Book Quotes About the Sea

The best book quotes about the sea are almost never about water. For Melville the sea is a cure for depression, for Kate Chopin it is a voice that speaks to the soul, for Captain Nemo it is the one place no government can reach, and for Conrad it is the thing that outlasts you. Here are eleven lines, each copied from the full public-domain text and cited to its chapter, with the scene that makes each one mean what it does.

Book quotes about the sea from Melville

1. The damp, drizzly November

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 1, “Loomings”

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The third paragraph of Moby-Dick is funnier than its reputation. Ishmael’s symptoms escalate until he admits he is tempted to go out and knock people’s hats off, and the sea is what stops him. The next sentence gives the game away: This is my substitute for pistol and ball. The voyage starts as an alternative to suicide.

2. Meditation and water

Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 1, “Loomings”

Ishmael has just proposed an experiment: if you are ever lost and thirsty in the American desert, and your caravan happens to include a metaphysical professor, follow him, because he will walk you to water. The solemn line arrives as the punchline to a joke. Melville does this constantly, and it is why the book is less heavy going than people fear.

3. Narcissus in the ocean

But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 1, “Loomings”

The same chapter turns serious in a single sentence. Narcissus drowned trying to grasp his reflection, and Ishmael says we all see that same image whenever we look into rivers and oceans. The key to it all is a bold claim for page three, and the rest of the novel, with its unreadable white whale, more or less honours it.

4. The Pacific

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 111, “The Pacific”

Late in the voyage the Pequod enters the Pacific, the ocean Ishmael has wanted to see since boyhood, and he stops for a short chapter of something close to worship. Gently awful is the phrase to notice: the sea is calm and terrifying at once. The paragraph goes on to imagine all the drowned lives and souls lying dreaming under the waves, which only move because the sleepers are restless.

Kate Chopin: the sea as a voice

5. The voice of the sea

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

Kate Chopin, The Awakening, chapter VI

This tiny chapter of The Awakening is where Edna Pontellier, on holiday at Grand Isle, starts to recognise her relations as an individual to the world. Chopin interrupts the narrative to give the sea its own paragraph, almost a prose poem. Notice the words for a spell: in chapter VI the solitude is temporary.

6. The touch of the sea

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

Kate Chopin, The Awakening, chapter VI

Both sentences come back, almost word for word, in the final chapter, as Edna walks into the Gulf. The repetition is the most carefully built effect in the novel. When the voice returns in chapter XXXIX, Chopin drops for a spell and the line about mazes of contemplation, so the invitation reads simply:

The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.

Kate Chopin, The Awakening, chapter XXXIX

A reader who has the first version in mind feels the cut. The wandering is no longer for a spell.

The sea as freedom, and as indifference

7. Captain Nemo

The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.

Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Part One, chapter X

Nemo says this over a dinner made entirely from the ocean, including a cream whose milk came from whales. The speech then turns political: The sea does not belong to despots. Thirty feet down, he says, no one’s laws apply. Professor Aronnax, his guest and prisoner, is beginning to see what kind of man has captured him.

8. Byron’s ocean

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean–roll! / Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; / Man marks the earth with ruin–his control / Stops with the shore

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth, stanza CLXXIX

Byron’s address to the ocean comes near the very end of the poem, and its pleasure is in human smallness. Every empire leaves ruins on land; at sea a sinking man leaves nothing, going down Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown. That last line, with its three negatives stacked up, is the one that stays with you.

9. Coleridge’s calm

Water, water, every where, / And all the boards did shrink; / Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part the Second

Read them in the original and the wording is Nor any drop, which slows the line down more than the version people tend to carry in their heads. The ship is becalmed after the Mariner has shot the albatross, stuck As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean. The sea that should carry them has become a punishment.

10. Conrad’s youth

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more–the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men

Joseph Conrad, Youth

Marlow is remembering the open boat that was his first command, after the old barque Judea, where he was second mate, burned at sea. He was twenty, parched and happy. The sentence keeps going, and darkens as it goes, calling the feeling deceitful and saying it lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort–to death. The sea in Youth is the measure of how short a life is.

Quick reference

What the sea is for, book by book

Line these up and each writer turns out to need the sea for something different. Melville uses it to think; Chopin uses it to let a character feel her own body; Verne uses it as politics; Byron as a rebuke to empire; Coleridge as a curse; Conrad as a clock. The ocean is the same in every case. What changes is who is looking at it, and from how far out.

The sea is also where some of literature’s loneliest moments happen. Pip’s hours in the water in Moby-Dick lead our collection of book quotes about solitude. For the sea in paint rather than prose, our piece on Hokusai’s Great Wave looks at the most famous wave ever printed. And Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, with its long-delayed boat trip, is covered in our Virginia Woolf quotes.

One last detail from Verne. When Nemo calls the sea the Living Infinite, he credits the phrase to one of your poets without naming him, and Aronnax never asks who. It is the only sentence in the speech where the captain borrows someone else’s words.

Sources

• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Project Gutenberg eBook #2701: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories, Project Gutenberg eBook #160: gutenberg.org/ebooks/160
• Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Project Gutenberg eBook #164: gutenberg.org/ebooks/164
• Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Project Gutenberg eBook #5131: gutenberg.org/ebooks/5131
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Project Gutenberg eBook #151: gutenberg.org/ebooks/151
• Joseph Conrad, Youth, a Narrative, Project Gutenberg eBook #525: gutenberg.org/ebooks/525