Ebb

Famous quotes containing the word ebb:

    For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
    Claspest the limits of mortality,
    And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
    Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;
    Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

    I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)