Sails Quotes

1. "This is the day of wonders. The land is covered with trees like a head with hair and behind the ship the sun rises tipping the top trees with light. The sky is clear and shining as a china plate and the water playfully ruffled with wind. Every wisp of fog is gone and the air is full of the resinous smell of the trees. Seabirds are flashing above the sails golden like creatures from Heaven, but the sailors raise a few shots to keep them from the rigging."
Author: Alice Munro

2. "I keep sailing on in this middle passage. I am sailing into the wind and the dark. But I am doing my best to keep my boat steady and my sails full."
Author: Arthur Ashe

3. "Fenella Doorn watched the unfamiliar wreck of a ship ghosting into her bay. Crippled by cannon fire, she thought. What else could do such damage? The foremast was blown away, as well as half the mainmast where a jury rig clung to the jagged stump, and shot holes tattered the sails on the mizzen. And yet, to Fenella's experienced eye the vessel had an air of defiance. Demi-cannons hulked in the shadowed gun ports. This ship was a fighter, battered but not beaten. With fight still in her, was she friend or foe?"
Author: Barbara Kyle

4. "I do what I've trained my whole life to do. I watch the ball. I keep my eye on the ball. I never stop watching.I watch it as it sails past me and lands in the catcher's mitt, a perfect and glorious strike three."
Author: Barry Lyga

5. "You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since-on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with."
Author: Charles Dickens

6. "What wings are to a bird, and sails to a ship, so is prayer to the soul. "
Author: Corrie Ten Boom

7. "To course across more kindly waters nowmy talent's little vessel lifts her sails,leaving behind herself a sea so cruel; and what I sing will be that second kingdom,in which the human soul is cleansed of sin,becoming worthy of ascent to Heaven."
Author: Dante Alighieri

8. "Lovely Arra Sails,nectar to all males,how I'd like to spear you like a whaler spears a whale!"
Author: Darren Shan

9. "Better to Die in Honour than to live in Shame." -Arra Sails"
Author: Darren Shan

10. "For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve--then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging."
Author: Edmund White

11. "One ship drives east and other drives west by the same winds that blow. It's the set of the sails and not the gales that determines the way they go."
Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox

12. "There, too, she would sit for hours gazing seawards. No tiniest speck of sail that crossed the waters could escape her watchful eyes, and as she watched she dreamed that some day one of these distant sails should bear down towards her, and one should come, in whose hand she would lay her own, and they two would flee to the far East. But as the changeless years went by and brought him not, the girl grew sullen, and a sense of wrong possessed her, for the older she grew, the clearer became her consciousness of a world beyond her, and the greater her longing to seek it.("The Serpent's Head")"
Author: Emilia Francis Strong Dilke

13. "You are going to take the high sea of the world; change not, on that account, patron or sails, anchor or wind. Have Jesus always for your patron, His Cross for a mast on which you must spread your resolutions as a sail. Your anchor shall be a profound confidence in Him, and you shall sail prosperously.May the favorable wind of celestial inspirations ever fill your vessel's sails fuller and fuller and make you happily arrive at the port of a holy eternity."
Author: Francis De Sales

14. "Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously."
Author: Frank Gehry

15. "Sometimes the storm winds blow so strong a man has no choice but to furl his sails."
Author: George R.R. Martin

16. "The beauty of the concept is that it takes the wind out of so many would-be ethical sails: the company that owns the porn-mag owns the company that makes the washing powder. The company that owns the munitions plants owns the company that makes the budgerigar food. The company that owns the nuclear waste owns the company that picks up your trash. These days, thanks to me, unless you pack up and go and live in a cave, you're putting money into evil and shit. And let's be realistic, if the cost of ethics is life in a cave . . ."
Author: Glen Duncan

17. "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Author: H. Jackson Brown Jr.

18. "We ate away, reminiscing about our victories over the enemies from different streets and villages and competing with each other in casting curses. A few golden butterflies and dragonflies were fluttering around us. The afternoon air was warm and clean, and the town below us seemed like a green harbor full of white sails."
Author: Ha Jin

19. "There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:-- through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it."
Author: Herman Melville

20. "The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales."
Author: Herman Melville

21. "Windmills, which are used in the great plains of Holland and North Germany to supply the want of falling water, afford another instance of the action of velocity. The sails are driven by air in motion - by wind."
Author: Hermann Von Helmholtz

22. "It's pleasant to get used to the expensive, the soft, the comfortable. Once you're addicted, it's so easy to become a sycophant, to trim the sails of your judgment in order to be kept on. The next step is to change your work to please those in power, and that is death to the sculptor."
Author: Irving Stone

23. "Tell you what we'll do," she said. "We'll drive to town and get some pickles, and some bread, and we'll eat the pickles in the car, and then we'll go to the station and get Daddy, and then we'll bring Daddy home and make him take us for a ride in the boat. You'll have to help him carry the sails down. O.K.?"
Author: J.D. Salinger

24. "May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

25. "Bilbo's Last SongDay is ended, dim my eyes,But journey long before me lies.Farewell, friends! I hear the call.The ship's beside the stony wall.Foam is white and waves are grey;Beyond the sunset leads my way.Foam is salt, the wind is free;I hear the rising of the Sea.Farewell, friends! The sails are set,The wind is east, the moorings fret.Shadows long before me lie,Beneath the ever-bending sky,But islands lie behind the SunThat I shall raise ere all is done;Lands there are to west of West,Where night is quiet and sleep is rest.Guided by the Lonely Star,Beyond the utmost harbour-bar,I'll find the heavens fair and free,And beaches of the Starlit Sea.Ship, my ship! I seek the West,And fields and mountains ever blest.Farewell to Middle-earth at last.I see the Star above my mast!"
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

26. "Farewell," they cried, "Wherever you fare till your eyries receive you at the journey's end!" That is the polite thing to say among eagles."May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks," answered Gandalf, who knew the correct reply."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

27. "When your life feels like you're on a sailboat, with no wind to fill your sails, there are still choices. You can drop anchor and enjoy your surroundings. Start your motor, if you have one. Grab an oar and start paddling, or wait for the wind to fill your sails once again. There are always other choices while crossing the ocean of life…"
Author: James A. Murphy

28. "Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver...History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and others we ignore. And as the pattern changes so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time that returns everything, changes everything. ..a bundle of abandoned clothes. The end of one identity and the beginning of another. …History is a madman's museum. I think I understand some of this, But it's all subject to the tide. Unmoor the boat. Part miracle part madness. My life is a series of set sails and shipwrecks. I run aground I cut loose, the rim is dangerously near the waterline. I feel like a saint in a coracle. Head thrown back, sun on my throat. Unmoor the boat."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

29. "The latter is very prepubescent.""Prepubescent!" Josh gasped. "Prepubescent!""I am totally pubescent," one of his friends said.Another said haughtily, "I will have you know that my mom and I are going to Aspen to shop for training bras this weekend."I rolled my eyes. "Later." I slid off the bench and stood."Hey,we're helping you go off the jump again tomorrow,right?" Josh asked, using the word helping very loosely."Yeah," another boy said, "eleventh time's the charm."I looked toward the Galaga machine. Fiona was still there, yet Nick was gone. Probably just to order her a drink.Ordinarily, I would have bounced all over the restaurant searching for him so I could flirt him out of Fiona's pink-nailed grasp. But the whoopee cushion had taken the wind out of my sails."
Author: Jennifer Echols

30. "Strolling down a white-graveled walk to the cliff above the ocean, he let his eyes rove aimlessly over the expanse of sea and sand: The icy-looking whitecaps, the blinking, faraway sails of boats, the sweeping, constantly searching gulls. Desolation. Eternal, infinite. Like Dostoevski's conception of eternity, a fly circling about a privy, the few signs of life only emphasized the loneliness."
Author: Jim Thompson

31. "I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination."
Author: Jimmy Dean

32. "I. cannot stoop to reply to the folly and the slander of every poor Tory partisan who assails me, and I should not have noticed you but for the fact that you are a member of the House of Commons."
Author: John Bright

33. "...love / is turning out the lights when others do, a curfew we / would take / for sails."
Author: Jorie Graham

34. "The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth."
Author: Joseph Conrad

35. "We clear the harbor and the wind catches her sails and my beautiful ship leans over ever so gracefully, and her elegant bow cuts cleanly into the increasing chop of the waves. I take a deep breath and my chest expands and my heart starts thumping so strongly I fear the others might see it beat through the cloth of my jacket. I face the wind and my lips peel back from my teeth in a grin of pure joy."
Author: L.A. Meyer

36. "He talks softly, patiently, as I sit on the window ledge and watch boats with colorful triangles for sails scratch the ocean."
Author: Lauren DeStefano

37. "Momma said that ghosts couldn't move over water. That's why Africans got trapped in the Americas.. They kept moving us over the water, stealing us away from our ghosts and ancestors, who cried salty rivers into the sand. That's where Momma was now, wailing at the water's edge, while her girls were pulled out of sight under white sails that cracked in the wind."
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson

38. "The boy and the girl had once dreamed of ships, long ago, before they'd ever seen the True Sea. They were the vessels of stories, magic ships with masts hewn from sweet cedar and sails spun by maidens from thread of pure gold. Their crews were white mice who sang songs and scrubbed the decks with their pink tails."
Author: Leigh Bardugo

39. "Cultural wisdom says 'Don't quit your day job.' Yet I think these desires represent our psyche's stretch toward wholeness. And to be whole, as many religious tranditions teach, is to make manifest a unique face of God in the world. We don't want to be irresponsible, yet for every accountant who deserts his family and sails for Tahiti, ten American men have heart attacks at their desks, after hours."
Author: Mary Rose O'Reilley

40. "Nemo Me Impugn Lacessit—No One Assails Me with Impunity. Or the alternative version—Do Not Fuck with Us or We Will Hurt You"
Author: Michael Grant

41. "Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth.""What giants?" Asked Sancho Panza."The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long.""Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.""Obviously," replied Don Quijote, "you don't know much about adventures."
Author: Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

42. "Morgon of Hed met the High One's harpist one autumn day when the trade-ships docked at Tol for the season's exchange of goods. A small boy caught sight of the round-hulled ships with their billowing sails striped red and blue and green, picking their way among the tiny fishing boats in the distance, and ran up the coast from Tol to Akren, the house of Morgon, Prince of Hed. There he disrupted an argument, gave his message, and sat down at the long, nearly deserted tables to forage whatever was left of breakfast. The Prince of Hed, who was recovering slowly from the effects of loading two carts of beer for trading the evening before, ran a reddened eye over the tables and shouted for his sister."
Author: Patricia A. McKillip

43. "Since the sheets were half-flown the sails instantly split at the seams, the maintopsail shaking so furiously that the masthead must have gone had not Mowett, the bosun, Bonden, Warley the captain of the maintop and three of his men gone aloft, laid out on the ice-coated yard and cut the sail away close to the reefs.Warley was on the lee yardarm when the footrope gave way under him and he fell, plunging far clear of the side and instantly vanishing in the terrible sea."
Author: Patrick O'Brian

44. "Light, my light, the world-filling light, the eye-kissing light, heart-sweetening light! Ah, the light dances, my darling, at the centre of my life; the light strikes, my darling, the chords of my love; the sky opens, the wind runs wild, laughter passes over the earth. The butterflies spread their sails on the sea of light. Lilies and jasmines surge up on the crest of the waves of light. The light is shattered into gold on every cloud, my darling, and it scatters gems in profusion. Mirth spreads from leaf to leaf, my darling, and gladness without measure. The heaven's river has drowned its banks and the flood of joy is abroad."
Author: Rabindranath Tagore

45. "I'm saying your name in the grocery store, I'm saying your name on the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal covered with frost, your name like a music that's been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud, a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails in wind and the slap of waves on the hull..."
Author: Richard Siken

46. "But only a fool sails into combat with nature"
Author: Robert Harris

47. "[T]hose who can take that crabbed tree handsomely upon their back, and fasten it on cannily, shall find it such a burden as wings unto a bird, or sails to a ship."
Author: Samuel Rutherford

48. "Beauty lies in the mind, inner soul....Beauty lies in the innocence, appreciation, understanding, warmth, expressions, caring nature, behavior towards others, the depth of understanding the situations, the kind of sufferings, struggles, losses, difficulties, sorrows, happiness- the thick n thins through which person sails throughout hi/her life. Which ultimately reflects on your face- the ultimate reflection of your mind and thus evolves a beautiful personality."
Author: Sriveena Dhagavkar

49. "...Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World! You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing. Beauty grown sad with its eternity Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea. Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait, For God has bid them share an equal fate; And when at last defeated in His wars, They have gone down under the same white stars, We shall no longer hear the little cry Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die."
Author: W.B. Yeats

50. "What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts."
Author: Walter Benjamin

Sails Quotes Pictures