Every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty†likea dryshell onthebeach, waiting for thetide to come in again.

-du Maurier, Dame Daphne
  In the Ladies Home Journal, Nov.

On the Beach is a storyabout the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.

-Gardner, Ava originally Lucy Johnson
  Alleged comment to Australian journalist Neil Jillett of the Melbourne Age at the shooting of a film based on the book by British^ Australian novelist Nevil Shute.

And here the sea-fogs lap and cling, And here, each warning each, The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring Along the hidden beach.

-Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard
  'Sussex'.

All that I know of our historyand thehistoryof the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by Europeans† Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away, like the scuff marks of fishermen on the beach.

-Naipaul, Sir V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad)
  A Bend in the River, ch.1,'The Second Rebellion'.

Everyone knowsthat thelabel Modern Art no longer has any relation to the words that compose it. To be Modern Art a work need not be either modern nor art; it need not even be a work. A three-thousand-year-old mask from the South Pacific qualifies as Modern and a piece of wood found on a beach becomes Art.

-Rosenberg, Harold
  'TheAmerican Action Painters', in Art News, no.51, Dec.