quotations about surfing
Surfing is very much like making love. It always feels good, no matter how many times you've done it.
PAUL STRAUCH
attributed, Surfing Hawaii
Surfing is kind of a good metaphor for the rest of life. The extremely good stuff -- chocolate and great sex and weddings and hilarious jokes -- fills a minute portion of an adult lifespan. The rest of life is the paddling: work, paying bills, flossing, getting sick, dying.
JAIMAL YOGIS
Saltwater Buddha
Truly, the waves are like women, for men watch them long and understand them but little.
UNKNOWN
Galaxy Science Fiction, Volume 19, Issue 4
Every now and then, we would hear reports through the grapevine of big-wave riders on the North Shore [of Oahu] drowning, and for the first time I began to understand why so many of the great California surfers never gave the North Shore a try, or if they did, they came back home and never tried it again.
MIKE DOYLE
Morning Glass
I learned that surfing is also based on the pursuit of those few seconds when life stops and you're standing on top of the ocean.
BETH FEHR
"How Surfing and Traveling Feed the Same Addiction", The Inertia, June 21, 2017
Surfing is not a complicated sport. Unlike many other water sports, the truth is that surfing only requires a surfboard and someone willing to glide over the ocean waves.
EDITOR
"The surfing equipment list", Surfer Today, June 20, 2017
There is nothing, nothing, more sad than a surfer who used to surf.
ANONYMOUS
Surfing is a way of life around here. A lot of people don't understand that. Surfers are environmentalists by the nature of what we do. We love the ocean.
TONY O'BRIEN
"Shark numbers surge ahead of Lennox Head junior surf contest", The Australian, June 28, 2017
If surfing is wandering for 40 days and 40 nights in a desert, the boon is the vision brought back from the quest and the wake is the path of the whole quest's footsteps.
KEVIN BEWERSDORF
Spirit Surfing
Surfing is for life.
BRUCE JENKINS
North Shore Chronicles
Surfing is climbing from a warm bed in predawn's coolness, a sleepy drive, coffee and doughnuts at a roadside diner and the clatter of surfboards as they're unstacked from a car rack. Surfing is the joy of watching a sun rise slowly into the sky. It's crisp, clean waves, crests blown high by an offshore wind. It's gray mist, dampness and cold sand under bare feet, the lonely cry of a gull sweeping across silent, brooding seas. On a big day, surfing is a strong swell and waves that have lost their playfulness. Then it's stomach knots, high exultation, a trace of fear.
FRED WARDY
"Surfing Is", The Perfect Day: 40 Years of Surfer Magazine
The problem with surfing and travel, as complementary explorations and succinct undertakings, remain the same. It's a quest which is not finite. So as hard as you try, as many places as you travel, and as many waves as you have the honor to feel beneath your heels, it will inevitably only deepen the desire to seek out more.
BETH FEHR
"How Surfing and Traveling Feed the Same Addiction", The Inertia, June 21, 2017
She was my surfer girl,
We surfed in the sun.
Where are you surfer girl
Now our fun is done?
Angry sea, took my love from me.
No surfing today.
No surfing.
THE FOUR SEASONS
"No Surfin' Today"
Work is for those who don't surf.
BEN MARCUS
The Surfing Handbook: Mastering the Waves for Beginning and Amateur Surfers
Surfing, alone among sports, generates laughter at its very suggestion, and this is because it turns not a skill into an art, but an inexplicable and useless urge into a vital way of life.
MATT WARSHAW
Maverick's: The Story of Big-Wave Surfing
Surfing expresses ... a pure yearning for visceral, physical contact with the natural world.
MATT WARSHAW
Maverick's: The Story of Big-Wave Surfing
Southbay surfing again,
Haven't been this way in I don't know when
If I have my say we'll be back again
Where the good times never end.
We got beaches in mind
Man, it's been too much time
Not a care in the world is where I wanna be
With the surfers, sand and the sea.
BEACH BOYS
"Beaches in Mind"
Surfing is a safe sport, but it takes place in an alien and hostile environment.
FRED WEBER
Shore News Today, June 8, 2017
I thought how, with the peeling wave as an ideal of perfection, the surfer's object of passion becomes the very essence of ephemerality--not a thing to be owned or a goal to be attained but rather a fleeting state to inhabit. So much more of my time, after all, passed in the dreaming and searching than in the actual riding of waves; so much more time spent driving the coast and floating between sets. Of a whole year of devotion, probably no more than a day was spent truly on my feet and surfing, so I couldn't view such a moment as this without an ardent, frustrated desire, a near-religious craving for wholeness. Unlike so many other passions: while one might, I suppose, wish for a bloom to remain in blossom, for a ripening grape to hang always on the vine--yearnings John Keats made his own, for fleeting beauty and youth, the understandably hopeless hope that we might freeze our world's better moments--the wave's plenitude is rather in the peeling of the petal, the very motion of the falling fruit.
DANIEL DUANE
Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast
I'll just float awhile as I'm waiting for the roller to come.
I let the little ones pass.
You know I'm waiting for that special one that will carry me away.
Don't you see. Just the waves, my board and me.
MARY-KATE & ASHLEY OLSEN
"I'd Rather Be Surfing"