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Wave Quotes

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Wave Quotes

“The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.”

“An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.”

“However constant the visitations of sickness and bereavement, the fall of the year is most thickly strewn with the fall of human life. Everywhere the spirit of some sad power seems to direct the time; it hides from us the blue heavens, it makes the green wave turbid; it walks through the fields, and lays the damp ungathered harvest low; it cries out in the night wind and the shrill hail; it steals the summer bloom from the infant cheek; it makes old age shiver to the heart; it goes to the churchyard, and chooses many a grave.”

“I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.”

“We should not laugh at the person who becoming caught up in his prayer bends his body or moves about in strange ways. Perhaps he moves in this manner to wave off unwelcome thoughts that would interrupt the prayer. Would we find it funny if we saw a person drowning going through strange motions doing whatever was necessary to save his life?”

“Hope is to a man as a bladder to a learning swimmer--it keeps him from sinking in the bosom of the waves, and by that help he may attain the exercise; but yet it many times makes him venture beyond his height, and then if that breaks, or a storm rises, he drowns without recovery. How many would die, did not hope sustain them! How many have died by hoping too much! This wonder we find in Hope, that she is both a flatterer and a true friend.”

“Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. There the child nestles as peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame.”

“some journalists have described the South Pole as 'hell on earth.' Others refer to my time here as 'an ordeal.' They would be surprised to know how beautiful Antarctica has seemed to me, with its waves of ice in a hundred shades of blue and white, its black winter sky, its ecstatic wheel of stars. They would never understand how the lights of the Dome welcomed me from a distance, or how often I danced and sang and laughed here with my friends. And how I was not afraid.”

“Since the journey is a metaphor - the most ambiguous and seductive of metaphors, we tell ourselves - it can also be born of immobility. There is no need to drag our bodies around so much, all dressed up. It's hot, there are flies, diseases. It is enough to close our eyes, seated on a chair in the shade, to float on the waves of imagination. Isn't that what books are there for?”

“This is, if not a lifetime process, it's awfully close to it. The writer broadens, becomes deeper, becomes more observant, becomes more tempered, becomes much wiser over a period time passing. It is not something that is injected into him by a needle. It is not something that comes on a wave of flashing, explosive light one night and say, 'Huzzah! Eureka! I've got it!' and then proceeds to write the great American novel in eleven days. It doesn't work that way. It's a long, tedious, tough, frustrating process, but never, ever be put aside by the fact that it's hard.”

“When I play with the full band, you get to be larger than life, you feel larger than life, and that particular moment in the song where there's passion, you've got nine guys behind you, all driving that sound and that feeling with you. That's like surfing a huge wave, because once you start you really can't stop it, you got it going down a huge mountain.”

“We hail the return of the day of thy birth, Fair Columbia! washed by the waves of two oceans Where men from the farthest dominions of earth Rear altars to Freedom, and pay their devotions; Where our fathers in fight, nobly strove for the Right, Struck down their fierce foemen or put them to flight; Through the long lapse of ages, that so there might be An asylum for all in the Land of the Free.”

“I saw thee in a vision of the night Transfigured; for it seemed that on thy brows The heavens did rest with all their stars, like boughs Laden with blossoms; round thy feet the bright Green waves, like grass, ran rippling, strewn with white Star-fragments of rent petals: wasted vows, And ruined prayers I thought them, such as house In hearts that love and are not loved aright.”

“Set we forward; let A Roman and a British ensign wave Friendly together. So through Lud's town march, And in the temple of the great Jupiter Our peace we'll ratify, seal it with feasts. Set on there! Never was a war did cease, Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace.”

“The days of television as we knew it growing up are over. You have a bigger, wider world audience on the Internet, larger than any American television series. People don't watch television in the same context as before. Nowadays they watch their television on the Internet at their convenience. That's the whole wave, and it's now - not the future.”