Beneath The Surface Quotes

1. "There had been absolutely nothing I could do to cover up the love I had for her, no desires or goals or bodies dense enough to bury the need that had consumed me since the first time I'd glimpsed her. She'd stolen something from me that I'd never get back, something she kept hidden deep beneath the surface in places I doubted either of us could see, in places neither of us could define."
Author: A.L. Jackson

2. "Women, I learned, adapted.At first..they seemed so fragile, so dependent on fathers and husbands and brothers and lovers. Gradually, though, I noticed how supple their lives were beneath the surface. Then I realized it was this flexibility that enabled them to survive...that sooner or later, by choice or by chance, most women faced the task of adapting to a future on their own. When at my most optimistic, I thought of it as independence; in darker moods, as survival. Either way women had to do it."
Author: Alice Steinbach

3. "As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different."
Author: Amy Waldman

4. "As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone."
Author: Andy Goldsworthy

5. "There's no love more intense than the love we have for our kids - and where there is intense love, there is also intense fear lurking beneath the surface."
Author: Arianna Huffington

6. "Reluctantly, he put his hand up to the cold glass. That odd tingling sensation raced through his body again. His ears began to hum and his head felt strange and heavy. Beneath his touch, the glass seemed to soften and his fingers made small indentions in the surface. ~ "The Mirror"
Author: Cassie McCown

7. "SELFBENEATH THE SURFACE,VEILED ON PURPOSE,ALL KNOWING AND GRAND,DIRECTED, GUIDED, BY THE ETERNAL HAND,SUSTAINED, FULFILLED, FULL OF LIGHT,REALIZATION ACHIEVED, BY WILLFUL MIGHT."
Author: Charles Edward

8. "It felt…it felt like I had never had sex before.  Yeah, yeah, I know how damn crazy that sounds, but…it was the first time the flesh beneath me came with heat, and scent.  It was the first time I noticed the taste of someone, the touch that only she gave; the tingle that only her breath could cause on the surface of my skin."
Author: Christine Zolendz

9. "I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force--a wild pain and decay--also accompanies everything."
Author: David Lynch

10. "She saw the normative life of the planet, business people crossing streets beneath glass towers, the life of sitting on buses that take you logically to destinations, the unnerved surface of rolling plausibly along."
Author: Don DeLillo

11. "I don't know. I suppose I should have had a better idea of what I was letting myself in for. Still, the first murder – the farmer – seemed to have been so simple, a dropped stone falling to the lakebed with scarcely a ripple. The second one was also easy, at least at first, but I had no inkling how different it would be. What we took for a docile, ordinary weight (gentle plunk, swift rush to the bottom, dark waters closing over it without a trace) was in fact a depth charge, one that exploded quite without warning beneath the glassy surface, and the repercussions of which may not be entirely over, even now."
Author: Donna Tartt

12. "Mosca had been so busy working the oars of her little plan that she had failed to see the iceberg upon which it was doomed to founder. And now here it was in front of her, a towering glacial mountain of selfishness, and she could not understand how she could have missed it. How vast was it? How far beneath the surface did it go?"
Author: Frances Hardinge

13. "The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantastic is, moreover, a product of human imagination, perhaps even an excess of imagination. It arises when laws thought to be absolute are transcended, in the borderland between life and death, the animate and the inanimate, the self and the world; it arises when the real turns into the unreal, and the solid presence into vision, dream or hallucination. The fantastic is the unexpected occurrence, the startling novelty which goes contrary to all our expectations of what is possible. The ego multiplies and splits, time and space are distorted."
Author: Franz Rottensteiner

14. "The underground of the city is like what's underground in people. Beneath the surface, it's boiling with monsters."
Author: Guillermo Del Toro

15. "The more he saw, the more he doubted. He watched men narrowly, and saw how, beneath the surface, courage was often rashness; and prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation; justice, a wrong; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, a modus vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, generous, prudent or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-men. ‘What a cold-blooded jest!' said he to himself. ‘It was not devised by a God.' From that time forth he renounced a better world, and never uncovered himself when a Name was pronounced, and for him the carven saints in the churches became works of art"
Author: Honoré De Balzac

16. "WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back."
Author: James Salter

17. "Whole worlds exist beneath the surface. And maybe you can't see down there, Michael thought, but there's a part of you that knows."
Author: Jess Walter

18. "Our food chain is in crisis. Big agribusiness has made profits more important than your health—more important than the environment—more important than your right to know how your food is produced. But beneath the surface, a revolution is growing."
Author: John Robbins

19. "He lived within himself, nourished by his own substance, like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves. Solitude had reacted upon his brain like a narcotic. After having strained and enervated it, his mind had fallen victim to a sluggishness which annihilated his plans, broke his will power and invoked a cortège of vague reveries to which he passively submitted.The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life."
Author: Joris Karl Huysmans

20. "Right on cue, the ground came whipping up beneath them. No longer simply held aloft by anti-gravity units, the vehicle's futuristic replacements for wheels could be put to work. Bigger, beefier versions of the same things that made his delivery bike work, the repulsors used the interplay between two tangible energy fields to create a synchronized wave pattern capable of instituting temporary charge differences between the vehicle and road surface for the purposes of facilitating the attraction and repulsion necessary to maintain an approximately constant distance. In other words, he had traction now."
Author: Joseph R. Lallo

21. "On the surface of the ocean, men wage war and destroy each other; but down here, just a few feet beneath the surface, there is a calm and peace, unmolested by man"
Author: Jules Verne

22. "He shivered beneath her touch, and his jaw clenched. It pleased her. Her longing rose to the surface, and an unfamiliar emotion overcame her. It swam beneath her skin, lighting little flickers of recognition. It was the same heat—the same feeling—that had made her run the night before. Not this time, though. This time she would own it. Embrace it. Ride it. Enjoy it."
Author: Justine Dell

23. "Things are never as they seem. A person. A Mark. A statement. They are always deeper than we perceive, like walking in the ocean and suddenly dipping under the surface because the bottom has disappeared beneath your feet. The water appears shallow until you are suddenly flailing around beneath the surface, desperately searching for stable ground once again."
Author: Kelseyleigh Reber

24. "Multihued light radiated up from beneath the water, centered among the reeds, and then diffusing outward as it reached the surface. Violet had never seen anything like it, and she knew that the spectrum of light was defying its very nature by behaving in that way.It could only be one thing.There was something dead down there."
Author: Kimberly Derting

25. "War doesn't start with an explosion….It bears far more subtlety. A simmer beneath the surface, as if bringing broth to a boil."
Author: Kristina McMorris

26. "The art does not always mimic the artist. You never know the real person until you slide beneath their surface"
Author: Lisa Renee Jones

27. "And what of your children?" I gestured to the others at the table. "The only thing that divides us from that laborer who toils far beneath the surface of the earth in our fathers' mines is the blood that runs through our veins.""Or half our blood," Vivian said with a sniff."Vivian,"Mr Kensington warned.I didn't flinch. "Half my blood, then," I said with a prim nod back at Vivian. "But if I cut open my wrist alongside yours, would it not appear as the very same red? Despite your effort to be a blueblood, sister, you are as red-blooded as I."
Author: Lisa Tawn Bergren

28. "No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed."
Author: Madeleine L'Engle

29. "As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there's something below it, I won't know it. But that's part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn't the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I'm perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

30. "…I suddenly discerned at my feet, crouching among the rocks for protection against the heat, the marine goddesses for whom Elstir had lain in wait and whom he had surprised there, beneath the dark glaze as lovely as Leonardo would have painted, the marvelous Shadows, sheltering furtively, nimble and silent, ready at the first glimmer of light to slip behind the stone, to hide in a cranny, and prompt, once the menacing ray had passed, to return to the rock or the seaweed over whose torpid slumbers they seemed to be keeping vigil, beneath the sun that crumbled the cliffs and the etiolated ocean, motionless lightfoot guardians darkening the water's surface with their viscous bodies and the attentive gaze of their deep blue eyes."
Author: Marcel Proust

31. "Look beneath the surface; let not the several quality of a thing nor its worth escape thee."
Author: Marcus Aurelius

32. "Her father...was all front to back in his transparency: what you saw was what there was, there was nothing clandestine in his character, and those few aspects that were disguised or hidden were that way because they were his closely kept emotions. When on those rare occasions he allowed his emotions to be seen, their appearance was all the more surprising. And more powerful. Which taught her early on a thing or two about the power of what's visible -- it derives its mystery from what it hides. How many stories had she heard of people sensing ghosts behind the walls, hobgoblins in the woods? People living on the shores of lakes since time began have conjured creatures from those depths. If you believe a thing is something different from the evidence before you, if you believe something is hidden by the wall or in the woods or beneath the surface of the lake, then that belief gives power to the darkness and the depths -- power to enchant; to terrify."
Author: Marianne Wiggins

33. "After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin…The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don't know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers."
Author: Mark Doty

34. "The book of Jonah is one of the shortest books in the Bible. Yet, something beneath the surface whispers to us, hinting that there is much more beneath this little book. (page iii)"
Author: Michael Ben Zehabe

35. "Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story."
Author: Neil Gaiman

36. "He could feel the earth beneath, all the deep stone of it, cool and hard near the surface of the earth, but hotter and softer as you went deep, until it flowed like honey, a vast sweet fiery ocean of molten rock a thousand times more voluminous and ten thousand times heavier than the sea. It felt to him as if it were his own blood, and his heart pumped it."
Author: Orson Scott Card

37. "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."
Author: Oscar Wilde

38. "We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives."
Author: Parker J. Palmer

39. "You'll always be a pretty unhappy man if you are always going to insist on digging and getting beneath things, instead of viewing just the surface. Excavations of thought and reason are always deadly, and always followed by a landslide. We can't both live and think too much; we must renounce either one or the other. How could one support existence if, like you, he were always reflecting on things? For, only a little thought is needed to urge us on to death. Look at a star in the sky and ask what it is: then our misery, our low estate, our limited and thin intelligence, appear in all their splendor. In disgust, we pity ourselves; weak and ashamed of ourselves, who were once stupidly arrogant, we call for the relief of oblivion, even more incomprehensible . We must fix things so that they glance off us, like so many strikes off armor. Accept everything cheerfully. Laugh at it all."
Author: Petrus Borel

40. "Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface."
Author: Ron Rash

41. "Her sadness was like a deep well just beneath the surface of her determination."
Author: Sage Steadman

42. "Even if you couldn't see it beneath the surface, molecules were bonding, energy pushing up slowly, as something worked do hare, all alone to grow."
Author: Sarah Dessen

43. "I catch a flash of red-gold beneath the surface of the water, and realize that there are koi in the pond, massive, serene, and I wonder: are they dreams of fish, or fish who dream?"
Author: Sarah Monette

44. "To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck--paddling, paddling, paddling."
Author: Scott Stossel

45. "He plunged beneath the surface and knew that these were Elyon's waters, and his lake had no bottom."
Author: Ted Dekker

46. "Being in the depths of the ocean was like being in the womb, suspended in a liquid environment, listening to my own breathing and heartbeat. Whether it was the serenity and security of being surrounded by this living liquid, or the total distraction of the adventure of the unknown which took me far away from the daily weight of the child abuse and violence at home, I sank beneath the surface, and if only for those few moments, was free."
Author: Tom North

47. "Yet, much of what lies beneath the ocean's surface remains a mystery, and our nation continues to rely on a confused, antiquated system of ocean governance."
Author: Tom Allen

48. "She listens closely to the silence as though the sounds just beneath the surface are awaiting to release the significance of a moment."
Author: Truth Devour

49. "The arrow increased without motion, then in a quick swirl the trout lipped a fly beneath the surface with that sort of gigantic delicacy of an elephant picking up a peanut."
Author: William Faulkner

50. "As the surface of the seashore rocks were pitted by by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distres brought by the sea, so did silence at Lahardane."
Author: William Trevor

Beneath The Surface Quotes Pictures