Curious Tides Quotes

Landscapes of great wonder and beauty lie under our feet and all around us. They are discovered in tunnels in the ground, the heart of flowers, the hollows of trees, fresh-water ponds, seaweed jungles between tides, and even drops of water. Life in these hidden worlds is more startling in reality than anything we can imagine. How could this earth of ours, which is only a speck in the heavens, have so much variety of life, so many curious and exciting creatures?

Dreams are manifestations of our unconscious desires.

... quite naturally, I am curious about behaviour which does not fit the natural patterns, which floats suspended at some unexplored level of the sentient sea and defies the tides and waves of society.

She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it forever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.

Remember not to veer from the path, dreamling.

Sea Hags* Sea Hags are curious creatures, particularly as they have no need for us. “Who needs a husband?” they ask in chiming voices. “Who needs a mother? When we have Poseidon as mate and the great Ocean herself to hold us.” Cascades of laughter behind the sparkling scales of their hands in a manner to call to question both their good sense and their sincerity. Sea Hags – one could study them for fifty years and find no answer. (*Shamelessly inspired by Kafka’s Sirens: another creature entirely.)

Been a pleasure, Don Gato. Have a sexy evening.” The cat looked dryly at him before hopping down to the floor and sauntering out of the house. Ken’s face showed genuine surprise as the cat left. He looked curiously at Jin. Guessing that Ken was wondering if he’d just used his telepathy on the cat, Jin beamed. “Oh, yeah,” he lied. “Not just human minds I’m the master of. I get cows to dance in musicals.

Leah is prone to ring the bath with a scrim of some curiously viscous material, oddly gritty when rolled between finger and thumb and pinkish in the white bathroom light. When I look at it, I think of tide pools filled with spiny creatures, scrub at it before running the taps again to clear the debris, little rock pool remains of something that might be shell or might be skin or might be something else entirely.

There is a scholar on these shores who breathes stories. He inhales all manner of them, holds each one in his soul, and when his lungs are too full of words, he exhales at last, daring to breathe his own stories to life. Thus he breathes in words and breathes more out, in and out and in again like the measured rhythm of the sea, until one day he finds a peculiar book that sets even the tides off their fated course.

Watching him, his hands buried in his pockets—to keep from circling her neck she supposed—she couldn't help but marvel at the curious mix of Southern courtesy and male arrogance, the natural assumption he shouldered of being lawfully in control. "Engaging in a moral battle isn't always hazardous to one's health, you know." "Doesn't look like it's doing wonders for yours." "Saints be praised, it can actually be rewarding." Looking over his shoulder, he halted in the middle of the room. "Irish." "I beg your pardon?" "You. Irish. The green eyes, the tiny bit of red in your hair. Is Connor your real name?" "Yes, why..." she said, stammering. Bloody hell. "Of course." "Liar." She felt the slow, hot roll of color cross her cheeks. "What could that possibly have to do with anything?" "I don't know, but I have a feeling it means something. It's the first I've heard come out of that sassy mouth of yours that didn't sound like some damned speech." He tapped his head, starting to pace again. "What I wonder is, where are you in there?

A book was all it ever took to hold him captive.

The idea of saying goodbye was unbearable. Emory had walked back into his life, carved herself a place in it despite all his trepidations, and though Baz doubted he would ever feel fearless like Kai or Romie, he knew Emory had made him want to fear less. This girl who’d laughed in fields of gold, who’d made sunflowers bloom, who’d looked up at the stars with him and thought they were lost should trying to find their way home.

in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, the prisoner stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path on the way to the gallows. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive.

The sands are the children’s great resort. They cluster there, like ants: so busy burying their particular friends, and making castles with infinite labour which the next tide overthrows, that it is curious to consider how their play, to the music of the sea, foreshadows the realities of their after lives.

Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.

Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it forever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of the tide.

In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold, the colonized subject has to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks. This is apparent in the colonized intellectual's inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand, when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck. He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. But the fellah, the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being. During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle - the defeat of colonialism. Swept along by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedantically. He does not always see the overall picture. He introduces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into that awesome mixer and grinder called a people's revolution. Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the local level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. "Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?" And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective model.

And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable, the wrongness of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. [...] He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.

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.

Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind; the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation. Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

As a child, she was curious about the world beyond the sea, but in a vague, half-sketched way, as she was curious about a lot of things she read in books. London and Treasure Island and horses and dragons were all equally imagined to her. She thought she would probably see them one day, when she was old. In the meantime, the island was hers to explore, and it took up more time than she could ever imagine having. There were books to read, thousands of them in the castle library, and Rowan brought back more all the time. There were trees to climb, caves along the beach to get lost in, traces of the fair folk who had once lived on the island to find and bring home. There was work to be done: Food needed to be grown and harvested; the livable parts of the castle, the parts that weren't a crumbling ruin, needed to be combed for useful things when the tide went out. She was a half-wild thing of ink and grass and sea breezes, raised by books and rabbits and fairy lore, and that was all she cared to be.

The Christ of Lembata Island Lately my dreams seep out of me, I who have a reputation of an airtight presence, I guess I'm past my expiration date, I fear both have gone out with the tide, and I am left stranded, a beached whale surrounded by a thousand curious and hungry eyes. Impatient villagers, whale hunters of Lamalera, carve slabs of meat and blubber from me before I am dead. I am the Christ of Lembata island, ready to feed the masses with my flesh, to redeem them of their hunger that goes beyond the flesh. The old harpooner will attest my heart's as large as a Sumo wrestler. Take it. My brain is five times as big as a humans. Take it. My heart and mind are yours. Take my oil to fill your lamps and I will give you light. Please, take all of me. That's why I'm here.

Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there.' For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started me on the errand. Going forward and glancing over the weather-bow, I perceived that the ship, swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing toward the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see. 'Well, what's the report?' said Peleg when I came back; 'what did ye see?' 'Not much,' I replied - 'nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there s a squall coming up, I think.' 'Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where you stand?

She discovered a curious thing about driving on islands. It’s impossible to get lost, even if you take a wrong turn, you just keep going and eventually you’ll be back where you started. Or you come to a dead end.

But the freshness of the theory attracted the most intelligent of the four girls, who couldn’t help but ask, “Time began with the singularity? So what was there before the singularity?” “Nothing,” Ye said, the way he would answer a question from any curious young person. He turned to look at the girl kindly. With his injuries and the tall iron hat, the motion was very difficult. “No … nothing? That’s reactionary! Completely reactionary!” the frightened girl shouted. She turned to Shao Lin, who gladly came to her aid. “The theory leaves open a place to be filled by God.” Shao nodded at the girl. The young Red Guard, confused by these new thoughts, finally found her footing. She raised her hand, still holding the belt, and pointed at Ye. “You: you’re trying to say that God exists?” “I don’t know.” “What?” “I’m saying I don’t know. If by ‘God’ you mean some kind of superconsciousness outside the universe, I don’t know if it exists or not. Science has given no evidence either way.” Actually, in this nightmarish moment, Ye was leaning toward believing that God did not exist. This extremely reactionary statement caused a commotion in the crowd. Led by one of the Red Guards on stage, another tide of slogan-shouting exploded. “Down with reactionary academic authority Ye Zhetai!” “Down with all reactionary academic authorities!” “Down with all reactionary doctrines!” Once the slogans died down, the girl shouted, “God does not exist. All religions are tools concocted by the ruling class to paralyze the spirit of the people!” “That is a very one-sided view,” Ye said calmly.

Emboldened, she skimmed her fingers across his buttocks, feeling the muscles clench in response, then onward to the top of his thigh, finding it just a bit rough with hair. Then, before she had time to talk to herself out of the impulse, she reached for his shaft and encircled him with her fingers. A harsh groan issued from his throat. She stiffened and began to withdraw, but he stopped her with a hand, forcing her fingers to stay where they were. "Stroke me," he said. "Please." Trembling, she hesitated just a moment more, then did as he wished. The feel of him was astonishing, hard and thick, yet covered with a skin as sleek and smooth as velvet. She glided up his length, then down, pausing at the last to brush a curious thumb across the tip. His shaft jumped in her palm, Jack releasing another throaty moan. "Harder," he said. "Stroke me harder." And she did, caressing him with increasing confidence while he massaged her breasts and took her mouth in a savage kiss. As she opened her lips wide, he slid his tongue inside, licking and lapping, then thrusting in and out in time to the movements of her hand. He kissed her until she was dizzy, her grip gradually weakening on him as he drowned her in a tide of pleasure.

as the tides of history rise and fall, worldviews rise and fall with them,

one of the cleanest, quickest, and most ecologically pure things to do with a body would be to put it in a big tide-pool full of Dungeness crabs, which apparently enjoy eating people as much as people enjoy eating crabs.

Jerry had indeed something in him that went beyond Rabelaisianism, in that he not only could get an ecstasy of curious satisfaction from the most drab, ordinary, homely, realistic aspects of what might be called the excremental under-tides of existence but he could slough off his loathing for humanity in this contemplation and grow gay, child-like, guileless.

Zesty hormones surged—not to carry wedges of information or holistic images, as in Quath, but to flood the bloodstream with urgent demands. Organs far from the brain answered these chemical heralds, pumping other hormones into the thumping flow, adding alkaline voices to the babble. Ideas rose like crystalline towers from this swamp, glimmering coolly—but soon were spattered with the aromatic chemical murk, blood on glass. These elements merged and wrestled, struggling armies rushing together in flurries, fermenting, spinning away into wild skirmishes. Lurid splashes festooned the brittle ramparts of analytical thought. A churning mire lapped hungrily at the stern bulwarks of reason, eroding worn salients even as fresh ones were built. Yet somehow this interior battle did not yield mere confusion and scattered indecision. Somehow a single coherent view emerged, holding the vital, fervent factions in check. Its actions sampled of all the myriad influences, letting none dominate for long. Quath marveled at the sheer energy behind the incessant clashings, and at the same time felt a mixture of recognition laced by repulsion. This Nought’s inner landscape was far more complex than it should be. No wonder it had not attained the technological sophistication of the podia!—it labored forward in a howling storm, its every sharp perception blunted by fraying winds of passion. But by the same stroke, it had a curious way of skating on the surface of these choppy, alchemical crosscurrents. Some balance and uncanny steadiness came from that. It was much like the way they walked—falling forward, then rescuing themselves by catching the plunge with the other leg. This yielded a rocking cadence that echoed the precarious nature of the being itself. Not a single mind… and not multiple, interlocking intelligences, such as Quath.

Sometime after dinner, we reached the deserted spot whereon, in summertime, pleasure seekers sought the sun and waves. Without speaking, I led the way down a rocky declivity to a narrow inlet left by the ebbed tide, finally indicated a deep, smooth pool banked around by curious, porous looking rocks. “That’s Brimstone Pool itself,” I explained, glancing up to find Tarp’s lean face within two inches of my own. “I dived in from here, swam right across, and back again, Eva followed a moment or two afterwards…” “Uh-huh, Tarp said pensively, then he stooped and stared into the Pool. It was perfectly clear, but it plainly had nothing in it beyond a few baby crabs and shrimps. Finally he wetted his lips with it. “Normal sea water all right,” he sighed; then as he stared around on the rocks fringing the Pool, he began to frown. “Say,” he breathed, “these rocks aren’t normal. They’re—meteoric!” he finished, kicking one of them. “Large amounts of iron and pumice in them.” I looked at him in surprise. “But I thought you knew that, Tarp! Don’t you remember the meteor of 1942 which fell near Atlantic City? It landed here and broke up—wasn’t very big. All around this Pool is where it dropped. These very rocks are the exploded parts of it—according to Doctor Grantham, anyway, Eva’s father. Hence the name Brimstone Pool.” “Idiot that I am!

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live.

If she had, instead, assumed that her colleague was being curious, possibly wanting to know what he needed to do to be selected for similar roles in the future, then she may have felt willing to mention the 2 previous projects she had co-facilitated and how her research was related to the focus on this team’s goals.

And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.

Naturally, nothing contented him more than libraries.

His voice was conjured night. It was a dark wood at midnight, the chilling howl of a beast; it was the quiet of dreams and the pull of nightmares, lovely and frightening all at once.