"I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living."
— Anaïs Nin

"The sea does not like to be restrained. "
— Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief)

"Look at that sea, girls--all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

"There was a single blue line of crayon drawn across every wall in the house. What does it mean? I asked. A pirate needs the sight of the sea, he said and then he pulled his eye patch down and turned and sailed away."
— Brian Andreas (Story People)

"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach, and drifted back to the sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea."
— Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story)

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
— Franz Kafka

"hark, now hear the sailors cry,
smell the sea, and feel the sky
let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic..."
— Van Morrison

"The peace of God is that eternal calm which, like the cushion of the sea, lies far too deep down to be reached by any external trouble or disturbance; and he who enters into the presence of God becomes a partaker of that undisturbed and undisturbable calm."
— A.J. Pierson

"and I shall watch the ferry boats, and they'll get high, on a bluer ocean against tomorrow's sky. and i will never grow so old again, and i will walk and talk, in gardens all wet with rain..."
— Van Morrison

"There was a magic about the sea. People were drawn to it. People wanted to love by it, swim in it, play in it, look at it. It was a living thing that as as unpredictable as a great stage actor: it could be calm and welcoming, opening its arms to embrace it's audience one moment, but then could explode with its stormy tempers, flinging people around, wanting them out, attacking coastlines, breaking down islands. It had a playful side too, as it enjoyed the crowd, tossed the children about, knocked lilos over, tipped over windsurfers, occasionally gave sailors helping hands; all done with a secret little chuckle"
— Cecelia Ahern (The Gift)

"To reach a port we must set sail –
Sail, not tie at anchor
Sail, not drift."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"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 (Under the Jolly Roger: Being an Account of the Further Nautical Adventures of Jacky Faber)

"Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks - how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will be slightly closed, and there will be a shadow on her neck. The shawl will be draped around her shoulders, and her hands will rest in her lap. In this deceptive photograph, she will look a young woman who is not at all disturbed or embarrassed, but instead appears to be rather serious. And she wonders if, in its ability to deceive, photography is not unlike the sea, which may offer a benign surface to the observe even as it conceals depths and current below."
— Anita Shreve (Fortune's Rocks: A Novel)

"they sat on the outcropping of stone and at bread and fruit. Kasta watched the long grass moving around them. The wind pushed it, attacked it, strucked it in one place than another. It rose and fell again. It flowed, like water.
"Is this what the sea is like?" Kasta asked, and they both tured to her, surprised."does the sea move the way this grass moves?"
“It is like the sea,” she said
Giddon’s eyes on her were incredulous.
“What? Is it such a strange thing to say?”
“It’s a strange thing for you to say.” He shook his head. He gathered their bread and fruit, then rose. “The Lienid fighter is filling your mind with romantic notions.”
"
— Kristin Cashore

"...this beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath..."
— Gary Paulsen (Caught by the Sea: My Life on Boats)

"There comes a time in a man's life when he hears the call of the sea. If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediatly."
— Dave Barry

"We fired pie filling. That was the Faroes. When they tried to board us, we hit them with forty-five gallon shots of custard and banana creme."
— Paul Watson

"With this idea, being a man with long experience of the sea (and they certainly have a great advantage over other men in any sort of task)..."
— GarciLaso De la Vega (Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru)

""A large bolt of lightning, a huge wave, we're..."
"Floating??""
— L + H

"at the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again'"
— Werner Herzog

"They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks."
— Jean Rhys

"I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me.
The sea."
— Gary Paulsen (Caught by the Sea: My Life on Boats)

"And finally the two of them plunged into the dark sea, a sea like a pack of wolves, and they dove around the boat trying to find young Reiter's body, with no success, until they had to come up for air, and before they dove again, they asked the men on the boat whether the brat had surfaced. And then, under the weight of the negative response, they disappeared once more among the dark waves like forest beasts and one of the men who hadn't been in before joined them, and it was he who some fifteen feet down spotted the body of young Reiter floating like uprooted seaweed, upward, a brilliant white in the underwater space, and it was he who grabbed the body under the arms and brought him up, and also he who made the young Reiter vomit all the water he had swallowed."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"Does the tide draw at the sand or does the sand release the sea?"
— Erica Wagner

"Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where other Howths grumbled to greet them. Swollen spumeless tide. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys."
— Jamie O'Neill

"I love you Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ I love you
Yes I do

I love you Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ I love you
Yes I do"
— Neutral Milk Hotel

"Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra."
— John Steinbeck (Tortilla Flat)

"Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"'Says O'Sullivan to me, "Mr. Fay, I'll have a word wid yeh?" "Certainly," says I; "what can I do for you?" "Sell me your sea- boots, Mr. Fay," says O'Sullivan, polite as can be. "But what will you be wantin' of them?" says I. "'Twill be a great favour," says O'Sullivan. "But it's my only pair," says I; "and you have a pair of your own," says I. "Mr. Fay, I'll be needin' me own in bad weather," says O'Sullivan. "Besides," says I, "you have no money." "I'll pay for them when we pay off in Seattle," says O'Sullivan. "I'll not do it," says I; "besides, you're not tellin' me what you'll be doin' with them." "But I will tell yeh," says O'Sullivan; "I'm wantin' to throw 'em over the side." And with that I turns to walk away, but O'Sullivan says, very polite and seducin'-like, still a-stroppin' the razor, "Mr. Fay," says he, "will you kindly step this way an' have your throat cut?" And with that I knew my life was in danger, and I have come to make report to you, sir, that the man is a violent lunatic.'"
— Jack London (The Mutiny of the Elsinore)

"Of all the things that drive men to sea the most common disaster I ve come to learn is women. "
— Charles Johnson

"One of the first Europeans to systematically study the geography of Greenland's ice was a teenager from Denmark named Peter Freuchen. At 18, he was a bright, competent medical student at the University of Copenhagen. Freuchen had grown up in a coastal village, his muscles hardened and hands callused from occasional shipboard jobs. Tall, broad-shouldered, and well-mannered, he was popular with his professors and their daughters. There was a brooding, distant quality to the young man's face befitting his romantic attachment to the sea. In his spare time he could be found listening to sailors' tales at the docks or sailing alone in the small boat he had owned since he was eight, eyes scanning the horizon."
— Michael Ray Taylor (Caves: Exploring Hidden Realms)