Seafaring Quotes

“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.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“A sweet surrender like a lullaby
came to me through your seafaring eyes.”
― Azra Gregor, Your Mother Is A Storm

“I’m engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton’s A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it’s a stanza too short for my morphing existence. So I write my own.”
― Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations

“We had taken him for a Norwegian ship's captain and had come to his table to hear some more about seafaring, not about philosophy, from which, indeed, we had fled north from Central Europe.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Voice Imitator

“Conrad tillhör de sjömän som får uppleva hur ångan triumferar och seglen försvinner från haven. Han befinner sig mitt inne i ett väldigt maktskifte. En tusenårig tradition bryts och ett helt nytt element förs in.
På segelfartyget är det kaptenen och hans män som är förmedlarna mellan Gud och världen. De fångar in och tyglar vinden som driver fartyget framåt. Seglaren lever i nära förbindelse med naturen, som han måste böja sig för, som han betjänar och utnyttjar.
När ångan kom, togs makten från kaptenen och gavs åt maskinisten i maskindjupet. Man seglade inte på havet längre utan plöjde sig genom det. Befälet på bryggan flyttades ned, förnedrades, hade blott själva navigeringen kvar och inte kraftöverföringen.”
― Olof Lagercrantz, Färd med Mörkrets hjärta: En bok om Joseph Conrads roman

“There was no water for miles on end here, not even a small lake, and he was starting to feel like a man trapped in a prison.”
― Noor Al-Shanti, Wandering Storm

“My broad conclusion is that an advanced global seafaring civilization existed during the Ice Age, that it mapped the earth as it looked then with stunning accuracy, and that it had solved the problem of longitude, which our own civilization failed to do until the invention of Harrison's marine chronometer in the late eighteenth century. As masters of celestial navigation, as explorers, as geographers, and as cartographers, therefore, this lost civilization of 12,800 years ago was not outstripped by Western science until less than 300 years ago at the peak of the Age of Discovery.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“He was, like so many of the men made large by history, rather mediocre in the flesh, the fine tailoring highlighting rather than hiding his physical shortcomings. […] A man made more for grand dinners than seafaring.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Wie auch die Mutter sich bemühte, ihn an den Deich und an das Land zu gewöhnen - er sprach von der See und guckte nach den Schiffen, als wenn es weiter nichts auf der Welt gäbe.”
― Gorch Fock, Seefahrt is not!

“Sie sagten man solle und dürfe niemanden aufs Wasser weisen. Wer den Weg nach dem Schiff nicht von selbst finde, aus dem könne doch kein Seemann werden.”
― Gorch Fock, Seefahrt is not!

“With my beloved sword I ministered to them, as it was meet. In no wise had they joy in that banqueting, foul doers of ill deeds, that they should devour me sitting round in feast nigh to the bottoms of the sea; nay, upon the morrow they lay upon the shore in the flotsam of the waves, wounded with sword-thrusts, blades done to death, so that never there-after might they about the steep straights molest the passage of seafaring men.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell