Rachel Carson - The Sea Around Us (1951)

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Autumn comes to the sea with a fresh blaze of phosphorescence, when every wave crest is aflame. Here and there the whole surface may glow with sheets of cold fire, while below schools of fish pour though the water like molten metal.

Rachel Carson
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

Rachel Carson
For all at last returns to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the everflowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.

Rachel Carson
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.

Rachel Carson
Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.

Rachel Carson
Unmarked and trackless though it may seem to us, the surface of the ocean is divided into definite zones, and the pattern of the surface water controls the distribution of its life.

Rachel Carson
The ocean is the earth's greatest storehouse of minerals.

Rachel Carson
Nothing is wasted in the sea; every particle of material is used over and over again, first by one creature, then by another. And when in spring the waters are deeply stirred, the warm bottom water brings to the surface a rich supply of minerals, ready for use by new forms of life.

Rachel Carson
The face of the sea is always changing. Crossed by colors, lights, and moving shadows, sparkling in the sun, mysterious in the twilight, its aspects and its moods vary hour by hour.

Rachel Carson
In the artificial world of his cities, [man] often forgets the true nature of his planet and the long vistas of its history, in which the existence of the race of men has occupied a mere moment of time.

Rachel Carson
There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.

Rachel Carson
The continents themselves dissolve and pass to the sea, in grain after grain of eroded land...

Rachel Carson
The sea has always challenged the minds and imagination of men and even today it remains the last great frontier of Earth.

Rachel Carson