John Steinbeck Quotes

Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. an alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.

Waves are the voices of tides. Tides are life," murmured Niko. "They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean's pulse, and our own heartbeat.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea.

And then he drew a dial from his poke, And looking with lack-lustre eye, Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock: Thus we may see', Quoth he, 'how the world wags: 'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more 'twill be eleven; And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour we rot and rot.

She is mine own, And I as rich in having such a jewel As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl, The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.

Truly time should be measured by events, and not by the lapse of hours.

One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea.

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me. The sea.

The tide rises, the tide falls, The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; The little waves, with their soft, white hands, Efface the footprints in the sands, And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Alice: "How long is forever?" White Rabbit: "Sometimes, just one second."

But he sleeps on the top of his mast with his eyes closed tight. The gull inquired into his dream, which was, "I must not fall. The spangled sea below wants me to fall. It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.

Stand through life firm as a rock in the sea, undisturbed and unmoved by its ever-rising waves

But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.

I love Florida. I love the beach. I love the sound of the crashing surfers against the rocks.

Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.

It's hard being a rock; they have such a strange sense of time - and priorities.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.

Like Thornton Wilder said, time is not a river, but rather a landscape that you step in and out of. I've always found that true of creative work, and I've heard so many songwriters and writers in general say the same thing... When you're going into the realms of your self and trying to tap into the mystery of this creative source, linear time kind of falls away.

The rain is falling all around, It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea. - Rain

When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.

Rains driven by storms fall not perpetually on the land already sodden, neither do varying gales for ever disturb the Caspian sea.

A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dinghy one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average experience, which is never at sea in a dinghy.

In high seas or in low seas, I'm gonna be your friend... I'm gonna be your friend. In high tide or in low tide, I'll be by your side... I'll be by your side.