Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of the Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continents of Asia and Australia in the west and the Americas in the east.

Quotes

• How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by Storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1st ed., 1798), Argument

• The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
    The furrow stream’d off free:
  We were the first that ever burst
    Into that silent sea.
  Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
    ’Twas sad as sad could be;
  And we did speak only to break
    The silence of the sea!
  All in a hot and copper sky
    The bloody Sun, at noon,
  Right up above the mast did stand,
    No bigger than the Moon.
  Day after day, day after day,
    We stuck, nor breath nor motion,
  As idle as a painted ship
    Upon a painted ocean,
  Water, water, every where
    And all the boards did shrink;
  Water, water, every where,
    Nor any drop to drink.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (rev ed., 1817), Part II

• Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
  When a new planet swims into his ken;
  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
  He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
  Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
  • John Keats, from "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816)

• When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.
  There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
  To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
  But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead’s veins swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull, “Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!”
  • Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), Ch. 111

• The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature. It was very far inland that I caught the first smell of the Pacific. When one has been long at sea, the smell of land reaches far out to greet one. And the same it true when one has been long inland.
  • John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1962)

• You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? [...] They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life: a warm place with no memory.
  • Spoken by Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption (1994)