Quotes from William Finnegan

There was a joy of life in him and a kind of tenderness untainted by the merely gentle." When I read that line, written by James Salter, many years later, I thought of Glenn.

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.

There was the ocean, effectively infinite, falling away forever to the horizon.

We were mining a rich lode of bliss. But disaster never felt far away.

Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of bullshit." When

This was what I was chasing: not the exotic, but a broad-beamed understanding of what is what.

the persistent nostalgia that infected most surfers, even young ones - the notion that it was always better yesterday, and better still the day before.

Its color was a muted gray-white until a wave reared; then turquoise floodlights seemed to switch on illuminating the wave's guts from the inside.

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 reactions.

Brian remained enchanted by the music of words - what he once called 'the incredible foot-stomping joy of a well tuned phrase.

she had enormous eyes and a laugh that pealed thrillingly in the twilight.

In fact, the flashy, antiauthoritarian vaulters were suspiciously regarded, often with reason, by the coaches and their more loyal athletes as Thoreau-reading, dope-smoking, John Carlos–loving hippies.

I've been reduced on certain magnificent days... to just drifting on the shoulder, gawking at the transformation of ordinary seawater into beautifully muscled swell, into feathering urgency, into pure energy, impossibly sculpted, ecstatically edged, and finally into violent foam.

The existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing--a radical critic, like Brown, of received wisdom, and similarly inclined to see mental illness as a sane response to an insane world, even as a form of shamanic journey--described in one of his early books what he called the ontologically secure person.

But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around.

I said. I was silently horrified. What was wrong with these people? Peter had started sporting a beret—another bad sign.

BUT SURFING ALWAYS HAD this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around. Everything out there was disturbingly

Chicks had to realize, he said, that when they married a surfer, they married surfing. They had to either adapt or split.

ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.

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.

It was more reflex than thought. That was my most heedless, least reasonable self down there. It did not weigh risks and probabilities. It didn't deserve to be called decision making. I wasn't proud of it. Still, I felt hot shame and regret as I drove away.

You were required — this was essential, a matter of survival — to know your limits, both physical and emotional. But how could you know your limits unless you tested them? And if you failed the test? You were also required to stay calm if things went wrong. Panic was the first step, everybody said, to drowning.

Walpole, that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

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.