Shallows Quotes

#1. For now he was in one of those crises when the soul yields a blurred glimpse of all that it enfolds, like an ocean, tempest-torn, uncovering everything from the seaweed in the shallows to the sands of the abyss.

Gustave Flaubert

#2. The worst of misery
Is when a nature framed for noblest things
Condemns itself in youth to petty joys,
And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life
Gasping from out the shallows.

George Eliot

#3. Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness ...

Virginia Woolf

#4. The people I love the best, jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows.

Marge Piercy

#5. One ascends into profundity, but profundity is nothing but a complication of the shallows, and 'one' is nowhere.

Nick Land

#6. One naked star has waded through
The purple shallows of the night,
And faltering as falls the dew
It drips its misty light.

James Whitcomb Riley

#7. Tave drew nearer, his pace never slowing. He continued with his rapid speed even as he approached the shallows of the beach. What, did he think he could swim on land? If so, the Ujals seriously needed to reconsider their leadership choices.

Erin Tate

#8. These men, as she often muttered to friend Eleanor Topping, the two of them pressed together like sisters, their friendship filling in for the matrimonial gaps. These men, romantically isolated, secretly tortured, became like lighthouses flashing their treacherous shallows. Stay away! Stay away!

David Gilbert

#9. at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia, where wild bottlenoses are regularly fed fish by people standing in the shallows, biologists have documented - on twenty-three occasions - the dolphins reciprocating, swimming up to offer freshly caught tuna, eels, and octopi as gifts.

Susan Casey

#10. There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

William Shakespeare

#11. The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.

Mary Renault

#12. She suppresses the ignoble thought that it's hard to see what two complex, intelligent men can see in Michelle. She must have hidden depths, that's all. Ruth sometimes suspects that she, herself, has hidden shallows.

Elly Griffiths

#13. There were nearly as many frogs in the shallows, where lily pads floated. Some water lily flowers were white and some were yellow and some were the palest pink. Dragonflies darted above the water, their iridescent wings catching the glint of the sunlight.

Alice Hoffman

#14. More to the point: the growing universe of the Nones - the new nonreligious - is one of the most spiritually vibrant and provocative spaces in modern life. It is not a world in which spiritual life is absent. It is a world that resists religious excesses and shallows.

Krista Tippett

#15. In the divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim.

John Owen

#16. For much of our lives, we live in the shallows. Then something happens - a crisis, a birth, a death - and we get this glimpse of tremendous depth. My soul becomes shallow when my interests and thoughts go no further than myself. A person should be deep because life itself is deep.

John Ortberg

#17. We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity's demand upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a river-keeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas. We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out.

Thomas McGuane

#18. There's a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads onto fortune, omitted, all their voyages end in shallows and miseries. Upon such tide are we now ...

William Shakespeare

#19. Good Lord, what is man! for as simple he looks, Do but try to develop his books and his crooks, With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil, All in all, he's a problem must puzzle the devil.

Robert Burns

#20. shallows, grabbed the bow rope, and held on for dear life. "Give me

Mark T. Sullivan

#21. The river, it's banks as yet untamed wandered languidly through thickets of rush and papyrus. Ibises waded in the shallows; in the deeps hippos rose and sank slowly like pickled eggs.

Terry Pratchett

#22. From the moment we'd met, he'd dragged me into the deep, swearing to me he was in there with me. It was a lie. He'd waded back out to the shallows and left me to drown.

Samantha Young

#23. ...there was a storm of enormous proportions, with winds so strong that dozens of fish were drawn up from the reedy shallows, then lifted above the village in a shining cloud of scales.

Alice Hoffman

#24. Choose love not in the shallows
but in the deep.

Christina Rossetti

#25. Hely's feelings didn't run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright.

Donna Tartt

#26. I followed the river to the shallows where it spoke of its bed, in whispering tones as gentle as the sun's growing warmth.

Miles Richardson

#27. Sometimes I come across as superficial. Of this I am aware. However, you may be confident that inside my head I am forever plumbing new shallows, finding novel ways to express the obvious, reheating old jokes.

John Dolan

#28. Morning larks called to one another from the shallows at the river's edge, and the sky began to silver behind the friar like a halo.

Julie Berry

#29. Let all Men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly: Men freely ford that see the shallows.

Benjamin Franklin

#30. In his bestseller, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that in the Internet age we are losing our capacity for deep thinking, reading, and conversation.

Michael S. Horton

#31. Shallows where a lamb could wade and depths where an elephant would drown.

Matthew Henry

#32. If life was like a body of water, she had asked that she be allowed to walk again in its shallows; instead she had been abruptly seized by strong currents and pushed into deep water.

Dorothy Gilman

#33. Oriel didn't move. But inside of his head, all was movement, like a river running over rapids, searching for the way through, trying routes around rocks and over shallows, a turbulence of thought more rapid than he could follow. Griff, he knew, would do and say nothing until he heard Oriel's choice.

Cynthia Voigt

#34. He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time. The

J.G. Ballard

#35. I love the Altai Mountains. Crimea, despite all the conflict, is a remarkable place historically, culturally and physically. The mountains drop down into the sea. Porpoises swim in the shallows. Horses gallop through the grass. There are huge rocks, castles, caves.

Tim Cope

#36. The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.

Herbert Spencer

#37. Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows;

Nathaniel Philbrick

#38. Strange how the deepest part of us isn't able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world.

Dean Koontz

#39. Looking back on it now, I'd say one's thirties are a cruel age. At this point, I think of them as a time I whiled away unaware of the tide that can suddenly pull you out, beyond the shallows, into the sea of hardship, and even death.

Takashi Hiraide

#40. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

Ford Madox Ford

#41. Our highest intelligence is deep water flowing into the shallows

Jayne Ryan