Atlantic Quotes

“the first axiom in flight school: takeoff is voluntary, but landing is compulsory.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“While a mere one million people had arrived in America in the seventy years between independence and 1840, over the following sixty years no fewer than thirty million came flooding in—most of them northern Europeans, particularly Britons and Irish, in the years of the first great wave that lasted until 1890;”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“But wait—was that not how the world at large had come to think of the ocean as a whole? Wasn’t the ocean just distance for most people these days? Didn’t we all now take for granted a body of water that, so relatively recently—no more than five hundred years before, at most—was viewed by mariners who had not yet dared attempt to cross it with a mixture of awe, terror, and amazement? Had not a sea that had once seemed an impassable barrier to somewhere—to Japan? the Indies? the Spice Islands? the East?—transmuted itself with dispatch into a mere bridge of convenience to the wealth and miracles of the New World? Had our regard for this ocean not switched from the intimidation of the unknown and the frightening to the indifference with which we now greet the ordinary? And”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“The great forces that created the Atlantic in the first place will in time - in a very long time, in human terms - also destroy it. The forces, part of the tectonic mechanisms of the planet, are better understood today than when they were first revealed in the 1960s, but they still present something of a mystery. They are difficult to appreciate in part because they are so complex, but also because of the time scale involved: we are only around to witness the tiny incremental movements and shifts by which the world changes its topography, even though those tiny shifts can often be, for mankind, catastrophically lethal and terrifying. The earthquakes,”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“the lifting against the natural force of gravity of two-hundred-odd tons of airplane and three-hundred-odd human beings to an entirely unsustainable altitude of seven or so miles, and then propelling all without interruption for many long hours, suspended by nothing more than a lately realized principle of physics, high above a cold and highly dangerous expanse of sea.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“According to many lexical authorities, the word that Londoners used for traders from the Hanseatic eastern cities—easterlings—became shortened and incorporated into the English language as the word sterling, with its implied meaning of solid reliability.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“The last surviving slave from the last arriving slaver died in 1935, in a suburb of Mobile, Alabama.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“The clash between those who built fortresses and those who drove wagons or sailed ships was a central part of early human life—”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“John Ruskin once noted that “to paint water in all its perfection is as impossible as to paint the soul.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“As the historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin once put it: “What is remarkable is not that the Vikings actually reached America, but that they reached America and even settled there for a while without discovering America.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“learning comes only from the taking of chances and risk,”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“the relatively peaceable inland sea of the classical world was to prove a training ground, a nursery school, for those sailors who in time, and as an inevitable part of human progress, would prove infinitely more daring and commercially ambitious than the Minoans.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“it was a brave man who ate the first oyster,”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“Derek Walcott, the Nobel laureate poet, wrote in his famous epic work Omeros of his fisherman-hero Achilles walking finally and wearily up the shingled slope of an Atlantic beach. He has turned his back on the sea at last, but he knows that even without his seeing it, it is behind him all the while and simply, ponderously, magnificently, ominously, continuing to be the sea. The Ocean is, quite simply, “still going on.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“The Atlantic is the classic ocean of our imaginings, an industrial ocean of cold and iron and salt, a purposeful ocean of sea-lanes and docksides and fisheries, an ocean alive with squadrons of steadily moving ships above, with unimaginable volumes of mysterious marine abundance below.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“It seemed to me a shame—as though the flight deck were telling its charges that there was nothing much to get excited about anymore: today’s transit was much like yesterday’s, or last week’s, and the crossing of what had become called “the pond” 3 (the terminology demoting the great ocean to a body of water almost without significance) would invariably be much as was generally expected at this time of year. Ho-hum, in other words. And we passengers scarcely noticed. Having made good our nest of books and blankets, having made obligatory noises of good cheer to our stranger-neighbor, having glanced at the menu and wondered idly if it was too early to order a drink, we settled down and barely noticed a takeoff that would perhaps have enthralled us twenty years before.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“But though it was to be an economical crossing, one step up from steerage, in the Canadian Pacific offices off Trafalgar Square—more cathedral than bureau, all teak, marble, and hush, and with scale models of famous ocean liners from the old days illuminated in the windows—even this most modest of transactions was handled with dignity and circumstance.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“The remains of sixty thousand young seamen now lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. More men had died there in the five years of the Second World War than in all of the conflicts in the ocean since the first Romans had set out on their invading expeditions nearly two thousand years before.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present. In this limitless nation, this nation of wind, light, and peace, there is no other ruler besides the sea.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“Montana named Triple Divide Peak.”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

“Americans”
― Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories