Beautiful Harbour Quotes

I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.

It was like being born in Germany after World War II, being from Japan after Pearl Harbour, or America after Hiroshima. History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn't change where you were from. But still, you didn't have to stay there. You didn't have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in the DAR, or the Gatlin Historical Society, or the Sisters. And you didn't have to accept that things had to be the way they were, like Lena. Ethan Carte Wate hadn't, and I couldn't either.

Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart?

London - beautiful, immortal London - has never been a 'city' in the simplest sense of the word. It was, and is, a living, breathing thing, a stone leviathan that harbours secrets underneath its scales. It guards them covetously, hiding them deep within its body; only the mad or the worthy can find them.

She wore a loose bathrobe that covered up a body that would have won first prize in a beauty contest for cement blocks.....She had a voice that made pearl harbour sound like a lullaby.

Can it be that there is not enough space for man in this beautiful world, under those immeasurable, starry heavens? Is it possible that man's heart can harbour, amid such ravishing natural beauty, feelings of hatred, vengeance, or the desire to destroy his fellows? All the evil in man, one would think, should disappear on contact with Nature, the most spontaneous expression of beauty and goodness.

Lila harboured an unspoken belief that motherhood was the best possible rehearsal for a prospective police officer.. Mothers were naturals for law enforcement, because toddlers, like criminals, were often belligerent and destructive. If you could get through those early years without losing your cool or blowing your top, you might be able to deal with grown-up crime. The key was to not react, to stay adult..

Some people harbour so much thorns inside, it strangles out all the beauty. The kingdom under yer aunt’s keep – smothered by nettles and vines – be a reflection of her heart. A rosebush with nary a rose. It weren’t ye that caused it. It were her own dark devices and hatred that drived her. That ugliness be makin‘ bits way out as we speak. It’ll be what vanquishes her in the end.

Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one's stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: God forgive me.

I was just a dark heart wrapped in a pretty pink bow. It astonished me how many people chose to focus on the beautiful ribbon instead of what it harboured inside.

One of those awfully simple and beautiful days with you that makes me afraid of dying, makes me afraid of not being. When the soft 6 o’clock sun is slowly sinking behind the harbour, and your smile, effortless and tidy, makes time take flight. You save me from death but also from lifeless living. With you, nothing's wasted on me. The music of the breeze, the colours of children’s footsteps, the dancing trees—I drink them all and, what’s more, you drink these with me. One of those insignificant days when we do nothing and achieve nothing, and yet, chasing the ducks and sharing my last stick of gum with you is everything.

Fireworks made of glass. An explosion of dew. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Silence. There are drugs that work the same, and while I am not suggesting that our founder purchased the glassworks to get more drops, it is clear that she had the seed planted, not once, but twice, and knew already the lovely contradictory nature of glass and she did not have to be told, on the day she saw the works at Darling Harbour, that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.

It wasn't a remarkable face in any way, but it had a clean-lined sweetness that brought up summer barbecues, golden retrievers, soccer games on new-mown grass, and I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.

They were the cars at the fair that were whirling around her; no, they were the planets, while the sun stood, burning and spinning and guttering in the centre; here they came again, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto; but they were not planets, for it was not the merry-go-round at all, but the Ferris wheel, they were constellations, in the hub of which, like a great cold eye, burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went: Cassiopeia, Cepheus, the Lynx, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and the Dragon; yet they were not constellations, but, somehow, myriads of beautiful butterflies, she was sailing into Acapulco harbour through a hurricane of beautiful butterflies, zigzagging overhead and endlessly vanishing astern over the sea, the sea, rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to glide in colourless ellipses over the sand, sinking, sinking, someone was calling her name far away and she remembered, they were in a dark wood, she heard the wind and the rain rushing through the forest and saw the tremours of lightning shuddering through the heavens and the horse—great God, the horse—and would this scene repeat itself endlessly and forever?—the horse, rearing, poised over her, petrified in midair, a statue, somebody was sitting on the statue, it was Yvonne Griffaton, no, it was the statue of Huerta, the drunkard, the murderer, it was the Consul, or it was a mechanical horse on the merry-go-round, the carrousel, but the carrousel had stopped and she was in a ravine down which a million horses were thundering towards her, and she must escape, through the friendly forest to their house, their little home by the sea.

Susan Baker and the Anne Shirley of other days saw her coming, as they sat on the big veranda at Ingleside, enjoying the charm of the cat's light, the sweetness of sleepy robins whistling among the twilit maples, and the dance of a gusty group of daffodils blowing against the old, mellow, red brick wall of the lawn. Anne was sitting on the steps, her hands clasped over her knee, looking, in the kind dusk, as girlish as a mother of many has any right to be; and the beautiful gray-green eyes, gazing down the harbour road, were as full of unquenchable sparkle and dream as ever. Behind her, in the hammock, Rilla Blythe was curled up, a fat, roly-poly little creature of six years, the youngest of the Ingleside children. She had curly red hair and hazel eyes that were now buttoned up after the funny, wrinkled fashion in which Rilla always

within the harbour, or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or day, for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks, descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles, sought the shade alike—taking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too intensely blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set with one great flaming jewel of fire. The universal stare made the eyes ache. Towards the distant line of Italian coast, indeed, it was a little relieved

Everything was so beautiful in this magical moment before sunrise. The wild blue irises around the pond, the violet shadows in the curves of the dunes, the white, filmy mist hanging over the buttercup valley across the pond, the cloth of gold and silver thtat was called a field of daisies, thye cool, delicious gulf breeze, the blue of far lands beyond the harbour, plumes of purple and mauve smoke going up on the still, golden air from the chimneys of Stovepipe Town where the fishermen rose early. And Teddy lying at her feet, his slim brown hands clasped behind his head. Again she felt thye magnetic attraction of his personality. Felt it so strongly that she dared not meet his eyes. Yet she was admitting to herself with a secret cadour which would have horrified Aunt Elizabeth that she wanted to run her fingers through his sleek black hair- feel his arms about her- press her face against his dark tender ne- feel his lips on her lips- Teddy took one of his hands from under his head and put it over hers.

And as we stood there, a curious thing happened: a kind of window opened in the rain, just as if a cloud had been hitched aside like a curtain, and in the space between we saw a landscape that took our breath away. The high ground along which the road ran fell away through a black, woody belt, and beyond it, for more miles than you can imagine, lay the whole basin of the Black Country, clear, amazingly clear, with innumerable smokestacks rising out of it like the merchant shipping of the world laid up in an estuary at low tide, each chimney flying a great pennant of smoke that blew away eastward by the wind, and the whole scene bleared by the light of a sulphurous sunset. No one need ever tell me again that the Black Country isn't beautiful. In all Shrophire and Radnor we'd seen nothing to touch it for vastness and savagery. And then this apocalyptic light! It was like a landscape of the end of the world, and, curiously enough, though men had built the chimneys and fired the furnaces that fed the smoke, you felt that the magnificence of the scene owed nothing to them. Its beauty was singularly inhuman and its terror – for it was terrible, you know – elemental. It made me wonder why you people who were born and bred there ever write about anything else.

Water droplets fell to earth whilst others embellished and baptised an abundance of webs. Their moistened silk threads resembled bridal veils as the sun fastened its gaze upon their shimmering fibres. Each possessed a weave unique to itself, intricate, though purposeful, strong yet submissive; delicate and melodious upon the eye. As my senses trickled through the silvery gauze, I became liberated from the eggshell. All things became much more terrible and far more beautiful at once. A dragonfly emerging, wings a-glisten, from years of safe harbour below a dense and watery film. I beheld the texture of the world as would a blind man

How beautiful the old Glen was, in its August ripeness, with its chain of bowery old homesteads, tilled meadows and quiet gardens. The western sky was like a great golden pearl. Far down the harbour was frosted with a dawning moonlight. The air was full of exquisite sounds—sleepy robin whistles, wonderful, mournful, soft murmurs of wind in the twilit trees, rustle of aspen poplars talking in silvery whispers and shaking their dainty, heart-shaped leaves, lilting young laughter from the windows of rooms where the girls were making ready for the dance. The world was steeped in maddening loveliness of sound and colour. He would think only of these things and of the deep, subtle joy they gave him.

Yes, I'm the one who washes the plates and glasses They call me an easy woman When they give me a penny I still have to say thank you Here I am, in ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel Today, you don't know who I am Today, you don't know who I am   But one evening, one beautiful evening A big commotion People running along the shore Saying: "Look who's coming!" And me, I'll smile for the first time They'll say: "You, you're smiling now?"   A big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will enter the harbour!   I'll always be washing The glasses and plates I'll always be an "easy woman" When they give me a penny I'll always say thank you I'll keep my ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel And tomorrow, tomorrow like today You'll never know who I am!   But one evening, that beautiful evening for which I live Look how the cannons Wake up and turn For the first time, I'll burst out laughing "What, brat, you have the heart to laugh?"   That big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will bombard the harbour!   Then the sailors will come to shore More than a hundred, they'll mark with a cross of blood Every house, every door And it's before me that will be brought Enchained, imploring, mutilated and bloodied Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen! Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen!   Then the one I'm waiting for will appear, he'll say to me: "What is it that you want from all these people I'm killing?" And I'll sweetly reply: "Kill them all! For each head that falls I'll clap my hands, here we go! And that big ship, Far from the city where everything will be dead Will carry me towards life!

To be frank, I think the elegant, long sentence is a thing of beauty, a self-contained entity worthy of study all by itself. Consider this sentence by Dylan Thomas from Quite Early One Morning: I was born in a large Welsh town at the beginning of the Great War—an ugly, lovely town (or so it was and is to me), crawling, sprawling by a long and splendid curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old men from nowhere, beachcombed, idled and paddled, watched the dock-bound ships or the ships streaming away into wonder and India, magic and China, countries bright with oranges and loud with lions; threw stones into the sea for the barking outcast dogs; made castles and forts and harbours and race tracks in the sand; and on Saturday afternoons listened to the brass band, watched the Punch and Judy, or hung about on the fringes of the crowd to hear the fierce religious speakers who shouted at the sea, as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, white-horsed and full of fishes.

in the light of love... love is beauty, like an endlessly glowing field of flowers... love is the stars, shining through in a world of darkness... love is the beacon, lighting the way to safe harbour... love is, what light dreams about becoming... dreaming light, love is my light.

Anne’s home then was already centuries old and though beautiful as it was, I cannot say I had ever felt at ease in the great Hall. Shadows, creaks, and groans as well as whispers and growls have forever lived within its walls. Evil was part of its foundations and even then, the rambling mansion harboured many souls and secrets. This is something inevitable in a place as old as Loftus Hall.

In reality two negations are involved in my title Immoralist. I first of all deny the type of man that has hitherto been regarded as the highest—the good, the kind, and the charitable; and I also deny that kind of morality which has become recognised and paramount as morality-in-itself—I speak of the morality of decadence, or, to use a still cruder term, Christian morality. I would agree to the second of the two negations being regarded as the more decisive, for, reckoned as a whole, the overestimation of goodness and kindness seems to me already a consequence of decadence, a symptom of weakness, and incompatible with any ascending and yea-saying life. Negation and annihilation are inseparable from a yea-saying attitude towards life. Let me halt for a moment at the question of the psychology of the good man. In order to appraise the value of a certain type of man, the cost of his maintenance must be calculated,—and the conditions of his existence must be known. The condition of the existence of the good is falsehood: or, otherwise expressed, the refusal at any price to see how reality is actually constituted. The refusal to see that this reality is not so constituted as always to be stimulating beneficent instincts, and still less, so as to suffer at all moments the intrusion of ignorant and good-natured hands. To consider distress of all kinds as an objection, as something which must be done away with, is the greatest nonsense on earth; generally speaking, it is nonsense of the most disastrous sort, fatal in its stupidity—almost as mad as the will to abolish bad weather, out of pity for the poor, so to speak. In the great economy of the whole universe, the terrors of reality (in the passions, in the desires, in the will to power) are incalculably more necessary than that form of petty happiness which is called "goodness"; it is even needful to practise leniency in order so much as to allow the latter a place at all, seeing that it is based upon a falsification of the instincts. I shall have an excellent opportunity of showing the incalculably calamitous consequences to the whole of history, of the credo of optimism, this monstrous offspring of the homines optimi. Zarathustra,[1] the first who recognised that the optimist is just as degenerate as the pessimist, though perhaps more detrimental, says: "Good men never speak the truth. False shores and false harbours were ye taught by the good. In the lies of the good were ye born and bred. Through the good everything hath become false and crooked from the roots." Fortunately the world is not built merely upon those instincts which would secure to the good-natured herd animal his paltry happiness. To desire everybody to become a "good man," "a gregarious animal," "a blue-eyed, benevolent, beautiful soul," or—as Herbert Spencer wished—a creature of altruism, would mean robbing existence of its greatest character, castrating man, and reducing humanity to a sort of wretched Chinadom. And this some have tried to do! It is precisely this that men called morality. In this sense Zarathustra calls "the good," now "the last men," and anon "the beginning of the end"; and above all, he considers them as the most detrimental kind of men, because they secure their existence at the cost of Truth and at the cost of the Future. "The good—they cannot create; they are ever the beginning of the end. They crucify him who writeth new values on new tables; they sacrifice unto themselves the future; they crucify the whole future of humanity! The good—they are ever the beginning of the end. And whatever harm the slanderers of the world may do, the harm of the good is the most calamitous of all harm.

Ken Wharfe In 1987, Ken Wharfe was appointed a personal protection officer to Diana. In charge of the Princess’s around-the-clock security at home and abroad, in public and in private, Ken Wharfe became a close friend and loyal confidant who shared her most private moments. After Diana’s death, Inspector Wharfe was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and made a Member of the Victorian Order, a personal gift of the sovereign for his loyal service to her family. His book, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He is a regular contributor with the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NBC, CBS, and CNN, participating in numerous outside broadcasts and documentaries for BBC--Newsnight, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News, News 24, and GMTV. My memory of Diana is not her at an official function, dazzling with her looks and clothes and the warmth of her manner, or even of her offering comfort among the sick, the poor, and the dispossessed. What I remember best is a young woman taking a walk in a beautiful place, unrecognized, carefree, and happy. Diana increasingly craved privacy, a chance “to be normal,” to have the opportunity to do what, in her words, “ordinary people” do every day of their lives--go shopping, see friends, go on holiday, and so on--away from the formality and rituals of royal life. As someone responsible for her security, yet understanding her frustration, I was sympathetic. So when in the spring of the year in which she would finally be separated from her husband, Prince Charles, she yet again raised the suggestion of being able to take a walk by herself, I agreed that such a simple idea could be realized. Much of my childhood had been spent on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, a county in southern England approximately 120 miles from London; I remembered the wonderful sandy beaches of Studland Bay, on the approach to Poole Harbour. The idea of walking alone on miles of almost deserted sandy beach was something Diana had not even dared dream about. At this time she was receiving full twenty-four-hour protection, and it was at my discretion how many officers should be assigned to her protection. “How will you manage it, Ken? What about the backup?” she asked. I explained that this venture would require us to trust each other, and she looked at me for a moment and nodded her agreement. And so, early one morning less than a week later, we left Kensington Palace and drove to the Sandbanks ferry at Poole in an ordinary saloon car. As we gazed at the coastline from the shabby viewing deck of the vintage chain ferry, Diana’s excitement was obvious, yet not one of the other passengers recognized her. But then, no one would have expected the most photographed woman in the world to be aboard the Studland chain ferry on a sunny spring morning in May. As the ferry docked after its short journey, we climbed back into the car and then, once the ramp had been lowered, drove off in a line of cars and service trucks heading for Studland and Swanage. Diana was driving, and I asked her to stop in a sand-covered area about half a mile from the ferry landing point. We left the car and walked a short distance across a wooded bridge that spanned a reed bed to the deserted beach of Shell Bay. Her simple pleasure at being somewhere with no one, apart from me, knowing her whereabouts was touching to see. Diana looked out toward the Isle of Wight, anxious by now to set off on her walk to the Old Harry Rocks at the western extremity of Studland Bay. I gave her a personal two-way radio and a sketch map of the shoreline she could expect to see, indicating a landmark near some beach huts at the far end of the bay, a tavern or pub, called the Bankes Arms, where I would meet her.

I’m texting your picture, your name, and your address to one of my flatmates. In case I’m letting your beautiful building blind me to the fact you’re actually a serial killer.” To his credit, he didn’t look at her like she was crazy, just smiled. “I’m a reasonably famous rugby player. I’m on the TV. You can see my half naked ass on a billboard as you drive off the Sydney Harbour Bridge.” “What, you can’t be a serial killer as well?

Aurelian Townshend Kind and True 'Tis not how witty nor how free, Nor yet how beautiful she be, But how much kind and true to me. Freedom and wit none can confine And beauty like the sun doth shine, But kind and true are only mine. Let others with attention sit To listen, and admire her wit, That is a rock where I'll not split. Let others dote upon her eyes And burn their hearts for sacrifice, Beauty's a calm where danger lies. But kind and true have been long tried A harbour where we may confide, And safely there at anchor ride. From change of winds there we are free And need not fear storms' tyranny, Nor pirate though a prince he be.

This pain we have harboured so long, breaks into beautiful song.

Beholden by Stewart Stafford All luminous things harbour flaws, If you permit the mask of judgement, To drag your eyes down to see them, Missing Chimera joys of the voyeur. Flirting looks at the sun are all we have, Save for the shadowy beard of clouds, Sunspots dappling the magisterial orb, Freckles of the wrapping skin merging. Smudged handwriting overlooked, Granting character to spidered scrawl, Blind alleys serve as crooked prizes, A third eye, newborn-viewing the self. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

By the 1580s he had already hired a professional researcher from Chania in Crete—there was a Venetian connection—to search for the oldest and purest of the Chrysostom manuscripts and to buy them. Savile recommended the agent look in Patmos, the beautiful island in the eastern Aegean where the monastery of St John was said to harbour the greatest treasures, and to acquire what he could. It was a lifelong fascination for Savile which culminated in his great edition of Chrysostom’s work, printed and published between 1610 and 1612 at the appalling cost of £ 8,000. By then, Savile had assembled 15,800 sheets of manuscript (which he presented to the Bodleian Library in Oxford). All the great libraries of Europe had been searched, not only in Mount Athos, Constantinople and the island of Chalce, but in Paris, Vienna, Augsburg and Munich.

Anne was sitting on the steps, her hands clasped over her knee, looking, in the kind dusk, as girlish as a mother of many has any right to be; and the beautiful gray-green eyes, gazing down the harbour road, were as full of unquenchable sparkle and dream as ever.

Yes, I'm the one who washes the plates and glasses They call me an easy woman When they give me a penny I still have to say thank you Here I am, in ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel Today, you don't know who I am Today, you don't know who I am But one evening, one beautiful evening A big commotion People running along the shore Saying: "Look who's coming!" And me, I'll smile for the first time They'll say: "You, you're smiling now?" A big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will enter the harbour! I'll always be washing The glasses and plates I'll always be an "easy woman" When they give me a penny I'll always say thank you I'll keep my ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel And tomorrow, tomorrow like today You'll never know who I am! But one evening, that beautiful evening for which I live Look how the cannons Wake up and turn For the first time, I'll burst out laughing "What, brat, you have the heart to laugh?" That big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will bombard the harbour! Then the sailors will come to sure More than a hundred, they'll mark with a cross of blood Every house, every door And it's before me that will be brought Enchained, imploring, mutilated and bloodied Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen! Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen! Then the one I'm waiting for will appear, he'll say to me: "What is it that you want from all these people I'm killing?" And I'll sweetly reply: "Kill them all! For each head that falls I'll clap my hands, here we go! And that big ship, Far from the city where everything will be dead Will carry me towards life!

Harbour love, not hate - don't let it contaminate your heart and conceal your beauty.