Maelstrom Quotes

• One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

  Harold Pinter

  Literature, Centre

  Interview with Ramona Koval, www.abc.net.au. December 22, 2002.

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• I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it.

  John Keegan

  Thinking, Scary, Black

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• Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.

  Herman Melville

  Flames, Whales, Giving

  Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.156

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• I would love to be a voice in this maelstrom of chaos and obsessive celebrity infatuation that says, 'Let's talk about something that matters'.

  Zachary Quinto

  Voice, Matter, Chaos

  "Career Zigzag, Changing Coasts And Galaxies" by David Rooney, www.nytimes.com. October 21, 2010.

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• A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring.

  Andrew S. Tanenbaum

  People, Bells, Linux

  "Clearing Up Some Misconceptions". "Ken Brown's Motivation, Release 1.2", www.cs.vu.nl. May 21, 2004.

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• There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.

  William Faulkner

  Reality, Rocks, Might

  William Faulkner, Noel Polk (1987). “Absalom, Absalom!, typescript setting copy and miscellaneous material”, Facsimiles-Garl

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• The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

  Thomas Nagel

  Passion, World, Madness

  Thomas Nagel (2010). “Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002-2008”, p.34, Oxford University Press

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• Across the troubled maelstrom of time, people always need a beer.

  Ellen Kushner

  Beer, People, Needs

  Ellen Kushner (2007). “Swordspoint”, p.333, Spectra

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• The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means "the shores where the sea breaks its back." The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder.

  Corey Ford

  Beach, War, Ocean

  Corey Ford (2003). “Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story - Georg Steller & the Russian Exploration of AK”, p.11, Graphic Arts Books

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• Love is the impulse which directs the world, And all things know it and obey its power. Man, in the maelstrom of his passions whirled; The bee that takes the pollen to the flower; The earth, uplifting her bare, pulsing breast To fervent kisses of the amorous sun;-- Each but obeys creative Love's behest, Which everywhere instinctively is done.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Love, Uplifting, Flower

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2016). “Complete Poetical Works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox (Delphi Classics)”, p.553, Delphi Classics

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• Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people’s lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people.

  Pope Francis

  Christian, Jesus, Reality

  Pope Francis (2014). “The Joy of the Gospel”, p.76, BookBaby

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• The conscious mind is a maelstrom of fleeting thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, conflicting desires, and doubts; barely able to confine its attention to a single clear objective for a microsecond before secondary thoughts begin to adulterate it and provoke yet further trains of mental discourse. If you do not believe this, then attempt to confine your conscious attention to the dot at the end of this sentence without involving yourself in any other form of thinking, including thinking about the dot.

  Peter J. Carroll

  Believe, Thinking, Feelings

  "Liber Kaos". Book by Peter J. Carroll, January 15, 1992.

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• I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can, so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture.

  Marlon Brando

  Children, Culture, Stories

  "Songs My Mother Taught Me". Autobiography by Marlon Brando and Robert Lindsey, 1994.

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• Why is the forecast so bland? Why instead of 'stormy' don't they just say the sea's 'a frothing maelstrom of terror and hopelessness'?

  Jeremy Clarkson

  Sea, Hopelessness, Terror

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• The once rather old-fashioned science of paleontology finds itself in a maelstrom of excitement and controversy. Astrophysicists, atmospheric scientists, geochemists, geophysicists, and statisticians are all contributing to the extinction problem. And the general public is taking part through television talk shows, magazine cover stories, newspaper editorials, and even the occasional mention in gossip columns.

  David M. Raup

  Gossip, Television, Extinction

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• If I had political responsibility, I would want to prepare for a plan B that would foresee that the European currency union, that the eurozone, no longer necessarily consists of 17 member states. And that means to make provisions so that other countries are not pulled into the maelstrom through contagion.

  Peer Steinbruck

  Country, Mean, Responsibility

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• Vengeous scowled. 'As you can see,' he said, 'you are vastly outnumbered.' I usually am.' Your situation has become quite untenable.' It usually does.' You are within moments of being swarmed by these filthy creatures of undeath and torn apart in a maelstrom of pain and fury.' Skulduggery paused. 'Okay, that's a new one on me.

  Derek Landy

  Pain, Doe, Torn Apart

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• The wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States with the rise of the drug war and the get tough movement really flooded our schools. Schools, caught up in this maelstrom, began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as young people with an enormous amount of potential struggling in their own ways and their own difficult context to make it and hopefully thrive. We began viewing the youth in schools as potential violators rather than as children needing our guidance.

  Michelle Alexander

  Children, War, Struggle

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Every time when it comes to writing a book, I think, "I'm the last person in the world that should be doing this, I don't know anything, I can't do this." And I went through years of that with Into The Maelstrom.

  David Toop

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  "The Strange World Of... David Toop". Interview with Karen Shook, thequietus.com. June 28, 2016.

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• I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I'm a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.

  Primo Levi

  Memories, Men, Clothes

  "The Mirror Maker" by Primo Levi, ("The Premise"), 1986.

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• No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

  Barbara Tuchman

  War, Europe, World

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• He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Summer, Dream, Morning

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.377, e-artnow

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• If I wrote at all, I must throw myself headlong into the great political maelstrom, and would of course be swallowed up like a fishing-boat in the great Norway horror which decorated our school geographies; for no woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which would be heaped upon me. But what matter? I had no children to dishonor; all save one who had ever loved me were dead, and she no longer needed me, and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one could be better spared than I.

  Jane Swisshelm

  Children, School, Fishing

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• Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

  Steven Pinker

  Self, Brain, Events

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