Moody Weather Quotes

The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort.

Every corner of the sky awkwardly showed up wearing the exact same thing, a moody gray dress accessorized with flat clouds. If North, South, East, and West were drag queens, this would be bad, very bad.

Weather here in this part of the world is just as moody, just as subjective and disloyal, as people.

The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of white waves.

So it went. Bob was increasingly cynical, leery, uneasy; Jesse was increasingly cavalier, merry, moody, fey, unpredictable. If his gross anatomy suggested a strong smith in his twenties, his actual physical constitution was that of a man who was incrementally dying. He was sick with rheums and aches and lung congestions, he tilted against chairs and counters and walls, in cold weather he limped with a cane. He coughed incessantly when lying down, his clever mind was often in conflict, insomnia stained his eye sockets like soot, he seemed in a state of mourning. He counteracted the smell of neglected teeth with licorice and candies, he browned his graying hair with dye, he camouflaged his depressions and derangements with masquerades of extreme cordiality, courtesy, and good will toward others.

Mab didn’t know what to make of such letters. How could a man who talked like his vocabulary was as rationed as his meat be so verbose in print? Not just verbose, but funny, wry, moody, tender . . . yet she wasn’t sure she understood him any better. Nothing he wrote ever touched on himself, but an envelope still winged from London nearly every other day. What was she supposed to write back? That the new billet was very nice, that the new landlady was very nice, that the weather was very nice? She couldn’t say anything about her work and didn’t have her husband’s knack for spinning pages about daily trifles. Trying to carry on a conversation with Francis seemed destined to be one-sided—but whereas he was the silent one in person, by letter, she felt like the mute.

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I- being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude- how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whaleships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time." And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness...: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the corking care of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:- "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain. " ... "Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

But instead, the skies overhead are heavy and gray, and everything is dim and dark and moody. I love it. I have an entire Spotify playlist dedicated to this kind of weather.

The sun was still bright, the sky still blue, and the morning was still too damn perfect. How was I supposed to be all moody and angst-ridden in this kind of weather? I felt a good brood coming on, and I needed gray clouds and rain to set the scene. Sunday evidently hadn’t gotten the memo, because it kept up the brood-killing ray of sunshine bit. Not even a cloud dared show itself against the azure sky as we drove along.

She pottered round now, a tall vague woman in her early fifties, with a long pale face and brown eyes which her daughter Deirdre had inherited. As she pottered she murmured to herself, ‘large knives, small knives, pudding spoons, will they need forks too? Oh, large forks, serving spoons, mats, glasses, well two glasses in case Deirdre and Malcolm want to drink beer, Rhoda probably won’t … and now, wash the lettuce …’ It was nice when the warm weather came and they could have salads for supper, she thought, though why it was nice she didn’t really know. Washing a lettuce and cutting up the things to go with it was really almost as much trouble as cooking a hot meal, and she herself had never got over an old-fashioned dislike of eating raw green leaves. When her husband had been alive they had always had a hot meal in the evenings, winter and summer alike. He needed it after a day in the City. But now he was gone and Rhoda had been living with them for nearly ten years now and everyone said how nice it was for them both, to have each other, though of course she had the children too. Malcolm was a good solid young man, very much like his father, reliable and, although of course she never admitted it, a little dull. He did not seem to mind about the hot meal in the evenings. But Deirdre was different, clever and moody, rather like she herself had been at the same age, before marriage to a good dull man and life in a suburb had steadied her.

There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon. Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.

Asteria’s Ship’s Library Sailing Books Admiralty, NP 136, Ocean Passages of the World, 1973 (1895).  Admiralty, NP 303 / AP 3270, Rapid Sight Reduction Tables for Navigation Vol 1 & Vol 2 & Vol3. Admiralty, The Nautical Almanac 2018 & 2019. Errol Bruce: Deep Sea Sailing, 1954. K. Adlard Coles: Heavy Weather Sailing, 1967. Tom Cunliffe: Celestial Navigation, 1989. Andrew Evans: Single Handed Sailing, 2015. Rob James: Ocean Sailing, 1980. Robin Knox-Johnston: A World of my Own, 1969. Robin Knox-Johnston: On Seamanship & Seafaring, 2018. Bernard Moitessier: The Long Route, 1971. Hal Roth: Handling Storms at Sea, 2009. Spike Briggs & Campbell Mackenzie: Skipper's Medical Emergency Handbook, 2015 Essays Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays, 1955. Biographies Pamela Eriksson: The Duchess, 1958. Olaf Harken: Fun Times in Boats, Blocks & Business, 2015. Martti Häikiö: VA Koskenniemi 1–2, 2009. Eino Koivistoinen: Gustaf Erikson – King of Sailing Ships, 1981. Erik Tawaststjerna: Jean Sibelius 1–5, 1989. Novels Ingmar Bergman: The Best Intentions, 1991. Bo Carpelan: Axel, 1986. Joseph Conrad: The End of the Tether, 1902. Joseph Conrad: Youth and Other Stories 1898–1910.  Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, 1902. Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim, 1900. James Joyce: Ulysses, 1922, (translation Pentti Saarikoski 1982). Volter Kilpi: In the Alastalo Hall I – II, 1933. Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks, 1925. Harry Martinson: The Road, 1948. Hjalmar Nortamo: Collected Works, 1938. Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time 1–10, 1922. Poems Aaro Hellaakoski: Collected Poems. Homer: Odysseus, c. 700 BC (translation Otto Manninen). Harry Martinson: Aniara, 1956. Lauri Viita: Collected Poems. Music Classic Jean Sibelius Sergei Rachmaninov Sergei Prokofiev Gustav Mahler Franz Schubert Giuseppe Verdi Mozart Carl Orff Richard Strauss Edvard Grieg Max Bruch Jazz Ben Webster Thelonius Monk Oscar Peterson Miles Davis Keith Jarrett Errol Garner Dizzy Gillespie & Benny Dave Brubeck Stan Getz Charlie Parker Ella Fitzgerald John Coltrane Other Ibrahim Ferrer, Buena Vista Social Club Jobim & Gilberto, Eric Clapton Carlos Santana Bob Dylan John Lennon Beatles Sting Rolling Stones Dire Straits Mark Knopfler Moody Blues Pink Floyd Jim Morrison The Doors Procol Harum Leonard Cohen Led Zeppelin Kim Carnes Jacques Brel Yves Montand Edit Piaf

One threat to our security comes from feelings of depression and doubt. The person of faith is described in this psalm as “a rock-solid mountain . . . nothing can move it.” But I am moved. I am full of faith one day and empty with doubt the next. I wake up one morning full of vitality, rejoicing in the sun; the next day I am gray and dismal, faltering and moody. “Nothing can move it”?—nothing could be less true of me. I can be moved by nearly anything: sadness, joy, success, failure. I’m a thermometer and go up and down with the weather.

So from morning onward I’m kept company by pictures of weather fronts, lovely abstract lines on maps, blue ones and red ones, relentlessly approaching from the west, from over the Czech Republic and Germany. They carry the air that Prague was breathing a short while ago, maybe Berlin too. It flew in from the Atlantic and crept across the whole of Europe, so one could say we have sea air up here, in the mountains. I particularly love it when they show maps of pressure, which explain a sudden resistance to getting out of bed or an ache in the knees, or something else again—an inexplicable sorrow that has just the same character as an atmospheric front, a moody figura serpentinata within the Earth’s atmosphere.