Quotes about sailing

Richelle E. Goodrich - Making Wishes

The only ship you can truly steer in this ocean is the one you're sailing. Quit trying to alter the winds harness them.

Rachel McAdams -

I use filming as an excuse to take classes. I got my certification in sailing for 'Wedding Crashers,' and now I can handle a 26-foot boat. I played a seamstress once, so I took sewing classes. I love dipping into these other lives.

Thomas Mallon -

The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.

Thomas Merton -

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

Roger Ebert -

Clouds do not really look like camels or sailing ships or castles in the sky. They are simply a natural process at work. So too, perhaps, are our lives.

Noam Chomsky -

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

Tania Aebi -

Charter boats are like books with no covers.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps - Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror

My wife and I said good-bye the next morning in a little sheltered place among the lumber on the wharf; she was one of your women who never like to do their crying before folks.She climbed on the pile of lumber and sat down, a little flushed and quivery, to watch us off. I remember seeing her there with the baby till we were well down the channel. I remember noticing the bay as it grew cleaner, and thinking that I would break off swearing; and I remember cursing Bob Smart like a pirate within an

Laurence Bergreen - Magellan: Over the Edge of the World

On September 6, 1522, a battered ship appeared on the horizon … A small pilot boat was dispatched to lead the strange ship over the reefs … The vessel they were guiding into the harbor was manned by a skeleton crew of just eighteen sailors and three captives, all of them severely malnourished. … Their captain was dead, as were the officers, the boatswains, and the pilots; in fact, nearly the entire crew had perished … the ship, Victoria, … had departed three years earlier. No one knew what had b

Dennis Conner -

Design has taken the place of what sailing used to be.

Leo Tolstoy - A Confession

My belief assumed a form that it commonly assumes among the educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word "progress." At the time it seemed to me that this word had meaning. Like any living individual, I was tormented by questions of how to live better. I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress, I was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; without really answering, such a person replies

Philip Pullman - The Golden Compass

She found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was very taken with this notion, and later on she folded the blankets on her bunk in a seamanlike way, and put her possessions in the closet in a seamanlike way, and used 'stow' instead of 'tidy' for the process of doing so. After two days at sea, Lyra decided that this was the life for her.

Ricky Skaggs -

I can't control the wind but I can adjust the sail.

Carsten Jensen - the Drowned

Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.

Amelia Earhart - The Fun of It

Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.

Lin Pardey - a Writer and Other Wildlife

Thing about boats is, you can always sell them if you don't like them. Can't sell kids.

Libba Bray - Beauty Queens

You can’t believe how bleeding scary the sea is! There’s, like, whales and storms and shit! They don’t bloody tell you that!

Garcilaso de la Vega - Part One

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)...

Herman Melville - The Whale

The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.

George R.R. Martin - A Storm of Swords

She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of the horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small, but free as well.

Andrew Rayner - Reach for Paradise

Paradise” is a suffering word, grossly overused and ineptly devalued in everyday hype and blurb. Yet, tired as it is, it will have to do. Nothing else conveys that sense of place that can inspire a blissful contentment.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ -

We of the sea come to know each other quickly; our loves, like our hates, are born of sudden dangers.

James Carlos Blake - Country of the Bad Wolfes

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when

Michael Morpurgo - Alone on a Wide Wide Sea

That's what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don't tell her. You have to remember always that she's the leader, not you. You and your boat are dancing to her tune.

Melissa C. Walker - Unbreak My Heart

Maybe you're getting into the rhythm of sailing life," says James. He looks out at the waves that are rolling in to lap against the dock. "You know, the tides going in and then out, the wind blowing east and then west, the high of a perfect day out on the water, the low of a thunderstorm or a wind that won't go your way.

Kristin Cashore - Graceling

What she really loved was to hang over the edge and watch the bow of the ship slice through the waves. She loved it especially when the waves were high and the ship rose and fell, or when it was snowing and the flakes stung her face.

L.A. Meyer - Under the Jolly Roger: Being an Account of the Further Nautical Adventures of Jacky Faber

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.

Gary Paulsen - Caught by the Sea

...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...

Yukio Mishima - The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.

Alexandre Dumas -

This sometimes happened: from time to time, Dantès, driven out of solitude into the world, felt an imperative need for solitude. And what solitude is more vast and more poetic than that of a ship sailing alone on the sea, in the darkness of night and the silence of infinity, under the eye of the Lord?

Susan Wiggs - The Charm School

She watched the gap between ship and shore grow to a huge gulf. Perhaps this was a little like dying, the departed no longer visible to the others, yet both still existed, only in different worlds.

Don Darkes - 6692 Pisces the Sailfish

Just because I am paranoid does not mean that someone is not out to get me

Torre DeRoche - Love with a Chance of Drowning

His introduction throws me. The only time I can envision "Hi, I'm a surgeon" as a fitting introduction is if I were on a gurney in a stark white room and a man wielding a scalpel was standing over me. Plus, it's been a while since we've talked careers with anyone. Jobs are rarely a topic of conversation anymore--they exist in a place and time too far away to seem interesting. "What do you do?" is not a question asked to define someone, because out here we're all working the same jobs: yachties,

Sara Sheridan - On Starlit Seas

The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, ‘There can be no better place in the world than this.’Henderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise

Sara Sheridan - On Starlit Seas

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 - On Starlit Seas

The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.

Sara Sheridan - On Starlit Seas

She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside – ports were places of freedom.

Sara Sheridan - On Starlit Seas

Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded – not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water.

Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana

When I'm all grown up, come what may,I'll build a boat to carry me away

Van Morrison -

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

Van Morrison -

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...

Ridwan Nurwansyah -

my mine ,I searching for you ..long time in the trip time walls,searching you in was me..I never felt lonely,this world always singeven at grave heart'sbeing numb to hearyour song is ..What the dealt of this life saidso breathe in wind singingsinking sailing in waves,and breathe out find me..in the rain and riversbut you and me are the ocean,you know ? in long time agothe time in this room make you forget..keep searching time with me and i.put the name your mine to heart of golduntil you coming

Micheal Rivers - The Black Witch

She holds you like a whore in the night, but she'll take your soul and not think twice.

Micheal Rivers - The Black Witch

So exquisitely perfect was the darkness of the heavens above that one would have difficulty believing it was a prison to the passengers and crew of The Black Witch.

Bernard Moitessier - Tamata and the Alliance

When a great adventure is launched with a powerful thrust, fatigue in the muscles and doubts in the mind are swept away by a fullness that moves life along like a breath from the depths of the soul.

Andrew Rayner - Reach for Paradise

Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food.

Homer -

For I say there is no other thing that is worse than the sea is for breaking a man, even though he may a very strong one.

Richelle E. Goodrich - Making Wishes

Life is a voyage across troubled waters where our days are often spent clinging to the top of the highest mast, scouting for a comforting glimpse of shore.

K.B. Ezzell - Elysium

I wrapped my fingers around the first light I saw and felt all at once so happy and so sad and so free. My hand was cold somehow as I lifted the tiny star out of the water and brought its trembling, burning form to my face. I kissed it gently and laughed like a child as my face seemed to become angelic for a few moments. The star laughed back at me in little sweet notes, and I released it back to the sea. I can still feel the star in my hands to this day. You can have your noctiluca scintillans,

Franklin D. Roosevelt -

To reach a port we must set sail –Sail, not tie at anchorSail, not drift.

Jimmy Spithill -

It’s better to be the rooster than the feather duster.

Anthony T. Hincks -

Calm sailing doesn't come from calm waters, it comes from having a good navigator; a good crew and a good vessel.

Anne Fall - Rosa Scriptum

I dreamt of land but that was so long ago.I don't even know if he still exists.

Richard Halliburton -

Just about a month from now I'm set adrift, with a diploma for a sail and lots of nerve for oars.

Malcolm Lowry - Ultramarine

Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! . . . It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's pr

Franklin D. Roosevelt -

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.

Chris Robb - Voyages with Kipper: and other Sailing Reminiscences

There have been times on this trip I’ve been convinced that GPS was wrong.

Jerome K. Jerome - Three Men in a Boat

There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams.

Robert M. Pirsig -

An alternative — and better — definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components: air, sunlight, wind, water, the motion of waves, the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These elements, unlike 20th-century office routines, have been here since before life appeared on this planet, and they will continue long after office routines are gone. They are understood by everyone, not just a small segment of a highly advanced society. When considered on purely logical grounds, they

John F. Kennedy -

I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the s

Matshona Dhliwayo -

A small boat that sails the river is better than a large ship that sinks in the sea.

José Ortega y Gasset - Man and People

To meditate is to sail a course, to navigate, among problems many of which we are in the process of clearing up. After each one looms another, whose shores are even more attractive, more suggestive. Certainly, it requires strength and perseverance to get to windward of problems, but there is no greater delight than to reach new shores, and even to sail, as Camoëns says, “through seas that keel has never cut before.” If you will now open a bank-account of attention for me, I foretell sun-smitten

Fidelis O Mkparu -

Midnight sail and moonlight. I remember sunset, and gentle breeze. Leaving the city lights behind, and gazing at the moon. Mountains of clouds. Waves slapping our boat. It was easy to forget that love has no direction, or need for compass. Let it guide you to its destination. ~ Fidelis O Mkparu, 2016

Sara Sheridan - On Starlit Seas

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.

Allen Curnow -

Simply sailing in a new direction you could enlarge the world

Catherine of Siena -

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

Nabil Sabio Azadi -

The winds of fortune tend to favour the sails of those who politely yell out to it, 'Nice to meet you!

James C. Dobson - Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future

13. If you’re going through difficult times today, hold steady. It will change soon. If you are experiencing smooth sailing and easy times now, brace yourself. It will change soon. The only thing you can be certain of is change.