South Sea Pearls

Famous quotes containing the words south sea, south, sea and/or pearls:

    “There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear—the city of London and the South Seas.”
    —Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    “Even when seen from near, the olive shows
    A hue of far away. Perhaps for this
    The dove brought olive back, a tree which grows
    Unearthly pale, which ever dims and dries,
    And whose great thirst, exceeding all excess,
    Teaches the South it is not paradise.”
    —Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)

    “They call them the haunted shores, these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here, and sea fog, and eerie stories. That’s not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you. It’s just that people who live hereabouts are strangely aware of them.”
    —Dodie Smith, and Lewis Allen. Roderick Fitzgerald (Ray Milland)

    “Or else I thought her supernatural;
    As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
    On this foul world in its decline and fall,
    On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
    Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
    Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
    —William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)