The Old Man and the Sea Quotes

Find the perfect quote to float your boat. Shmoop breaks down key quotations from The Old Man and the Sea.

Perseverance Quotes

I could just drift, he thought, and sleep and put a bight of line around my toe to wake me. But today is eighty-five days and I should fish the day well. Just then, watching his lines, he saw one...

Suffering Quotes

All my life the early sun has hurt my eyes, he thought. Yet they are still good. In the evening I can look straight into it without getting the blackness. It has more force in the evening too. But...

Strength and Skill Quotes

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks....

Pride Quotes

"Thank you," the old man said. He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride. (1.36)

Memory and the Past Quotes

"How old was I when you first took me in a boat?" "Five and you nearly were killed when I brought the fish in too green and he nearly tore the boat to pieces. Can you remember?" "I can remember t...

Defeat Quotes

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days wi...

Isolation Quotes

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days wi...

Man and the Natural World Quotes

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. (1.3)

Hunger Quotes

There was no cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it. But they went through this fiction every day. There was no pot of yellow rice and fish and the boy knew this too. (1.59)

Respect and Reputation Quotes

No one would steal from the old man but it was better to take the sail and the heavy lines home as the dew was bad for them and, though he was quite sure no local people would steal from him, the o...

Luck Quotes

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days wi...

Friendship Quotes

"Santiago," the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. "I could go with you again. We’ve made some money." (1.4)