Washed Ashore Quotes

A prosthetic leg with a Willie Nelson bumper sticker washed ashore on the beach, which meant it was Florida. Then it got weird.

I guess I work in small ways. It's kind of like this story someone told me, about a guy on the beach in Mexico throwing starfish in the sea. Thousands had washed ashore. Someone asked him why - 'Why are you wasting your time, when there are so many? You can't possibly make a difference.'" "I know that story! The man threw another one back, and said -" "'Made a difference to that one!'" Rowan finishes.

​“I like pink,” Cat said. “Laila’s is purple. What about you?” ​Jean frowned as he thought it over, gaze drifting over the assortment of clothes piled in their shopping cart. At last he settled on the only one that made sense: “Brown.” It was not the answer Cat was expecting, judging by her reaction, but Jean didn’t waste his time explaining. Brown like the soil in Rhemann’s garden, or the sand where the tide washed ashore, or the dirt roads Cat had led him down time and again. Brown like the gaze that sought Jean out in every room, but that last thought wasn’t one he could linger on.

On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the north-west of the city.

I learned that politicians are not supposed to help people. They simply listen to people, nod their heads painfully, commiserate at proper intervals, promise to do all they can, and then do nothing. It was very instructive. I could probably have enlisted more action from a bleached jellyfish washed ashore in a seasonal storm.

Once, on ancient Earth, there was a human boy walking along a beach. There had just been a storm, and starfish had been scattered along the sands. The boy knew the fish would die, so he began to fling the fish to the sea. But every time he threw a starfish, another would wash ashore. "An old Earth man happened along and saw what the child was doing. He called out, 'Boy, what are you doing?' " 'Saving the starfish!' replied the boy. " 'But your attempts are useless, child! Every time you save one, another one returns, often the same one! You can't save them all, so why bother trying? Why does it matter, anyway?' called the old man. "The boy thought about this for a while, a starfish in his hand; he answered, "Well, it matters to this one." And then he flung the starfish into the welcoming sea.

Brown like the soil in Rhemann’s garden, or the sand where the tide washed ashore, or the dirt roads Cat had led him down time and again. Brown like the gaze that sought Jean out in every room, but that last thought wasn’t one he could linger on.

Words and stories washed ashore on that ancient way of the sea, and we made of them new songs. The sun came again, casting shadows that we peeled off the street to make of them new clothes.

She tried to speak; her mouth opened, once, twice, silent, a mermaid washed ashore.

No one cares if, after a storm, they’re washed ashore naked. Only that they are alive.

Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess.

was a study on fulmar carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs—an average of 44 pieces per bird. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh nearly five pounds. There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms would likely be consuming them. He devised an aquarium experiment, using bottom-feeding lugworms that live on organic sediments, barnacles that filter organic matter suspended in water, and sand fleas that eat beach detritus. In the experiment, plastic particles and fibers were provided in proportionately bite-size quantities. Each creature promptly ingested them.

Until you've been washed ashore you can't know how all encompassing the sea has become.

But the Count hadn’t the temperament for revenge; he hadn’t the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn’t the fanciful ego to dram of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world’s Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island’s topography, it’s climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.

A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the cold clean currents. He was very hungry that season.

First the slender Spear Tower, a hundred-and-a-half feet tall and crowned with a spear of gilded steel that added another thirty feet to its height; then the mighty Tower of the Sun, with its dome of gold and leaded glass; last the dun-colored Sandship, looking like some monstrous dromond that had washed ashore and turned to stone.

up in Pacific Grove, a coastal town on the Monterey Peninsula in California, I had spent many Sunday mornings combing beaches, hunting for sea glass. I once believed the surf-tumbled glass had come from mermaids when the mythical creatures wept for sailors lost at sea, their tears hardened and washed ashore by the latest storm front. Mermaid tears were treasure, meant to be guarded close to one’s heart. They brought wishes of true love and kept you safe

If you study the rhythm of life on this planet, you will find that everything moves in perfect symphony with everything else — by grand divine design. The earth has the ability to heal and regenerate itself, just as our oceans have the ability to replenish themselves by turning over their debris with the waves to wash them ashore. This perfect orchestration of the cycle of life is one of the Creator's greatest and most beautiful miracles. The earth will continue to exist with or without us. So the real concern should be, will we be able to continue to co-exist with each other?

Oblong stones sink slow and sideways. Shaped by the weight of waves, dutifully vibrating nature’s lunar-bound graces, they wash ashore only for closed palms to forsake them. The cheerful will cherish them, place them on windowsills, or on graves.

And thus they form a perfect group; he walks back two or three paces, selects his point of sight, and begins to sketch a hurried outline. He has finished it before they move; he hears their voices, though he cannot hear their words, and wonders what they can be talking of. Presently he walks on, and joins them. 'You have a corpse there, my friends?' he says. 'Yes; a corpse washed ashore an hour ago.' 'Drowned?' 'Yes, drowned; - a young girl, very handsome.' 'Suicides are always handsome,' he says; and then he stands for a little while idly smoking and meditating, looking at the sharp outline of the corpse and the stiff folds of the rough canvas covering. Life is such a golden holiday to him young, ambitious, clever - that it seems as though sorrow and death could have no part in his destiny. ("The Cold Embrace")

Rico laughed a little, feeling helpless. "Is your life always this...I don't know-" "Tide of chaos washing ashore on the beach of what the fuck? Yesh.

My penis lay pathetically along my left thigh, like some small animal washed ashore.

Holy fairy feathers, why does he have to be so handsome? Why couldn't a haggard old man have washed ashore?

All those bodies floating in the water next to the ship. I couldn’t get them out of my mind so I looked again at newspapers from that time. Three Chinese bodies were found washed ashore within

Memories streamed over her, and she sat up, images converging in her mind’s eye, the sneaker wave of grief catching her in its riptide pull once again, leaving her washed ashore, bereft, with two deep desires: to sleep forever, or to live life for them both. “Oh,

Iowa City was a place where people could and did stall out forever. Seated along the bar in the Mill Restaurant was a line of customers that hadn’t changed in thirty years, being served by bartenders ten years older than Guthrie was. If you were from Oelwein or Spencer or Denby, you could wash ashore in Iowa City and be so sated with ease and pleasure that you would never move on, which was not the case in Ames. Ames took them in and popped them out. Iowa City took them in and kept them—that was the difference between pain and pleasure, Guthrie supposed.

Tsukuru couldn't fathom what this substance was. He couldn't accept or reject it. It merely settled on his body as a shadowy swarm, laying an ample amount of shadowy eggs. Then darkness would withdraw and twilight would return, bringing with it the birds, who once again slashed away at his body.

Absurdly, dead fish by the hundreds were washing ashore, their peaceful world disrupted by man's squabble.

Sweden?” he cried. “Orr!” cried the chaplain. “Orr?” cried Yossarian. “Sweden!” cried the chaplain, shaking his head up and down with gleeful rapture and prancing about uncontrollably from spot to spot in a grinning, delicious frenzy. “It’s a miracle, I tell you! A miracle! I believe in God again. I really do. Washed ashore in Sweden after so many weeks at sea! It’s a miracle.

I know you,” he added, helping to arrange the blanket over my shoulders. “You won’t drop the subject until I agree to check on your cousin, so I’ll do it. But only under one condition.” “John,” I said, whirling around to clutch his arm again. “Don’t get too excited,” he warned. “You haven’t heard the condition.” “Oh,” I said, eagerly. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it. Thank you. Alex has never had a very good life-his mother ran away when he was a baby, and his dad spent most of his life in jail…But, John, what is all this?” I swept my free hand out to indicate the people remaining on the dock, waiting for the boat John had said was arriving soon. I’d noticed some of them had blankets like the one he’d wrapped around me. “A new customer service initiative?” John looked surprised at my change of topic…then uncomfortable. He stooped to reach for the driftwood Typhon had dashed up to drop at his feet. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, stiffly. “You’re giving blankets away to keep them warm while they wait. When did this start happening?” “You mentioned some things when you were here the last time….” He avoided meeting my gaze by tossing the stick for his dog. “They stayed with me.” My eyes widened. “Things I said?” “About how I should treat the people who end up here.” He paused at the approach of a wave-though it was yards off-and made quite a production of moving me, and my delicate slippers, out of its path. “So I decided to make a few changes.” It felt as if one of the kind of flowers I liked-a wild daisy, perhaps-had suddenly blossomed inside my heart. “Oh, John,” I said, and rose onto my toes to kiss his cheek. He looked more than a little surprised by the kiss. I thought I might actually have seen some color come into his cheeks. “What was that for?” he asked. “Henry said nothing was the same after I left. I assumed he meant everything was much worse. I couldn’t imagine it was the opposite, that things were better.” John’s discomfort at having been caught doing something kind-instead of reckless or violet-was sweet. “Henry talks too much,” he muttered. “But I’m glad you like it. Not that it hasn’t been a lot of added work. I’ll admit it’s cut down on the complaints, though, and even the fighting amongst our rowdier passengers. So you were right. Your suggestions helped.” I beamed up at him. Keeper of the dead. That’s how Mr. Smith, the cemetery sexton, had referred to John once, and that’s what he was. Although the title “protector of the dead” seemed more applicable. It was totally silly how much hope I was filled with by the fact that he’d remembered something I’d said so long ago-like maybe this whole consort thing might work out after all. I gasped a moment later when there was a sudden rush of white feathers, and the bird he’d given me emerged from the grizzly gray fog seeming to engulf the whole beach, plopping down onto the sand beside us with a disgruntled little humph. “Oh, Hope,” I said, dashing tears of laughter from my eyes. Apparently I had only to feel the emotion, and she showed up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you behind. It was his fault, you know.” I pointed at John. The bird ignored us both, poking around in the flotsam washed ashore by the waves, looking, as always, for something to eat. “Her name is Hope?” John asked, the corners of his mouth beginning to tug upwards. “No.” I bristled, thinking he was making fun of me. Then I realized I’d been caught. “Well, all right…so what if it is? I’m not going to name her after some depressing aspect of the Underworld like you do all your pets. I looked up the name Alastor. That was the name of one of the death horses that drew Hades’s chariot. And Typhon?” I glanced at the dog, cavorting in and out of the waves, seemingly oblivious of the cold. “I can only imagine, but I’m sure it means something equally unpleasant.

If you toss a pebble into the ocean, it will sink forever without ever making a ripple. But if you throw that same pebble into a small pond, it will create waves that eventually wash ashore & touch all who walk there.

A few years ago, Ed and I were exploring the dunes on Cumberland Island, one of the barrier islands between the Atlantic Ocean and the mainland of south Georgia. He was looking for the fossilized teeth of long-dead sharks. I was looking for sand spurs so that I did not step on one. This meant that neither of us was looking very far past our own feet, so the huge loggerhead turtle took us both by surprise. She was still alive but just barely, her shell hot to the touch from the noonday sun. We both knew what had happened. She had come ashore during the night to lay her eggs, and when she had finished, she had looked around for the brightest horizon to lead her back to the sea. Mistaking the distant lights on the mainland for the sky reflected on the ocean, she went the wrong way. Judging by her tracks, she had dragged herself through the sand until her flippers were buried and she could go no farther. We found her where she had given up, half cooked by the sun but still able to turn one eye up to look at us when we bent over her. I buried her in cool sand while Ed ran to the ranger station. An hour later she was on her back with tire chains around her front legs, being dragged behind a park service Jeep back toward the ocean. The dunes were so deep that her mouth filled with sand as she went. Her head bent so far underneath her that I feared her neck would break. Finally the Jeep stopped at the edge of the water. Ed and I helped the ranger unchain her and flip her back over. Then all three of us watched as she lay motionless in the surf. Every wave brought her life back to her, washing the sand from her eyes and making her shell shine again. When a particularly large one broke over her, she lifted her head and tried her back legs. The next wave made her light enough to find a foothold, and she pushed off, back into the water that was her home. Watching her swim slowly away after her nightmare ride through the dunes, I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.

Ever since I was in Amherst College I have remembered how Garman told his class in philosophy that if they would go along with events and have the courage and industry to hold to the main stream, without being washed ashore by the immaterial cross currents, they would someday be men of power. He meant that we should try to guide ourselves by general principles and not get lost in particulars. That may sound like mysticism, but it is only the mysticism that envelopes every great truth. One of the greatest mysteries in the world is the success that lies in conscientious work.

Dr. Syngmann: I am talking about the only quality that was worth creating the world for, the only power that is worth controlling. Pastor Jón: Úa? Dr. Syngmann in a tired, gravelly bass: I hear you mention once more that name which is no name. I know you blame me; I blame myself. Úa was simply Úa. There was nothing I could do about it. I know you have never recovered from it, John. Neither have I. Pastor Jón: That word could mean everything and nothing, and when it ceased to sound, it was as if all other words had lost their meaning. But it did not matter. It gradually came back. Dr. Syngmann: Gradually came back? What did? Pastor Jón: Some years ago, a horse was swept over the falls to Goðafoss. He was washed ashore, alive, onto the rocks below. The beast stood there motionless, hanging his head, for more than twenty-four hours below this awful cascade of water that had swept him down. Perhaps he was trying to remember what life was called. Or he was wondering why the world had been created. He showed no signs of ever wanting to graze again. In the end, however, he heaved himself onto the riverbank and started to nibble. Dr. Syngmann: Only one thing matters, John: do you accept it? Pastor Jón: The flower of the field is with me, as the psalmist said. It isn't mine, to be sure, but it lives here; during the winter it lives in my mind until it resurrects again. Dr. Syngmann: I don't accept it, John! There are limits to the Creator's importunacy. I refuse to carry this universe on my back any longer, as if it were my fault that it exists. Pastor Jón: Quite so. On the other hand, I am like that horse that was dumbfounded for twenty-four hours. For a long time I thought I could never endure having survived. Then I went back to the pasture.

Before Will got sick, Tova used to pack a picnic for two: cheese, fruit, sometimes a bottle of red wine with two plastic tumblers. At Hamilton Park, if the tide was low, they’d scramble down and sit on the beach under the seawall. They’d bury their bare feet in the coarse sand and let the cold, foamy sound lick their ankles as it washed ashore. Tova pulls her hatchback into the empty lot. “Park” has always been a generous term for the narrow strip of soggy grass, its two weather-worn picnic tables, and the drinking fountain that never works. Now, Tova comes here to be alone with her thoughts, when she needs a break from being alone in her house.

There was once a bunny who lived by the ocean. Every day he would stroll along the sandy beach and pick up thoughts which had washed ashore. He would find them in shells, under rocks, and sometimes even tangled up in seaweed. "Oh, this is a good one,” he would say, “We see chaos, but if we look carefully, if we look beneath the chaos, we find perfection." And into his bucket the thought would go. When the bunny had reached a ripe old age he gathered all the thoughts together and placed them carefully into a large silver cauldron heated by the fires of life. Using a straw broom, he stirred them thoroughly, and as he was stirring he listened carefully. Much to his surprise he heard the ocean singing a wordless song of incomparable beauty. The bunny closed his eyes and said, “Ah, it was all worth it.” --The Blue Monk of Niim

Eh? How 'bout that?" Bill nudged her. "Did I promise to show you love or did I promise to show you love?" "Sure,they seem like they're in love." Luce shrugged. "But-" "But what?Do you have any idea how painful that is? Look at that guy. He makes getting inked look like being caressed by a soft breeze." Luce squirmed on the branch. "Is that the lesson here? Pain equals love?" "You tell me," Bill said. "It may surprise you to hear this,but the ladies aren't exactly banging down Bill's door." "I mean,if I tattooed Daniel's same on my body would that mean I loved him more than I already do?" "It's a symbol,Luce." Bill let out a raspy sigh. "You're being too literal. Think about it this way: Daniel is the first good-looking boy LuLu has ever seen. Until he washed ashore a few months ago, this girl's whole world was her father and a few fat natives." "She's Miranda," Luce said, remembering the love story from The Tempest, which she'd read in her tenth-grade Shakespeare seminar. "How very civilized of you!" Bill pursed his lips with approval. "They are liek Ferdinand and Miranda: The handsome foreigner shipwrecks on her shores-" "So,of course it was love at first sight for LuLu," Luce murmured. This was what she was afraid of: the same thoughtless,automatic love that had bothered her in Helston. "Right," Bill said. "She didn't have a choice but to fall for him.But what's interesting here is Daniel. You see, he didn't have to teach her to craft a woven sail, or gain her father's trust by producing a season's worth of fish to cure,or exhibit C"-Bill pointed at the lovers on the beach-"agree to tattoo his whole body according to her local custom.It would have been enough if Daniel had just shown up.LuLu would have loved him anyway." "He's doing it because-" Luce thought aloud. "Because he wants to earn her love.Because otherwise,he would just be taking advantage of their curse. Because no matter what kind of cycle they're bound to,his love for her is...true.

As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you. From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvellous branches twine around you from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf. But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar. And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down. You saw that was the life of the whole and the death of each individual. You felt yourself entwined in the collective death, from death to the earth’s deepest place, from death in your own strangely breathing depths. Oh – you long to be beyond; despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breathes slowly and streams back and forth eternally. All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy, swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.

Dr. Rune Orqvist appeared in Fort Cochin in 1910 AD, washing ashore like Ask and Embla. Like those first humans of Norse mythology, Rune quickly found his legs, and they carried him to food, shelter, drink, women, and raucous company. With his giant girth and his booming baritone, the first impression of the newly arrived blond, bearded foreigner was of an oracle, the sort of man who in apostolic robes, carrying a staff, could have stepped off a dhow alongside that other apostle, Saint Thomas. His arrival is clouded in almost as much myth as that of Saint Thomas. What is known is that South India was the last stop on a journey that began in Stockholm. According to the good doctor, one night, full of akvavit and “singing to myself on Stora Nygatan, I was abducted. When I woke up I was a ship’s physician on a vessel bound for Cape Town!” That occupation took him to all the major ports of the Orient and Africa. But, in his midthirties, he disembarked in Cochin. The

Noble Dash has a kind master, who values his faithful dog, and who would not part with him for a pile of silver and gold, He never forgets the day when his fair-haired little Mary was washed by a big wave into the sea as’ she ran towards her ball, which Tom had thrown into the tide. Dash at the time was lying as if asleep on a heap of sea-weed a short distance off. At the cry of Mary's nurse he bounded away, and in a moment was battling in the midst of the waves. He soon had little Mary's dress held fast in the grip of his strong teeth, and swam bravely with her ashore. Good dog! who could repay him for such a noble deed? Mary's father and mother patted and praised him, and nurse and the children cried over him and hugged him, all dripping as he was from the salt sea; and that night, when little Mary was: warmly asleep in her bed, and the household met together at the hour of evening prayer, no one was surprised that Mary s father thanked God that he had made so noble a dumb creature as faithful Dash, who had saved the life of his darling child.