Tar Beach Quotes

Summer came whirling out of the night and stuck fast. One morning late in November everybody got up at Cloudstreet and saw the white heat washing in through the windows. The wild oats and buffalo grass were brown and crisp. The sky was the color of kerosene. The air was thin and volatile. Smoke rolled along the tracks as men began to burn off on the embankment. Birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases, and beneath them in the streets, the tar began to bubble. The city was full of Yank soldiers; the trams were crammed to standing with them. The river sucked up the sky and went flat and glittery right down the middle of the place and people went to it in boats and britches and barebacked. Where the river met the sea, the beaches ran north and south, white and broad as highways in a dream, and men and babies stood in the surf while gulls hung in the haze above, casting shadows on the immodest backs of the oilslicked women.

No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don’t read, can’t write, and clearly can’t add.

He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long, golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night and in his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning.

Still the congenitally clueless—tourists and locals alike—continue to flop into the Gulf and mess with these phenomenal creatures, dooming them to a future of begging, sloth, and worse. A dolphin that swims close enough to take a treat from your fingers is also close enough to be stabbed by a scumbag with a screwdriver.

The cycles of Eric’s life took in stony beaches and pine forests where you could walk in a daylight all but night dark and fields where there was no grass, only stones and moss, alongside tar and macadam measured at its edge with poles and wires and solar panels, and water, broken, flickering, so much water, as much water—salt and silver—as there was sky, enough to make you scream or laugh at such absurd vastness, swelling within until Eric became his self exploding through today toward tomorrow, water green as glass falling between rocks and wet grass, the smell of dust and docks and distances, and sometimes Shit stepped up and took Eric’s rough hand in his rough hand.

novels. I can’t imagine living anywhere as corrupt, overrun, mismanaged, and freak-infested as Florida. I also can’t imagine living anywhere as beautiful or so worth fighting for. Carl Hiaasen Vero Beach June 7, 2013

As a child, Lena had pored over pictures of tropical beaches in faraway lands, beaches where sand lay smooth and warm as a blanket. Those were not the beaches of Knob Knoster. She sifted crushed rock, bits of shell, and glass through her fingers. Everything around her was muted in shades of gray—water, sky, and land. She breathed in the distinctive smell of fish and tar. Waves licked the stony shore of the harbor and crashed against the riprap of a jetty. And Lena found that she was listening, as if the wild call of the ocean was familiar. It filled her with strange longings for adventure, longings Nana Crane would say no civilized girl should ever have. Her heart beat faster. Lena tried not to listen, afraid the ocean might call her name.

Florida needs a special prison for tourists. Not all tourists—just the ones who trash the place, rob, shoplift, vandalize, drive drunk, assault the cops, puke in the alleys, pee in the medians, and so on.

Here, inmates would spend seven days and six nights being drilled on vacation etiquette. For example, they’d be taught how to read speed-limit signs; how to park within the parallel lines of a parking space; how to drink and dispose of alcohol; how to vomit inconspicuously; how to steer a Jet Ski and chew gum at the same time.… The drill instructors would be selected from an elite pool of former Highway Patrol troopers, ex–Navy SEALs, and retired tour guides from Epcot.

troglodytes

It was a place to delight the heart of a boy, the deck of the Shenandoah; forward right from the main hatchway it was laden with timber. Running rigging lay loose on the deck in coils, and nearly the whole of the quarter-deck was occupied by a deck-house. The place had a delightful smell of sea-beach, decaying wood, tar, and mystery. Bights of buntline and other ropes were dangling from above, only waiting to be swung from. A bell was hung just forward of the foremast.

That Sunday, the sun floated bright and hot over the Los Angeles basin, pushing people to the beaches and the parks and into backyard pools to escape the heat. The air buzzed with the nervous palsy it gets when the wind freight-trains in from the deserts, dry as bone, and cooking the hillsides into tar-filled kindling that can snap into flames hot enough to melt an auto body.