Quotes About Seashells

I love the beach.

He reached down, pulled on a piece of seaweed and came up with a handful of gleaming white shells, shook off the water and tossed them on to the sandy bank. I attempted to do likewise, and came up with a handful of slime and a few broken bits of twig, one of which had a tiny but very angry-looking crab clinging to it.

I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world... perhaps you've seen it.

Life's a beach

It always amazed her to see the treasures low tide turned up.

As a matter of habit, I stop and pick up seashells that interest me, and I always put the ones I really like in a lovely Baccarat bowl in my living room. It's my way of remembering that I once was young and carefree.

When they got back in the Corvette, Gretel fished around in her shopping bad. What is this? She had chosen a black tank suit, but somehow a pink bikini had wound up among her purchases. Don't be mad, Margot pleaded. I'm not wearing this. Gretel tossed the bikini back in the bag. All the same, she couldn't help but notice the fabric was the same exact shade as the palest climbing roses. The tint of seashells on a deserted beach, or the mouth of someone you might want to kiss.

I think there is status to having a house full of pretty things, to buying expensive paintings of seashells from her arty friends and spoons from Tiffany's.

Here in the city she had gilded her nails. They shone. And she had put on a velvet dress, this soft red one, which was heavy. The buttons were in the form of seashells.

Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister "She sells seashells on the seashore.")

Nature is a brilliant engineer and builder. It knows how to create seashells that are twice as strong as the most resistant ceramics human beings can manufacture, and it produces silk fibers five times stronger than steel. Nature also knows how to create multipurpose forms.

Why is it, he asked, that wherever a Chilean goes in the world, Neruda and his fucking seashells has already been there and set up a monopoly? He held my gaze waiting for me to counter him, and as he did I got the feeling that where he came from it was commonplace to talk as we were talking, an even to argue about poetry to the point of violence, and for a moment I felt brushed by loneliness.

I know it's stupid to not own a gun yet have so many triggers, but in some other world gigantic seashells hold humans to their ears and listen to the echo of machines.

Where the surf meets the shore – lots of neat things can happen there.

A conversation with Miss Zwida would lead me inevitably to talk about seashells, and I cannot decide what attitude to take, whether to pretend absolute ignorance or to call on a remote experience now vague; it is my relationship with my life, consisting of things never concluded and half erased, that the subject of seashells forces me to contemplate; hence the uneasiness that finally puts me to flight.

In addition there is the fact that this girl's application in drawing seashells denotes in her a search for formal perfection which the world can and therefore must attain; I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; Therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.

Was it wrong, wanting to sleep late with the covers over my head and wander around a peaceful house with old seashells in drawers and wicker baskets of folded upholstery fabric stored under the parlor secretary, sunset falling in drastic coral spokes through the fanlight over the front door?

The tide goes out imperceptibly. The boulders show and seem to rise up and the ocean recedes leaving little pools, leaving wet weed and moss and sponge, iridescence and brown and blue and China red. On the bottoms lie the incredible refuse of the sea, shells broken and chipped and bits of skeleton, claws, the whole sea bottom a fantastic cemetery on which the living scamper and scramble.

In strange and beautiful wares. It sells the lovely animals of the sea, the sponges, tunicates, anemones, the stars and buttlestars, and sun stars, the bivalves, barnacles, the worms and shells, the fabulous and multiform little brothers, the living moving flowers of the sea, nudibranchs and tectibranchs, the spiked and nobbed and needly urchins