I was thinking recently, I've always loved the ocean. If I could do it all again, I might do an oceanography degree. You can do ocean archaeology, and I thought that might be fascinating to do - man-made structures, where the sea has risen above the structures.
From about 700 B.C. to A.D. 500, the vast territory of Scythia, stretching from the Black Sea to China, was home to diverse but culturally related nomads. Known as Scythians to Greeks, Saka to the Persians, and Xiongnu to the Chinese, the steppe tribes were masters of horses and archery.
Even in our day, science suspects beyond the Polar seas, at the very circle of the Arctic Pole, the existence of a sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever green.
It is best to be born in April or August when the life-giving Sun is in its exaltation sign Aries or Leo, its home, for then we enter the sea of life on the crest-wave and are backed in the battle of existence by an abundant fund of vim and energy.
Meeting Australian mountaineer and author Tim Macartney-Snape when I was 16 in 1994 had a big impact on me. His ascent of Everest from sea to summit captured my imagination.
Americans deserve to feel secure in their own lives, in their own middle-class aspirations, before you go to them and say, 'We're going to have to enforce navigable sea lanes in the South China Sea.'
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
I have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the force of gravity, but I have not yet assigned a cause to gravity.
We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.
When I was a kid, I had asthma, so I would have to take cod liver oil all the time. So anything fishy that reminds me of that taste, I can't eat. I love Chilean sea bass because I don't taste it there. But salmon? No, no, no.
Our forefathers regarded as a prodigy the passage of the Alps: first by Hannibal and, more recently, by the Cimbri; but at the present day, these very mountains are cut asunder to yield us a thousand different marbles; promontories are thrown open to the sea; and the face of Nature is being everywhere reduced to a level.
My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land - the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
The anchovy which is found in the sea at Athens, men despise on account of its abundance and say that it is a poor man's fish; but in other cities, they prize it above everything, even where it is far inferior to the Attic anchovy.
Shamu the killer whale is Sea World's Mickey Mouse; whales named Shamu are the star attractions of three parks and the focus of their marketing efforts.
The very pointlessness of a sea walk is it's attractiveness to me.
Climate change is a global problem. The planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues, truly catastrophic consequences are likely to ensue from rising sea levels, to reduced water availability, to more heat waves and fires.
All rivers, even the most dazzling, those that catch the sun in their course, all rivers go down to the ocean and drown. And life awaits man as the sea awaits the river.
A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
