I Live With Ghosts

Anna Akhmatova, from Plantain

… and there is something about the achingly bright expanse of blue that makes me feel infinitely placid, infinitely calm, infinitely spacious. Something there is about the ceaseless, unperturbed ebb and flow … about the vast masses of green-blue water … that heals all my uneasy questionings and self-searchings.

Sylvia Plath, from a letter

You would rather have gone on feeling nothing, emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace of the deepest sea, which is easier than the noise and flesh of the surface.

Margaret Atwood, from Eurydice

The sea has many voices, Many Gods and many voices.

T.S. Eliot, from The Dry Salvages

Look there: how she approaches impatiently over the sea. Do you not feel the thirst and the hot breath of her love? She would suck at the sea and drink its depth into her heights; and the sea’s desire rises toward her with a thousand breasts. It wants to be kissed and sucked by the thirst of the sun; it wants to become air and height and a footpath of light, and itself light.

Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The sea is working, working in my silence.

Pablo Neruda, from Nothing More

She knows what she wants: she wants to remain standing still in the sea. And so she remains. The woman neither receives nor transmits. She does not need to communicate. She knows that she is gleaming from the water, the salt and the sun. In some obscure way her dripping hair is like that of a shipwrecked person.

Clarice Lispector, from An Apprenticeship, or the Book of Delights

I wish you a kinder sea.