Coast Quotes

“Little islands are all large prisons; one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.”
― Sir Richard Francis Burton

“Postmen have a legendary aura. A ring at the doorbell may inflame a sense of expectation, suspense, secrecy, hazard or even intrigue. Ringing twice may imply a warning that trouble is on the way or an appeal to make the coast clear. Not all mailmen, though, will ring twice and await an eye-catching Lana Turner, whom they can whisper: "With my brains and your looks, we could go places.” ("The postman always rings twice")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, "Come and find out".”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“My mother always wanted to live near the water," she said. "She said it's the one thing that brings us all together. That I can have my toe in the ocean off the coast of Maine, and a girl my age can have her toe in the ocean off the coast of Africa, and we would be touching. On opposite sides of the world.”
― Megan Miranda, Vengeance

“The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;- on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.”
― Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach and Other Poems

“The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“You need to lose yourself and disappear in the depths of the repetitions? Find a coast and watch the repetitive waves! Soon your mind vanishes away and when your mind disappears you disappear!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The coast is an edgy place. Living on the coast presents certain stark realities and a wild, rare beauty. Continent confronts ocean. Weather intensifies. It's a place of tide and tantrum; of flirtations among fresh- and saltwaters, forests and shores; of tense negotiations with an ocean that gives much but demands more. Every year the raw rim that is this coast gets hammered and reshaped like molten bronze. This place roils with power and a sometimes terrible beauty. The coast remains youthful, daring, uncertain about tomorrow. The guessing, the risk; in a way, we're all thrill seekers here.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“Beautiful as they are, these tidal places are often moody and strange. Sometimes you can feel the bittersweet tang of your mortality rubbing up against a beachhead of infinity”
― Christopher Camuto, Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island

“Well, I still don't like him! What kind of a man doesn't name his boat?”
― Amber Silvia, Unspoken

“This jeweled coast does not shine for its gems are coated with grit.”
― Bryant A. Loney, To Hear The Ocean Sigh

“Eels from the Tiber are a traditional Roman delicacy, pan-cooked with soft onions, garlic, chiles, tomatoes, and white wine, but a much more common dish is baccalà, preserved salt-cured cod, which is fried in thin strips, then simmered in a tomato sauce flavored with anchovies, pine nuts, and raisins. For really good fresh fish, you are better off heading either up or down the coast, toward Civitavecchia to the north or Gaeta to the south.”
― Anthony Capella, The Food of Love

“DEPORT yourself from the coast of negative attitudes and you will give your dreams a lift up from a level of high concentration of repeated failure to an indelible success! God is with you!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Daily Drive 365

“Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore and beach because they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight. But the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country's edge - an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave because acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless. It might be an appetite for other streets, other slants of light. Or a yearning to be surrounded by strangers. It may even be a wish to hear the solid click of a door closing behind their backs.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“Watch the waves crash upon the shore. Feel the sea breeze on your face and smell the salty sea air.”
― Wendy Joubert, Sea Witch

“Camping in the tropical Hawaiian jungle brought on the best health I had seen in years!”
― Steven Magee, Magee’s Disease

“There are halibut as big as doors in the ocean down below the town, flapskimming on the murky ocean floor with vast skates and rays and purple crabs and black cod large as logs, and sea lions slashing through the whip-forests of bull kelp and eelgrass and sugar wrack, and seals in the rockweed and giant perennial kelp and iridescent kelp and iridescent fish and luminous shrimp too small to see with the naked eye but billions of which feed the gray whales which slide hugely slowly by like rubbery zeppelins twice a year, north in spring and south in fall.

Salmonberries, thimbleberries, black raspberries, gooseberries, bearberries, snowberries, salal berries, elderberries, blackberries along the road and by the seasonal salt marshes north and south.

The ground squirrels burrow along the dirt banks of the back roads, their warren of mysterious holes, the thick scatter of fine brown soil before their doorsteps, the flash of silver-gray on their back fur as they rocket into the bushes; the bucks and does and fawns in the road in the morning, their springy step as they slip away from the gardens they have been eating; the bobcat seen once, at dusk, its haunches jacked up like a teenager's hot-rodding car; the rumor of cougar in the hills; the coyotes who use the old fire road in the hills; the tiny mice and bats one sometimes finds long dead and leathery like ancient brown paper; the little frenetic testy chittering skittering cheeky testy chickaree squirrels in the spruces and pines - Douglas squirrels, they are, their very name remembering that young gentleman botanist who wandered near these hills centuries ago.

The herons in marshes and sinks and creeks and streams and on the beach sometimes at dusk; and the cormorants and pelicans and sea scoters and murres (poor things so often dead young on the beach after the late-spring fledging) and jays and crows and quorking haunted ravens (moaning Poe! Poe! at dusk) especially over the wooded hills, and the goldfinches mobbing thistles in the meadowed hills, and sometimes a falcon rocketing by like a gleeful murderous dream, and osprey of all sizes all along the Mink like an osprey police lineup, and the herring gulls and Caspian terns and arctic terns, and the varied thrushes in wet corners of thickets, and the ruffed grouse in the spruce by the road, and the quail sometimes, and red-tailed hawks floating floating floating; from below they look like kites soaring brownly against the piercing blue sky, which itself is a vast creature bluer by the month as summer deepens into crispy cold fall.”
― Brian Doyle, Mink River: A Novel