Quotes from William Finnegan

Writing is pretty flexible work, don't you think? If you want to surf, you just have to get a lot done when the waves are lousy. That's what I'm always telling myself, anyway - write while the surf's down!

For billionaires who cannot buy good press, there is the option of buying the press.

There are good waves not that far from Manhattan - on Long Island, in north Jersey. It's true that the best surf around here tends to happen in winter, so you need a good wetsuit, and the time window of good waves is often pretty short, so you have to stay on top of the forecasts.

Mandela's political evolution was gradual.

Inequality is on the rise.

Even wars, big conflicts that have drawn a lot of news coverage, sometimes seem to me to have a center that hasn't been described, that might yet be glimpsed if approached from some odd angle.

The differences between the received wisdom, the standard version of events, and the facts on the ground may be subtle or they may be stark, even profound.

Back when I could get away with it, I subscribed to Norman Mailer's view that exercise without excitement, without competition or danger or purpose, didn't strengthen the body but simply wore it out. Swimming laps always seemed to me especially pointless. But I can't get away with that attitude now. If I don't swim, I will be a pear-shaped pillar of suet.

The Vietnam war was wrong, rotten to the core. But the military, the government, the police, big business were all congealing in my view into a single, opressive mass -- The System, The Man. These were standard issue youth politics at the time, of course, and I was soon folding school authorities into the enemy force. And my casual, even contemptuous attitude toward the law was mostly a holdover from childhood, when a large part of glory was defiance and what you could get away with.

When I finally came in and complained, she tried to explain, not for the first time, how exquisitely boring it was to watch surfing. The lulls between sets seemed to go on for hours. There had been, it was true, some fairly long lulls. My

The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization.

Evidently it took Catholic school to turn young kids into fearless, hardened apostates.

In truth, difficult as it was, pulling up stakes was in many ways easier than staying. It gave me an excellent excuse to postpone mundane but frightening decisions about where and how to live. I would disappear from the overdetermined, underwhelming world of disco-dulled, energy crisis America. I might even become another person- someone more to my liking- in the antipodes.

I had this vague idea that I could be completely happy as an idler, even a beggar, around the water.

Sometimes it was mild elation. Often it was a pleasant melancholy.

Defeats, humiliations- craven avoidance- burn into memory so much more deeply than their opposites.

The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. —JOSEPH CONRAD, The Mirror of the Sea

Then there is the human factor. As a variation on the old maxim has it, "Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of bullshit.

But Southern California, in its sprawling, edgeless blandness, was losing its baseline status in my mind. It was no longer the place by which all other places had to be measured.

I had never surfed so loosely in waves that size. I felt immortal.

There were plenty of things I was actually glad I had left unsaid. Still, the comment haunted me. It haunts me today. All the things I wish I had said when I had the chance. A moment recurs. We were

To my Western eyes, they were paragons of graceful competence and imagined wholeness. Sina's

We will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam.

Eu ouvira dizer que, como surfista, envelhecer era apenas o processo longo e lento de humilhação de se transformar em um iniciante outra vez.