Quotes from William Finnegan

As I travelled around Australia, strangers in pubs, on airplanes, in beach parking lots would bring up Gina Rinehart, not knowing I was writing about her. Everybody had something to say, some of it thoughtful, some of it poorly informed, some of it vividly obscene.

I felt the weight of unmapped worlds, unborn language.

In a recent interview, he compared himself to surfers: "What are they doing this for? It's just pure. You're alone. That wave is so much bigger and stronger than you. You're always outnumbered. They always can crush you. And yet you're going to accept that and turn it into a little, brief, meaningless art form.

By thirteen, I'd mostly stopped believing in God, but that was a new development and it left a hole in my world, a feeling that I'd been abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring god, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.

It was, once again, a glorious wave, with hues in its depths so intense they felt like first editions—ocean colors never seen before, made solely for this wave, this moment, perhaps never to be seen again.

You have to hate how the world goes on.

tequila, which Selya called "loudmouth soup.

Being adjacent to that much beauty—more than adjacent; immersed in, pierced by it—was the point. The physical risks were footnotes.

Being friends as in writing letters was so much easier than being friends as in living together.

I was a sunburnt pagan now. I felt privy to mysteries.

This is what I mean by quitting surfing. When you surf, as I then understood it, you live and breathe waves. You always know what the surf is doing. You cut school, lose jobs, lose girlfriends, if it's good.

May your earlobes turn to assholes and shit on your shoulders.

Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would.

Surfers have a perfection fetish. The perfect wave, etcetera. There is no such thing. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. They're quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction. Even the most symmetrical breaks have quirks and a totally specific, local character, changing with every shift in tide and wind and swell.

I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would.

I continued to doubt. But I was not afraid. I just didn't want this to end.

The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization. Robinson Crusoe, Endless Summer. This was a track that led away from citizenship, in the ancients sense of the word, toward a scratched-out frontier where we would live as latter-day barbarians. It went deeper that that. Chasing waves in a dedicated way was both profoundly egocentric and selfless, dynamic and ascetic, radical in its rejection of the values of duty and conventional achievement.

People who tried to start at an advanced age, meaning over fourteen, had, in my experience, almost no chance of becoming proficient, and usually suffered pain and sorrow before they quit.

I later spent a year studying Finnegans Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would never have undertaken—and he had an eye for genre fiction, including westerns, that I lacked.

The particulars of new places grabbed me and held me, the sweep of new coasts, cold, lovely dawns. The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see.... I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity of the road. And I generally liked being a stranger, an observer, often surprised.

Our conversation changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves on Tavarua. But out in the lineup, once the swells started pumping, large pools of awe seemed to collect around us, hushing us, or reducing us to code and murmurs, as though we were in church. There was too much to say, too much emotion, and therefore nothing to say.

And I saw surfing that day - by Leslie Wong, among others - that made my chest hurt: long moments of grace under pressure that felt etched deep in my being: what I wanted, somehow, more than anything else. That night, while my family slept, I lay awake on the bamboo-framed couch, heart pounding with residual adrenaline, listening restlessly to the rain.

L.A. was the John Wayne Gacy of cities, smothering its children with a toxic beach towel of poisoned air, mindless growth, and bad values.

Buzzy Trent, an old-time big-wave rider, allegedly said, "Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of fear.