“There are some silences that are so huge, and fraught, and haunted, and weighed, and shocked, that they just are; there's nothing you can say about them that makes any sense. All you can do is witn...”

“...awkward passion is so often so very much more admirable than mere achievement.”

“...people would tell you much more than you expected to if you were generically presentable and left silence next to them like a friendly stranger; it was like they were waiting for some friendly s...”

“He claimed he had read the book so many times that the words had fallen out of it and the pages were all blank so he had to read the book to put the words back in or the book would be forlorn and n...”

“But if we do not dream, then I think perhaps we are misusing our heads. They are not on our shoulders only to be farms for hair.”

“If everything must be burned I will do the burning and so I will not be burnt but be the fire. Everything I ever loved burned and so I will be the burning. There is nothing but that must which be b...”

“At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hea...”

“Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above t...”

“When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully a...”

“Ships are my arrows, the sea my bow, the world my target.”

“Land and sea.We may think of them as opposites; as complements. But there is a difference in how we think of them; the sea, and the land.If we are walking around in a forest, a meadow or a town, we...”

“When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way back to ourselves”

“Only weak thinkers do not love the sky.”

“Your sky is full of stars and my arms too short to reach a piece to call my own”