Quotes About Sailors

Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.

Rats, even dead rats, are as familiar to sailors as sunburn. Or fleabites.

Ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, land-thieves and water-thieves.

I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.

Experiments in isolation by the U.S. Marine Corps, Dr. John Lilly and others — and the records of shipwrecked sailors, as summarized by Lilly in Simulations of God — show that only a few hours of pure isolation may be necessary before hallucinations begin. These hallucinations, like those of psychedelic drugs, indicate the breaking down of previous imprints and the onset of vulnerability to new imprints.

national navies tend to cooperate better than national armies, partly because sailors are united by a kind of fellowship-of-the-sea born of their shared experience facing violent natural forces.

And the talk, the wonderful talk flowed on—or was it speech entirely, or did it pass at times into song—chanty of the sailors weighing the dripping anchor, sonorous hum of the shrouds in a tearing North-Easter, ballad of the fisherman hauling his nets at sundown against an apricot sky, chords of guitar and mandoline from gondola or caique?

He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.

During the previous summer U.S. public health workers had accidentally killed four sailors, on two different foreign vessels, by fumigating against possible plague-carrying rats.

Swear toads infested every damp patch, cursing like sailors.

Everyone in Denmark has at least two or three sailors in their family; sea travel is part of the DNA of our nation, and because of that, I'd always wanted to tell a story aboard a ship.

Here are also the two vessels, but the San Carlos without sailors, all having died of the scurvy, except two.

If you've ever been in a bar with a bunch of old sailors and see a guy that has an eagle tattooed across his chest, that guy has seen some stuff.

I'm sorry, but in my generation and where I came from, only sailors got tattoos. Not ladies.

Most sailors were in their teens or twenties. Anyone who had reached his thirties was considered a veteran scalawag; by the time he had survived to that age, he had seen what life at sea held: brutality, loneliness, and disease; he had experienced flashes of camaraderie and heroism, as well as persistent dishonesty and callousness. He knew all about the avarice of shipowners, the uncomprehending indifference of kings under whose flags the expedition sailed, and the tyranny of captains.

At first, Africans apparently saw the white sailors not as men but as vumbi—ancestral ghosts—since the Kongo people believed that a person's skin changed to the color of chalk when he passed into the land of the dead.

If you want to see sharks, I'd go to the port side. That's the left side for you landlubbers.

Yorktown, where friendly French soldiers and sailors had outnumbered American ground troops more than two to one.

Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.

It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick - on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.

Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. "So that's what war looks like!" von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, "We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.

A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9—U-9, for short—commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.

most sailors still held the belief that there was no point in knowing how to swim, since it would only prolong your suffering. Turner

Don't like fish. They eat drowned sailors – don't seem right to eat them in return.