sea
Saw the limb of a rainbow footing itself on the sea at a small apparent distance from the shore, a thing of itself—no substrate cloud or even mist visible—but the distance glimmered through it as through a thin semi-transparent hoop.
Anima Poetae: from the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: William Heinemann, 1895), 97.
I don’t consider myself a hero. I’m an ordinary girl who believed in her dream. You don’t have to be someone special or anything special to achieve something amazing. You’ve just got to have a dream, believe in it, and work hard.
Awarded the Order of Australia Medal after attempting a solo circumnavigation of the planet at the age of 16.CNN, May 15, 2010.
One by one the stars fell into the sea, the sky drained of its last lights.
Notebook IX, in Albert Camus: Notebooks 1951–1959, trans. by Ryan Bloom (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 244.
Why I miss the trolley cars. Because unlike everything and everybody else in the U.S. they did not swerve from their ancient path. And because as a boy (thousands of years ago) I went to Coney Island in a trolley car, and saw grass growing between the tracks and because it was an open trolley, with the conductor on the side hopping from row to row to collect his fares (his left arm holding the rail as he hopped) and because it seemed to me then (as does not happen now on the bus) that the other passengers were all my family, all Brooklyn. And because as we neared the sea, and could see its blue glare on the surface, everyone (at least in the back row) burst out singing.
May 21, 1984 entry in Alfred Kazin’s Journals, selected and edited by Richard M. Cook (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011), 504.
It is getting warmer all the time and I have been swimming almost every morning—except for two marvelous stormy days. Today the sea is like pale blue satin, with a mauve haze—huge freighters and tankers coming in slowly through the haze, like ghosts—lovely.
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 419.
There never was a very great man yet who spent all his life inland. A snuff of the sea, my boy, is inspiration; and having been once out of sight of land, has been the making of many a true poet and the blasting of many pretenders; for, d’ye see, there’s no gammon about the ocean; it knocks the false keel right off a pretender’s bows; it tells him just what he is, and makes him feel it, too. A sailor’s life, I say, is the thing to bring us mortals out.
Herman Melville, White-Jacket in Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick (New York: Library of America, 1983), 635.
Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple.
Pale Fire: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 1989), 21 (foreword).
When are you sailing so I can meet you at the dock with champagne?
Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, dated April 24, 1952, in Words in Air (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 137.
One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much. Physical shedding to begin with, which then mysteriously spreads into other fields. Clothes, first. Of course, one needs less in the sun. But one needs less anyway, one finds suddenly. One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full. And what a relief it is! Less taking up and down of hems, less mending, and—best of all—less worry about what to wear. One finds one is shedding not only clothes—but vanity.
Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 50th anniversary ed., 24–25.
Owing to my boat’s shape, she could not wear a tall mast without turning over and so her pocket-handkerchief-sized sail could only garner and harvest the tiniest cupfuls of wind; thus, for the most part, she was propelled from point to point with oars, and when we had a full crew on board—three dogs, an owl, and sometimes a pigeon—and were carrying a full cargo—some two dozen containers full of seawater and specimens—she was a back-aching load to push through the water.
Fauna and Family (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 21.
In spring the almost enclosed sheet of water that separated Corfu from the mainland would be a pale and delicate blue, and then as spring settled into hot, crackling summer, it seemed to stain the still sea a deeper and more unreal color, which in some lights seemed like the violet blue of a rainbow, a blue that faded to a rich jade green in the shallows. In the evening when the sun sank, it was as if it were drawing a brush across the sea’s surface, streaking and blurring it to purples smudged with gold, silver, tangerine and pale pink.
Fauna and Family (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 16–17.