Ships Quotes
45 quotes
"Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink."
"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."
"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."
"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)"
"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."
"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."
"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, The World Was My Garden: Travels Of A Plant Explorer
"Ships are my arrows, the sea my bow, the world my target."
"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."
"Turn over the rudder in God's name, and sail with the wind heaven sends us."
"Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction."
"Now comes the reign of iron — and cased sloops are to take the place of wooden ships."
"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?"
"Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city."
"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."
"I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?”She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?"
"Did Bach ever eatpancakes at midnight?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Ships have feelings."
"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."
"Gay ships are yay ships!"
"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"
"Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest."
"The dangers of the sea should always take precedenceover the violence of the enemy’Rear-Admiral Ben Bryant CB, DSO and two bars, DSC"
"Then on the River I saw the dream-built ship of the god Yoharneth-Lehai, whose great prow lifted grey into the air above the River of Silence. Her timbers were olden dreams dreamed long ago, and poets' fancies made her tall, straight masts, and her rigging was wrought out of the people's hopes. Upon her deck were rowers with dream-made oars, and the rowers were the people of men's fancies, and princes of old story and people who had died, and people who had never been."
"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, Unsinkable: The Full Story Of The RMS Titanic
"I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral."
"When De Long arrived in California with Emma that May, he went straight down to the yard and feasted his eyes upon his new ship. He was smitten by the transformation that had taken place during his absence. "I am perfectly satisfied with her," he wrote. "She is everything I want."
Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette
"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."
"We all came in on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now"
"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"
"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."
"Don't give up the ship!"
"Ships that pass in the night."
"They that go down to the sea in ships that do business in great waters."
"Ships are but boards sailors but men."
"There breaks in every Gloucester wave A windowed woman's heart."
"The more ships have grown in size and consequence, the more their place in our imagination has shrunk."