“When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.”

“ I cherished you inconstant; what would I have done, faithful? Now, even now, when your cruel mouth so calmly speaks my death sentence, I wonder, cold wretch, I wonder still, if I do not love you. ”

“When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. ... I must be scientific.”

“In my dream I see the sea, the utterly calm sea. I see the coast, the utterly calm coast. When this utterly calm sea meets the utterly still coast, huge breakers are suddenly thrown up. Two sorts of stillness touch one and other and explode in roars and foam.”

“For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.”

“I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love that was more than love- I and my Annabel Lee; With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven Coveted her and me.”