The sea - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

You are going to tour the land of marvels. Astonishment, amazement will become your everyday state of mind. You won't get bored with the spectacles I will provide for you. I'm going on another tour of the submarine world.

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), translated byWalter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (1993)

The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the planet. Its breath is pure and healthful. It's an immense wilderness where a man never feels lonely, for he feels life astir on every side. The sea fosters a wondrous, supernatural existence.

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), translated byWalter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (1993)

Look at that sea! Who can say it isn't actually alive! It expresses its anger and its tenderness! Yesterday it went to sleep as we did, and now like us it is awakening after a peaceful night.

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), translated byWalter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (1993)

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

- H. P. Lovecraft, ''TheWhite Ship'' (1919)

Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body moved out towards the open sea.

- William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)

Leaving the sea two hundred million years ago may have been a deep trauma from which we've never recovered . . .

- J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962)

A few moments earlier the water had seemed cool and inviting, but now had become a closed world, the barrier of the surface like a plane between two dimensions.

- J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962)

The idea of the sea troubled him: enormous, massive, patient, capable of wrath, a hostile beast encircling the hostile giant of the jungle and equally ready to wash away the memory of man.

- John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

The desert, the mountains: they stood still. They did not cry out forever in a great, dull voice. The sea spoke forever, but its language was foreign to her.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan (1971)

It took a sailor who was better than good to work his way past reefs, fight clear of eddies and riptides, beat around regions against which the hovering man warned him. [. . .] The air blew full of salt and strength, it lulled, it whistled, it frolicked and kissed. To sail was to dance with the world.

- Poul Anderson, ''My Own, My Native Land'' (1974)

On the water, aboard the Proteus, the crowding, the activities, the tempo, of life in the cities, on the land, are muted, slowed - fictionalized - by the metaphysical distancing a few meters of water can provide.We alter the landscape with great facility, but the ocean has always seemed unchanged, and I suppose by extension we are infected with some feelings of timelessness whenever we set out upon her.

- Roger Zelazny, ''Home Is the Hangman'' (1975)

Speaking now only to that Presence, to the sea, to that vast remorseless deity, bargaining with it cannily, hopefully, shrewdly, like a country housewife at market, proffering it the fine rich red gift of his death.

- Gardner Dozois, ''The Peacemaker'' (1983)

Fish are not the best authority on water.

- Jane Yolen, ''TheWhite Babe'' (1987)

We would stop for me to name the rivers: Memory that carries remembering away, and Anger that runs so gently smoothing the pebbles round, and Terror that we swam in fearlessly.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''Kore 87'' (1988)

They wanted a bath - in their old aquatic dolphin brains, down below the cerebrums, down where desires were primal and fierce, they wanted back into water.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)