Turquoise Sea Quotes

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand.... I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn't they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?

I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.

Seriously, it was a day's labor to look in her eyes. Crystalline irises that darkened to turquoise around the edges. Poseidon couldn't have scoured the sea and come up with a more potent color.

This was how it was supposed to feel. Like standing on a cliff high above a turquoise sea, terrified to jump but desperate for the thrill of the fall.

Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.

Breathing, it seemed to me, was a proper attribute for the mountains... mountains that quietly functioned as a single thing with a rhythmic inhale-exhale I could feel...

The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also—more so—for beauty.

My hair smells of oceanic wind My eyes are two starfish The charming, turquoise sea is seducing me The rhythms of the calming Crashing waves are my guide Omnipotent, almost holy, They seek to cleanse my polluted soul Here, by the seductive sea, I am unshackled. I am free. I am me.

I put a gentle hand to my chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice.

Finally we came over a rise and I saw the Caribbean...My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.

He dreamt...he was a huge white egg floating in the sea of turquoise blue, and he was everything that there was.

The tantalizing scent transported me to a white, sandy beach lapped by a turquoise sea under a tropical sun. Lime and coconut were the getaway flavors my bakery customers needed in April, tax time.

And you can still see the sea!" She wanted to swim there, immediately- she had a childlike urge of excitement at the sight of water so clear the rocks at the foot of the cliffs looked like clumps of turquoise flowers growing on the seabed.

Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all.

On clear days, the sea is an impossible turquoise, and when the sun sets, the sky is streaked with extravagant pinks and purples, lighting up the mountainous islands they can see from the shore. At these times, Cristabel feels an intense happiness; an almost painful awareness of being alive and breathing.

Let Us Gather In A Flourishing Way Let us gather in a flourishing way opening with sun light grains songs we carry every day I pasture the young body happy to give and give pearls pearls of corn flowing tree of life at the four corners let us gather in a flourishing way happy life full of strength to giving birth to fragrant rivers Fresh sweet green turquoise strong rainbows flesh of our children let us gather in a flourishing way in the light and in the flesh of our heart to toil quiet in fields of blossoms together to stretch the arms With the quiet rain in the morning Early on our forehead star Heat sky and wisdom to meet us Where we toil always in the garden of our Struggle and joy let us offer our hearts to greet our eagle rising freedom woven branches celebrate arms branches nopales stones feathers bursting piercing figs and avocados Butterfly ripe fields and clear seas of our face to breathe all the way in blessing to give seeds to grow maiztlán in the hands of our love.

There, below the cliffs, is a bay of sand where the rocks stand up like the fangs of wolves, and no boat or swimmer can live when the tide is breaking round them. To right and left of the bay the sea has driven arches through the cliff. The rocks are purple and rose-coloured and pale as turquoise in the sun, and on a summer’s evening when the tide is low and the sun is sinking, men see on the horizon land that comes and goes with the light. It is the Summer Isle, which (they say) floats and sinks at the will of heaven, the Island of Glass through which the clouds and stars can be seen, but which for those who dwell there is full of trees and grass and springs of sweet water . . .’ The

Beyond the slumpstone wall lay a backyard, a swimming pool. Dappled with morning light and tree shadows, the water glimmered in shades of blue from sapphire to turquoise, as might a trove of jewels left by long-dead pirates who had sailed a sea since vanished.

Nature is the beauty of blue sky, white clouds,turquoise seas and green vegetation.

I close my hand around the bit of turquoise sea glass in my pocket, rub its smooth edges with my thumb - a broken bit made smooth and beautiful, changed by the sea." -Bailey

But it was no good trying to tell about the beauty. It was just that life was beautiful beyond belief, and that is a kind of joy which has to be lived. Sometimes, when they came down from the cirrus levels to catch a better wind, they would find themselves among the flocks of cumulus: huge towers of modeled vapor, looking as white as Monday's washing d as solid as meringues. Perhaps one of these piled-up blossoms of the sky, these snow-white droppings of a gigantic Pegasus, would lie before them several miles away. They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth; and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. Then, in a moment of time, they would be in the jeweled world once more: a sea under them like turquoise and all the gorgeous palaces of heaven new created, with the dew of Eden not yet dry.

Everyone will tell you that genealogy serves two purposes: self-knowledge and social status, some sort of pedigree divined from names, locations, and achievements of eminence. However, there is nothing quite like an anomaly to suck attention away from the droning census records. A suicide hinted at emotion and thought. A closet door was flung open and daylight flooded a skeleton.

As I write these lines I lift my eyes and look seaward.  I am on the beach of Waikiki on the island of Oahu.  Far, in the azure sky, the trade-wind clouds drift low over the blue-green turquoise of the deep sea.  Nearer, the sea is emerald and light olive-green.  Then comes the reef, where the water is all slaty purple flecked with red.  Still nearer are brighter greens and tans, lying in alternate stripes and showing where sandbeds lie between the living coral banks.  Through and over and out of these wonderful colours tumbles and thunders a magnificent surf.

Grass! Millions of square miles of it. . . . a hundred rippling oceans, each ripple a gleam of scarlet or amber, emerald or turquoise. . . . the colors shivering over the prairies. . . . Sapphire seas of grass with dark islands of grass bearing great plumy trees which are grass again.

Desert which is immense and from above light brown or red vast rivulets of sand with no human life. As the only land. What land is. Running alongside it and then forward is the deep blue Red Sea — with the edges of the land in very light turquoise blue rim, it is the rim. A very beautiful rim. The people are in the air. There are patches of sand in, as it goes in, the endless sea, the very light turquoise rimmed. So it could be sky, which has white rainless clouds. In the sky or it could be in the sea. Whatever is darker as shadows could be just in the air. Only in the air. Sand patches, rimmed or with the very light blue shallower sea. But only if one's there.

In the hallowed tradition of squishy doughball liberals, I believe that science, reason, kindness, and understanding—maybe a little food—can set the world right. B

In genealogy you might say that interest lies in the eye of the gene holder. The actual descendants are far more intrigued with it all than the listeners, who quickly sink into a narcoleptic coma after the second or third great-great-somebody kills a bear or beheads Charles I, invents the safety pin or strip-mines Poland, catalogues slime molds, dances flamenco, or falls in love with a sheep. Genealogy is a forced march through stories. Yet everyone loves stories, and that is one reason we seek knowledge of our own blood kin. Through our ancestors we can witness their times. Or, we think, there might be something in their lives, an artist’s or a farmer’s skill, an affection for a certain landscape, that will match or explain something in our own. If we know who they were, perhaps we will know who we are. And few cultures have been as identity-obsessed as ours. So keen is this fascination with ancestry, genealogy has become an industry. Family reunions choke the social calendar. Europe crawls with ancestor-seeking Americans. Your mother or your spouse or your neighbors are too busy to talk to you because they are on the Internet running “heritage quests.” We have climbed so far back into our family trees, we stand inches away from the roots where the primates dominate.

The sky is turquoise, the sea is azure, the mountains are emerald, the air is heaven. Sunny, hot days; everyone in summer clothes. Guitars and singing all through the night…. Briefly, a delicious life. —Frédéric Chopin

Sometimes the desert exhilarates me to the point of soaring. Other times I am so heartsick I cannot bear up against the despair, a palpable, aching longing. Longing for this wild beauty to last and for me never to die and no longer be able to feel, see, hear, taste, and breathe it. A yearning to die before the desert's wild heart is lost so I do not have to witness it. A longing to be a better person, for the world to be a better place, for us to truly measure up to this land, for this land not to be a battlefield of anger and greed. When these two opposing conditions, elation and despair, follow one another too quickly, the universe seems careless and precipitate. I soar, I crash, a squall of heat let loose in the ethos. Or else I get hungry.

Old Harry, who knew more about boats and the sea than anybody I knew, was sleeping off last night's tequila on my big cruiser/houseboat, Stella. She'd been named after Gail Russell's character in an old classic film titled, The Uninvited. It was Harry's favorite movie.

Julius explained that the palace rooms where they stood were called Wunderkammers, or wonder rooms. Souvenirs of nature, of travels across continents and seas; jewels and skulls. A show of wealth, intellect, power. The first room had rose-colored glass walls, with rubies and garnets and bloodred drapes of damask. Bowls of blush quartz; semiprecious stone roses running the spectrum of red down to pink, a hard, glittering garden. The vaulted ceiling, a feature of all the ten rooms Julius and Cymbeline visited, was a trompe l'oeil of a rosy sky at down, golden light edging the morning clouds. The next room was of sapphire and sea and sky; lapis lazuli, turquoise and gold and silver. A silver mermaid lounged on the edge of a lapis lazuli bowl fashioned in the shape of an ocean. Venus stood aloft on the waves draped in pearls. There were gold fish and diamond fish and faceted sterling silver starfish. Silvered mirrors edged in silvered mirror. There were opals and aquamarines and tanzanite and amethyst. Seaweed bloomed in shades of blue-green marble. The ceiling was a dome of endless, pale blue. A jungle room of mica and marble followed, with its rain forest of cats made from tiger's-eye, yellow topaz birds, tortoiseshell giraffes with stubby horns of spun gold. Carved clouds of smoky quartz hovered over a herd of obsidian and ivory zebras. Javelinas of spotted pony hide charged tiny, life-sized dik-diks with velvet hides, and dazzling diamond antlers mingled with miniature stuffed sable minks. Agate columns painted a medley of dark greens were strung with faceted ropes of green gold. A room of ivory: bone, teeth, skulls, and velvet. A room crowded with columns all sheathed in mirrors, reflecting world maps and globes and atlases inlaid with silver, platinum, and white gold; the rubies and diamonds that were sometimes set to mark the location of a city or a town of conquest resembled blood and tears. A room dominated by a fireplace large enough to hold several people, upholstered in velvets and silks the colors of flame. Snakes of gold with orange sapphire and yellow topaz eyes coiled around the room's columns. Statues of smiling black men in turbans offering trays of every gem imaginable-emerald, sapphire, ruby, topaz, diamond-stood at the entrance to a room upholstered in pistachio velvet, accented with malachite, called the Green Vault. Peridot wood nymphs attended to a Diana carved from a single pure crystal of quartz studded with tiny tourmalines. Jade tables, and jade lanterns. The royal jewels, blinding in their sparkling excess: crowns, tiaras, coronets, diadems, heavy ceremonial necklaces, rings, and bracelets that could span a forearm, surrounding the world's largest and most perfect green diamond. Above it all was a night sky of painted stars, with inlaid cut crystal set in a serious of constellations.

The door had six knobs on its inner side: the uppermost, which matched the outer one, a square of frost-furred crystal, and five beneath it, placed in an uneven row. The first two were of some sort of dark stone, one icy and the other matte and slippery-smooth. The fourth had the look of a tiny aquarium, a cylinder of turquoise sea shafted with sunlight. The bottom two were made of wood. The first was pale, carved with an intricate floral pattern. I could not tell if the second was similarly decorated, for it was largely covered in a wet moss woven with constellations of tiny white flowers.

These rocky, verdant, and volcanic landscapes of the Greek Isles exert their own charm, but it is the sea that dominates every aspect of life. Winding paths hug the shoreline, revealing hidden coves and inlets of turquoise water sparkling in the sun. So many constructions--whether house, church, shop, or restaurant--offer a vista of the blue sea. Terraces spilling over with bougainvillea, and balconies bearing hand-hewn wooden chairs take advantage of the views afforded by crescent-shaped harbors and quiet bays. Each island takes pride in its own picturesque fishing harbors. Off the ports of Kalymnos, fishermen and skin divers gather sponges, octopi, grouper, and shellfish.

Lady of the Moon, of the fertile Earth and rolling seas! You who are the Maiden, with strong heart and youthful spirit. You who are the Mother, with able body and nurturing spirit. You who are the Crone, with wise mind and compassionate spirit. You who are birth, life, love and death. Descend upon my circle, I pray to witness these rites in your honor!

Though I could guess which doorknob was for Wendell's kingdom, I could not resist trying the loveliest first: the tiny turquoise sea. Hardly daring to breathe, I turned the doorknob, and the door swung open with a gentle sigh. Salt wind spilled into the faerie's house. Before me stretched a dry, rocky coastline punctuated by groves of yellowish trees. The turquoise sea was endless and far too bright, broken only by an ellipsis of rugged islands. Just beyond the door was a spindly olive tree and a cairn of white pebbles. Largely to see if I could, I reached through and took one--- the sun beat down upon my arm, a most curious sensation, while the rest of me felt only the cozier warmth of the faerie's alpine home. I closed the door. "Greece," I murmured. "I think. It looks to be situated either in the mortal world or a place of overlap, like Poe's door. I had no idea the nexus led there--- they have no stories of tree fauns in Greece. Perhaps they do not use it much?

Physically, Manya was both appealing and aristocratic in her bearing. It wasn't her copious white hair that attracted men, her flawless white skin, her billowing breasts, but the innate womanliness that emanated from her. Even when she wore her cooking clothes- a mammoth Hoover apron that she slipped on over her head and tied around a baggy dress or her cardigan sweater, a dull brown thing appropriate for shopping- she exuded a sympathetic femininity. Many didn't give much thought to her appearance. More often than not she washed her face and body with the brown kosher soap that contained no fat from forbidden animals, and wrapped her hair in a haphazard bun held together with several large imitation-turquoise hairpins. Her cooking shoes were splattered with chicken and goose fat, bits and oddments of duck, salmon roe, even calves' brains. Because she had been raised on the Black Sea, she loved caviar, so every now and then a glistening bead would fall upon her well-fed shoes. The smell of food on her body made her no less alluring.

The Book Lover:- See how I have come up in the World, because of my books. I pull the covers agape, pages release their cargo and words fly like birds each with its own song. Listen, and vowels will breathe like flutes in your head, Consonants tick-tack like woodpeckers, and sibilants, sly as asps, bite the plosives that pop from our pressed lips. A picture worth a thousand words? You paint a score of trees, dark needled, stippled and stroked across your canvas: My book say ‘’forrest’’ (Feel that Pine green touch) You wash your paper with azures and turquoise, set ship after ship, sails wind-pregnant, As far as the daubed horizon: my books say ‘’armada’’. (Smell that sea-green scent) Art’s shape is their noun, its colour their objective, Its tone their adverb; my books match the grammar of landscapes. This book may say ‘Socrates’ secrets, Freud’s autopsy of actions or Heaney’s verses; Every idea dreamed by man caught, black stamped for all time, within its cardboard confines. Here the past speaks to us, as the future will, in the language of our senses. Step up book by book- In time, you will reach the stars.

And there Sara would stand, sometimes turning her face upward to the blue which seemed so friendly and near—just like a lovely vaulted ceiling—sometimes watching the west and all the wonderful things that happened there: the clouds melting or drifting or waiting softly to be changed pink or crimson or snow-white or purple or pale dove-gray. Sometimes they made islands or great mountains enclosing lakes of deep turquoise-blue, or liquid amber, or chrysoprase-green; sometimes dark headlands jutted into strange, lost seas; sometimes slender strips of wonderful lands joined other wonderful lands together.

THE RETURN OF THE GODS Like a white bird upon the wind, the sail of the boat of Manannan mac Lir (Pronounced Mananarn mak Leer), the Son of the Sea, flew across the sparkling waves filled with the breeze that blew Westward to the Islands of the Blessed. The Sun Goddess above him smiled down with warmth upon her friend. The fish in the ocean danced for him beneath the turquoise water; the porpoises leapt above the waves to greet him. Upon the wind was a smell of sweetness, the smell of apple blossom in the Spring of the morning of the world. And in the prow of the boat sat Lugh (Pronounced Loo) the long-armed; strumming on his harp, he sang the Song of Creation. And as they drew closer to the green hills of Ireland, the holy land of Ireland, the Shee came out of their earth-barrow homes and danced for joy beneath the Sun. For hidden in a crane-skin sack at the bottom of the boat was the Holy Cup of Blessedness. Long had been her journeying through lands strange and far. And all who drank of that Cup, dreamed the dreams of holy truth, and drank of the Wine of everlasting life. And deep within the woods, in a green-clad clearing, where the purple anemone and the white campion bloomed, where primroses still lingered on the shadowed Northern side, a great stag lifted up his antlered head and sniffed the morning. His antlers seven-forked spoke of mighty battles fought and won, red was his coat, the colour of fire, and he trotted out of his greenwood home, hearing on the wind the song of Lugh. And in her deep barrow home, the green clad Goddess of Erin, remembered the tongue that she had forgotten. She remembered the secrets of the weaving of spells, She remembered the tides of woman and the ebb and flow of wave and Moon. She remembered the people who had turned to other Gods and coming out of her barrow of sleep, her sweet voice echoed the verses of Lugh and the chorus of Manannan. And the great stag of the morning came across the fields to her and where had stood the Goddess now stood a white hind. And the love of the God was returned by the Goddess and the larks of Anghus mac Og hovering above the field echoed with ecstasy the Song of Creation. And in the villages and towns the people came out of their houses, hearing the sweet singing and seeking its source. And children danced in the streets with delight. And they went down to the shore, the Eastern shore, where rises the Sun of the Morning, and awaited the coming of Manannan and Lugh, the mast of their boat shining gold in the Sun. The sea had spoken, the Eastern dawn had given up her secret, the Gods were returning, the Old Ones awakening, joy was returning unto the sleeping land.  

Bram stared into a pair of wide, dark eyes. Eyes that reflected a surprising glimmer of intelligence. This might be the rare female a man could reason with. “Now, then,” he said. “We can do this the easy way, or we can make things difficult.” With a soft snort, she turned her head. It was as if he’d ceased to exist. Bram shifted his weight to his good leg, feeling the stab to his pride. He was a lieutenant colonel in the British army, and at over six feet tall, he was said to cut an imposing figure. Typically, a pointed glance from his quarter would quell the slightest hint of disobedience. He was not accustomed to being ignored. “Listen sharp now.” He gave her ear a rough tweak and sank his voice to a low threat. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as I say.” Though she spoke not a word, her reply was clear: You can kiss my great woolly arse. Confounded sheep. “Ah, the English countryside. So charming. So…fragrant.” Colin approached, stripped of his London-best topcoat, wading hip-deep through the river of wool. Blotting the sheen of perspiration from his brow with his sleeve, he asked, “I don’t suppose this means we can simply turn back?” Ahead of them, a boy pushing a handcart had overturned his cargo, strewing corn all over the road. It was an open buffet, and every ram and ewe in Sussex appeared to have answered the invitation. A vast throng of sheep bustled and bleated around the unfortunate youth, gorging themselves on the spilled grain-and completely obstructing Bram’s wagons. “Can we walk the teams in reverse?” Colin asked. “Perhaps we can go around, find another road.” Bram gestured at the surrounding landscape. “There is no other road.” They stood in the middle of the rutted dirt lane, which occupied a kind of narrow, winding valley. A steep bank of gorse rose up on one side, and on the other, some dozen yards of heath separated the road from dramatic bluffs. And below those-far below those-lay the sparkling turquoise sea. If the air was seasonably dry and clear, and Bram squinted hard at that thin indigo line of the horizon, he might even glimpse the northern coast of France. So close. He’d get there. Not today, but soon. He had a task to accomplish here, and the sooner he completed it, the sooner he could rejoin his regiment. He wasn’t stopping for anything. Except sheep. Blast it. It would seem they were stopping for sheep. A rough voice said, “I’ll take care of them.” Thorne joined their group. Bram flicked his gaze to the side and spied his hulking mountain of a corporal shouldering a flintlock rifle. “We can’t simply shoot them, Thorne.” Obedient as ever, Thorne lowered his gun. “Then I’ve a cutlass. Just sharpened the blade last night.” “We can’t butcher them, either.” Thorne shrugged. “I’m hungry.” Yes, that was Thorne-straightforward, practical. Ruthless. “We’re all hungry.” Bram’s stomach rumbled in support of the statement. “But clearing the way is our aim at the moment, and a dead sheep’s harder to move than a live one. We’ll just have to nudge them along.” Thorne lowered the hammer of his rifle, disarming it, then flipped the weapon with an agile motion and rammed the butt end against a woolly flank. “Move on, you bleeding beast.

The gyre that pulls this sunrise ocean moves west from Africa across the equator then caresses this thumb of land on Mexico’s flank. The Gulf Stream carries the warm waters farther north. Like the ocean currents, airflow also moves in a circular pattern, captive to the earth’s rotation, pulled one way or the other on either side of the equator: the Coriolis effect. This force can act upon the spiraling of water down drains, counterclockwise if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, clockwise if you are south of the equator. We are still in the Northern Hemisphere but just barely. My quest for drain behavior reassures me that we will not be flung off the spinning globe—you can never be too sure. On a flight to Australia once, when the airplane was precisely over the equator, I rushed to the airplane’s lavatory and filled the sink with water. Then I pulled the plug to see which way the water would circle the drain, hoping for some sort of momentous turmoil in the physics of deflection. When you venture well beyond home, it is important to assess the territory.

All over the gold silk lining of the brocade cloak, Amah had embroidered a secret; a map of Feng Lu, rendered in rich jewel tones and surrounded by a border of pearl-white lanterns. The five kingdoms nestled in a sea of turquoise thread representing the oceans. Symbols and images had been stitched all around the border: moon-colored cranes taking flight, red roses burning in the desert sand, a phoenix rampant in tree branches, a silvery fish, a shining sword of steel.

It felt fantastic to be back filming again, and it made me realize how much I missed it. The crew represented our extended family. I never once caught a feeling of annoyance or impatience at the prospect of having a six-day-old baby on set. To the contrary, the atmosphere was one of joy. I can mark precisely Bindi Irwin’s introduction to the wonderful world of wildlife documentary filming: Thursday, July 30, 1998, in the spectacular subtropics of the Queensland coast, where the brilliant white sand meets the turquoise water. This is where the sea turtles navigate the rolling surf each year to come ashore and lay their eggs. Next stop: America, baby on board. Bindi was so tiny she fit on an airplane pillow. Steve watched over her almost obsessively, fussing with her and guarding to see if anything would fall out of the overhead bins whenever they were opened. Such a protective daddy. Our first shoot in California focused on rattlesnakes and spiders. We got a cute photo of baby Bindi with a little hat on and a brown tarantula on her head. In Texas she got to meet toads and Trans-Pecos rat snakes. Steve found two stunning specimens of the nonvenomous snakes in an abandoned house. I watched as two-week-old Bindi reacted to their presence. She gazed up at the snakes and her small, shaky arms reached out toward them. I laughed with delight at her eagerness. Steve looked over at me, as if to say, See? Our own little wildlife warrior!

Religious structures represent just one facet of the precious art and architectural heritage of the Greek Isles, where splendid built sites vie with natural wonders for spectacular beauty and interest. Kárpathos and Kíthnos boast rows of picturesque windmills along a rugged coastline. On Santorini, whitewashed villas cling to precipitous cliffs, rising above a turquoise sea. Classical and earlier ruins are eerie reminders of the past on the now-uninhabited island of Delos, which, along with Athens, Olympia, and Delphi, was one of the most important sanctuaries of the ancient world.

It has come quickly, this crushing, industrial love of paradise. The pervert-free, less-trammeled, hundred-mile-view days were little more than two decades past, not so very long ago. Yet already my own history sounds like another country.

She loved everything around, turquoise blue sky and calm sea, and the holy mountain, and fragrant woods on it, and monasteries and hermitages, and herbs, and flowers, and monks and pilgrims, and children. And him? She asked herself and almost said “yes” inwardly...

It is no wonder that historians trace the birth of Western civilization to these jewels of the Aegean, Ionian, and Mediterranean seas. The Greek Isles are home to wide-ranging and far-reaching cultural traditions and mythic tales, not to mention the colorful history and unforgettable vistas that still draw thousands of tourists to the region every year. Minoan ruins stand alongside Byzantine churches and Crusader fortresses. Terra-cotta pots spilling over with hibiscus flowers adorn blinding-white stucco houses that reflect the sun’s dazzling light. Fishing villages perched upon craggy cliffs overlook clusters of colorful boats in island harbors. Centuries-old citrus and olive groves dot the hillsides. Lush vegetation and rocky shores meet isolated stretches of sand and an azure sea. Masts bob left and right on sailboats moored in secluded inlets. Each island is a world unto itself. Although outsiders and neighbors have inhabited, visited, and invaded these islands throughout the centuries, the islands’ rugged geography and small size have also ensured a certain isolation. In this environment, traditional ways of life thrive. The arts--pottery, glass blowing, gem carving, sculpture, and painting, among others--flourish here today, as contemporary craft artists keep alive techniques begun in antiquity. In the remote hilltop villages of Kárpathos, for example, artisans practice crafts that date back eons, and inhabitants speak a dialect close to ancient Greek. Today, to walk along the pebbled pathways of a traditional Greek mountain village or the marbled streets of an ancient acropolis is to step back in time. To meander at a leisurely pace through these island chains by boat is to be captivated by the same dramatic landscapes and enchanted islets that make the myths of ancient Greece so compelling. To witness the Mediterranean sun setting on the turquoise sea is to receive one of life’s greatest blessings.

She crossed her arms behind her head, gazing at the turquoise sea visible between the dilapidated buildings that made up Skull’s Bay. Sam half-rose from his chair. “Just get back in your seat.” “I’ve spent the past ten days at sea. Why should I sit in that uncomfortable chair when this one’s far more suited to my tastes?” Sam let out a growl. Before he could speak, the door opened. Sam froze, but Celaena only inclined her head in greeting as Captain Rolfe, Lord of the Pirates, entered his office. “I’m glad to see you’ve made yourself at home.” The tall, dark-haired man shut the door behind him. Bold move, considering who was waiting in his office.

It was the most perfectly warm and still summer night in months. Even the breeze caused by the airship’s motion was warmer than usual, as soft against her cheek as the breath of an attentive lover. Above, yet hidden by the black curve of the vacuum-bag, the two moons were nearly at their fullest. Microscopic creatures sparkled a hundred metres under the airship, great schools of them daubing galaxies against the profound black of the sea. Spirals, flukes and arms of luminescence wheeled and coiled as if in thrall to secret music.

In the beginning, some brothers could sea the sea if they stood on their sink and looked through their window. In the rec yard, I found that if I lay down on my stomach in the corner, I could tear away a tiny piece of green tarp covering the fence and steal glimpses of a turquoise sea. I told my brothers and soon many of us would lie down and spend our recreation time looking at the sea through that small secret window. Eventually the guards noticed the hole. "Why can I look at the sea?" I asked the watch commander when he caught me. "It's for your own safety and security," he said through an interpreter. I suspected he thought Osama bin Laden might land on the beach one day with an al Qaeda army and break us all out. America was supposed to be a smart country, but the things we believed made us question this.

Where the white sea dragon moved, black blood sprayed. And just when the soldiers mastered their terror enough to launch arrows and spears at the opalescent scales enforced with Spidersilk, she twisted and flipped back into the deep river, vanishing beneath the ice. Spears plunged into the turquoise waters, missing their mark, but Lysandra was already racing past.

then through the Indian Ocean, down around the Cape of Good Hope, and up to the Atlantic. The entirety of the world via water. So many of the places I went exist in my mind like a brochure when I try to recall them. Elephants in Tsavo East National Park, an elevator packed with people riding from Salvador’s upper to lower city. The rippling heat of Delhi and the bright turquoises, saffrons, and fuchsias of women’s saris. I learned about silk and sashimi, about wild animals and barren deserts. I also learned about intractable poverty, caste systems, indigenous tribes—things I might have learned about America if I’d been paying closer attention. But this is perhaps the most profound lesson of travel, that you don’t really know the place and culture you’ve come from until you’ve left it. Today, I think that even if I had someday left the States, without that voyage, I’d have trod the familiar: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Montreal. Instead, Semester at Sea gave me the courage to imagine a different kind of travel, and a blueprint for how to do it. To see the sights, certainly, but to understand that it was meeting people that really mattered. In this, I also count a legacy from my father, the salesman who could talk to anyone about anything.

As they banked left, Frankie saw Vietnam through the open doorway: The flat green swath of jungle, a brown ribbon of water, dotted with boats. White sand beaches bordered the turquoise waters of the South China Sea. Verdant mountains in the distance reached up into the blue cloud-strewn sky.

How does vision, this tyrant of the senses, draw someone to a piece of earth? What do the eyes rest upon-mind disengaged, heart not—that combines senses and affection into a homeland? Do the eyes conspire with other senses in a kind of synesthetic faculty, an ability to respond to the colors of place as if they were taste and scent, sound and touch?

And then the sea, bright and unreal as a painting. She's never seen so many shades of blue" gleaming turquoise near the breakers; further out, a blue so dark it's almost black. Lucy shivers, thinking of the world beneath the spangled waves. The coastline curves around, so that she can see the cliffs on the other side of the bay, honeycombed with caves. Devil's Lookout. It's the same view she's seen already, on Jess's postcard, but the photographer hadn't quite captured the eeriness of the cliff face. In person, the caves look deeper and darker; one in particular, closest to the waterline, is large enough that she can almost imagine a demon lurking there, surveying the sea below. A prickle starts at the base of Lucy's spine. Maybe it's the knowledge of what the water would do to her skin. She imagines the waves lapping at her like tongues, stripping her of flesh until she is nothing but bone, gleaming white. Or perhaps it's the podcast; the thought of all those missing men, presumed drowned. But with the prickling fear there's a strange pull, too. Lucy struggles to tear her gaze from the bright waves, mesmerized by the way they curl over the shore. A part of her wants to get closer, to feel spindrift on her face, slick rock beneath her palms.

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They gaped as if they’d never seen a ridiculously handsome bleeding man in a turquoise waistcoat fall through a rubbish hole and then save himself with a grappling hook before. What DID they do for fun in New Eden?

The wonderful thing about Moab is that everything happens in a story-book setting, with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish and Wyeth and Joe Coll, and all the rest of them, whichever way you look. Imagine a blue sky—so clear-blue and pure that you can see against it the very feathers in the tails of wheeling kites, and know that they are brown, not black. Imagine all the houses, and the shacks between them, and the poles on which the burlap awnings hang, painted on flat canvas and stood up against that infinite blue. Stick some vultures in a row along a roof-top—purplish—bronze they’ll look between the tiles and sky. Add yellow camels, gray horses, striped robes, long rifles, and a searching sun-dried smell. And there you have El-Kerak, from the inside. From any point along the broken walls or the castle roof you can see for fifty miles over scenery invented by the Master-Artist, with the Jordan like a blue worm in the midst of yellow-and-green hills twiggling into a turquoise sea. The villains stalk on-stage and off again sublimely aware of their setting. The horses prance, the camels saunter, the very street-dogs compose themselves for a nap in the golden sun, all in perfect harmony with the piece. A woman walking with a stone jar on her head (or, just as likely, a kerosene can) looks as if she had just stepped out of eternity for the sake of the picture. And not all the kings and kaisers, cardinals and courtezans rolled into one great swaggering splurge of majesty could hold a candle to a ragged Bedouin chief on a flea-bitten pony, on the way to a small-town mejlis.

Nightmare The swirl of leaping phantoms lie Behind the REM-ing of my eye. Its stare fixed firm upon a fear Which vanishes, as I draw near. My head now turned, it follows me Like the jealous moon by night, And submerges in my private sea Of rippling waves and turquoise light. It pulls me down unto its depths; I scream, but cannot make a sound. My heart has seized with bated breaths; If I don’t wake, I shall be drowned! My first strikes forth from this nightmare Swiping at phantoms in the air.

Meredith Etherington-Smith Meredith Etherington-Smith became an editor of Paris Vogue in London and GQ magazine in the United States during the 1970s. During the 1980s, she served as deputy and features editor of Harpers & Queen magazine and has since become a leading art critic. Currently, she is editor in chief of Christie’s magazine. She is also a noted artist biographer; her book on Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, was an international bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages. Her drawing room that morning was much like any comfortable, slightly formal drawing room to be found in country houses throughout England: the paintings, hung on pale yellow walls, were better; the furniture, chintz-covered; the flowers, natural garden bouquets. It was charming. And so was she, as she swooped in from a room beyond. I had never seen pictures of her without any makeup, with just-washed hair and dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt. She looked more vital, more beautiful, than any photograph had ever managed to convey. She was, in a word, staggering; here was the most famous woman in the world up close, relaxed, funny, and warm. The tragic Diana, the royal Diana, the wronged Diana: a clever, interesting person who wasn’t afraid to say she didn’t know how an auction sale worked, and would it be possible to work with me on it? “Of course, ma’am,” I said. “It’s your sale, and if you would like, then we’ll work on it together to make the most money we can for your charities.” “So what do we do next?” she asked me. “First, I think you had better choose the clothes for sale.” The next time I saw her drawing room, Paul Burrell, her butler, had wheeled in rack after rack of jeweled, sequined, embroidered, and lacy dresses, almost all of which I recognized from photographs of the Princess at some state event or gala evening. The visible relics of a royal life that had ended. The Princess, in another pair of immaculately pressed jeans and a stripy shirt, looked so different from these formal meringues that it was almost laughable. I think at that point the germ of an idea entered my mind: that sometime, when I had gotten to know her better and she trusted me, I would like to see photographs of the “new” Princess Diana--a modern woman unencumbered by the protocol of royal dress. Eventually, this idea led to putting together the suite of pictures of this sea-change princess with Mario Testino. I didn’t want her to wear jewels; I wanted virtually no makeup and completely natural hair. “But Meredith, I always have people do my hair and makeup,” she explained. “Yes ma’am, but I think it is time for a change--I want Mario to capture your speed, and electricity, the real you and not the Princess.” She laughed and agreed, but she did turn up at the historic shoot laden with her turquoise leather jewel boxes. We never opened them. Hair and makeup took ten minutes, and she came out of the dressing room looking breathtaking. The pictures are famous now; they caused a sensation at the time. My favorite memory of Princess Diana is when I brought the work prints round to Kensington Palace for her to look at. She was so keen to see them that she raced down the stairs and grabbed them. She went silent for a moment or two as she looked at these vivid, radiant images. Then she turned to me and said, “But these are really me. I’ve been set free and these show it. Don’t you think,” she asked me, “that I look a bit like Marilyn Monroe in some of them?” And laughed.

Unfurling herself like a large polar cat, she stood twice as tall as me. Her coat was a magnificent mother of pearl, while her tail gleamed turquoise with threads of gold bisecting each scale. Her teeth were large, capable of tearing a man in half, and her eyes glowed a deep bloody red. She was fury and wonder, and I adored her.

Thomas wiggled his toes in the sand and watched a sea bird glide across the calm, clear, turquoise water. There was a gentle breeze and the sun on his skin felt glorious.

Indeed, the door before us was nearly identical in shape and style--- it blended into the Greek countryside perfectly, its wooden boards painted with a scene of pale, pebbly stone and sun-dried vegetation. A little patch of rock roses to the left continued into the painting, and these two-dimensional blooms tossed their heads in the breeze in time with their tangible brethren. Even more impossible, to my mortal eyes, was the doorknob, a square of glass enclosing a splash of turquoise sea. This nexus is truly the most peculiar variety of faerie door I have encountered in my career.

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SUCH A THIN VEIL separated the past from the present; they existed simultaneously in the human heart. Anything could transport you—the smell of the sea at low tide, the screech of a gull, the turquoise of a glacier-fed river. A voice in the wind could be both true and imagined.

Often Khaster heard noises in the night he could not identify. They were the sounds made by animals, but had a human resonance to them. Sometimes gouts of light would spurt into the sky-red, turquoise, gold-and some moments later thunder would come, but from beneath the earth rather than the heavens. Strange smells, bitter yet musky and sweet, would occasionally come in through an open window to haunt a room. Khaster knew that the priest-mages of Madragore employed a regiment of alchemists who worked in a shuttered citadel on the east of the city. Its huge domed roof, which was covered in flaky verdigis scales rose up from an area of factories and tanning shops. Stories leaked out of the citadel along with the fumes. Creatures were made there, homunculi, golems, beasts of war. Sometimes the creatures escaped or were let out to roam the city by their keepers. That accounted for the strange nocturnal noises. But perhaps these were only stories after all. Perhaps the citadel hid secrets of a more mundane yet brutal nature. Prisoners could be interrogated there, tortured with corrosive steams. The alchemists made killing perfumes for use on the battlefield. Khaster had heard tales of a liquid that when released into the air corroded all the flesh from anyone who smelled its delicate aroma. The alchemists made weapons; if not magical beasts, then mordant potions and poisons. They had to test them on someone.

Prayer to the Pacific I traveled to the ocean distant from my southwest land of sandrock to the moving blue water Big as the myth of origin. Pale pale water in the yellow-white light of sun floating west to China where ocean herself was born. Clouds that blow across the sand are wet. Squat in the wet sand and speak to the Ocean: I return to you turquoise the red coral you sent us, sister spirit of Earth. Four round stones in my pocket I carry back the ocean to suck and to taste. Thirty thousand years ago Indians came riding across the ocean carried by giant sea turtles. Waves were high that day great sea turtles waded slowly out from the gray sundown sea. Grandfather Turtle rolled in the sand four times and disappeared swimming into the sun. And so from that time immemorial, as the old people say, rain clouds drift from the west gift from the ocean. Green leaves in the wind Wet earth on my feet swallowing raindrops clear from China.

The sun has collapsed against the vast expanse of the darkening ocean. Soon the turquoise sea will be completely black like a void. I hate the ocean at night. It has me thinking about hopelessness and loss. The red sky a watercolour as the thickening clouds leak together.

La geografia dell'aridità è un prisma da cui emergono i più insoliti e complessi accostamenti di colore. I sederti hanno questo in comune, i colori. E sono loro a farci sentire a casa in luoghi simili, a darci l'impressione che il mondo non sia poi così grande.

Sulla linea dell'orizzonte, al crepuscolo, là dove la roccia rossa incontra il cielo blu oltremare, proprio nel punto in cui avviene l'unione, corre un nasto turchese adagiato sopra la grande terra scura. Un colore transitorio.

Siete sognatori, e i sogni che custodite sono così tanti che di giorno, nelle ore di veglia, ve li portate appresso come pietre, storie che vi lasciano nella testa il sapore della nebbia finchè le pietre della notte successiva non arrivano a rimpiazzarle.

Il mare turchese costituisce un orizzonte che esalta i contorni e le tinte di ogni altro elemento del paesaggio [...] Il mare ospita altri colori per cui nessuno ha un nome.

Farther out, the water sheds its sandy complexion and turns a turquoise of such clarity that the tourists’ sailboats seem to float atop their own shadows.

Clear blue skies, turquoise seas and dancing trees, Beautiful Barbados!!

When projection takes the leap from a normal human impulse to a pathology, it demonizes the Other. In its extremes it reduces a group or race to stereotype, even subhuman stature, thereby providing an excuse for oppressing them.

Unlike Herman Melville and Mark Twain, London brought his readers into the surf from the moment he espied “the white-headed combers thrust suddenly skyward out of the placid turquoise blue and come rolling in to shore. One after another they come, a mile long, with smoking crests, the white battalions of the infinite army of the sea. And one sits and listens to the perpetual roar, and watches the unending procession, and feels tiny and fragile before this tremendous force expressing itself in fury and foam and sound.”12

I think the best solution would be if they were to fall into the sea accidentally,” Viggo proposed the next morning. “Accidentally?” Gerd said, looking puzzled. “Yeah sure. With an accidental push.” “Viggo!” Ingrid exclaimed. “Eh? You’re thinking exactly the same thing, and you know it.” “It might have crossed my mind, but we can’t do that.

​‘Why is the sea sometimes green and sometimes turquoise, sometimes white and sometimes as black as lava? Why is it never just the colour of water?’ Alessi asked. ​‘It’s God’s will,’ his grandfather said. ‘That way the sailor knows when he can go out to sea and when it’s best to stay on shore.

If doubt has brought you to this page, you probably need a little genealogical cheat-sheet: Kimiâ Sadr, the narrator. Leïli Sadr, Kimiâ’s oldest sister. Mina Sadr, the younger sister. Sara Sadr (née Tadjamol), Kimiâ’s mother. Darius Sadr, Kimiâ’s father. Born in 1925 in Qazvin, he is the fourth son of Mirza-Ali Sadr and Nour. The Sadr uncles (six official ones, plus one more): Uncle Number One, the eldest, prosecuting attorney in Tehran. Uncle Number Two (Saddeq), responsible for managing the family lands in Mazandaran and Qazvin. Keeper of the family history. Uncle Number Three, notary. Uncle Number Five, manager of an electrical appliance shop near the Grand Bazar. Uncle Number Six (Pirouz), professor of literature at the University of Tehran. Owner of one of the largest real estate agencies in the city. Abbas, Uncle Number Seven (in a way). Illegitimate son of Mirza-Ali and a Qazvin prostitute. Nour, paternal grandmother of Kimiâ, whom her six sons call Mother. Born a few minutes after her twin sister, she was the thirtieth child of Montazemolmolk, and the only one to inherit her father’s blue eyes, the same shade of blue as the Caspian Sea. She died in 1971, the day of Kimiâ’s birth. Mirza-Ali, paternal grandfather. Son and grandson of wealthy Qazvin merchants; he was the only one of the eleven children of Rokhnedin Khan and Monavar Banou to have turquoise eyes the color of the sky over Najaf, the city of his birth. He married Nour in 1911 in order to perpetuate a line of Sadrs with blue eyes. Emma Aslanian, maternal grandmother of Kimiâ and mother of Sara. Her parents, Anahide and Artavaz Aslanian, fled Turkey shortly before the Armenian genocide in 1915. The custom of reading coffee grounds was passed down to her from her grandmother Sévana. Montazemolmolk, paternal great-grandfather of Kimiâ and father of Nour. Feudal lord born in Mazandaran. Parvindokht, one of Montazemolmolk’s many daughters; sister of Nour. Kamran Shiravan, son of one of Mirza-Ali’s sisters and Ebrahim Shiravan. Cousin of Darius . . .

We began with two buttery sweet edamame and one sugar syrup-soaked shrimp in a crunchy soft shell. A lightly simmered baby octopus practically melted in our mouths, while a tiny cup of clear, lemony soup provided cooling refreshment. The soup held three slices of okra and several slippery cool strands of junsai (water shield), a luxury food that grows in ponds and marshes throughout Asia, Australia, West Africa, and North America. In the late spring the tiny plant develops leafy shoots surrounded by a gelatinous sheath that floats on the water's surface, enabling the Japanese to scoop it up by hand from small boats. The edamame, okra, and water shield represented items from the mountains, while the shrimp and octopus exemplified the ocean. I could tell John was intrigued and amused by this artistic (perhaps puny?) array of exotica. Two pearly pieces of sea bream, several fat triangles of tuna, and sweet shelled raw baby shrimp composed the sashimi course, which arrived on a pale turquoise dish about the size of a bread plate. It was the raw fish portion of the meal, similar to the mukozuke in a tea kaiseki. To counter the beefy richness of the tuna, we wrapped the triangles in pungent shiso leaves , then dunked them in soy. After the sashimi, the waitress brought out the mushimono (steamed dish). In a coal-black ceramic bowl sat an ivory potato dumpling suspended in a clear wiggly broth of dashi thickened with kudzu starch, freckled with glistening orange salmon roe. The steamed dumplings, reminiscent of a white peach, was all at once velvety, sweet, starchy, and feathery and had a center "pit" of ground chicken. The whole dish, served warm and with a little wooden spoon, embodied the young, tender softness of spring.

After the initial shock subsides, the Aegean Sea, turquoise and limpid, enveloping my limbs feels like a gigantic womb. I think, as we swim side by side moving our legs and arms in unison like synchronized frogs, of the sea as the mother of the first creatures who crawled out of it and somehow, eventually became me and Patron’s operatic wife. She is still wearing her glasses and is careful to keep her teased puffy hair out of the water.

was finding my soul in México, and my soul’s color was turquoise, a healing color, as I found out from a street vendor. This was why people wore turquoise jewelry around their necks and wrists and ears, to bring in the healing spirits of the sea and the sky.

Sam would stand on the beach at dusk for long periods of time staring at the particles reflectively glisten across trillions of tiny explosion points watching sunsets of the Aegean Sea fade out. Sam would change his visible spectrum across wider ranges allowing the elements and their cascade of radiance to repeat and dance in vibratory field mechanisms unimaginable. The waves would crash glowing with blue bioluminescence but on the opposite ends of the spectrum creating red shift tides that grew and shrank on black sand while the sun burned in turquoise.

The geography of aridity is a prism for brightness, the eclectic partnerships of a fiercely articulated palette. Deserts share a kinship of color. You know you are home and the world is not so large.

Another small chuckle sounds beside Annex before the figure sits down, and I’m met with two familiar turquoise eyes. “How do you know this crazy asshole?” Ezra slaps Annex on the shoulder, a broad grin on his face. “I knew you had a fighter's spirit, little sea star, but I didn’t know you ran toward the trouble.