparkling waves

All shadows of clouds the sun cannot hide like the moon cannot stop oceanic tide;but a hidden star can still be smiling at night's black spell on darkness, beguiling