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A Smorgasbord of Quotes
by Julian Madden
Ocean Truths
"The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid ...Beware of me, it says, but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Going into the ocean is like diving into the history of life on Earth" -Sylvia Earle
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"How do you get to the great depths? How do return to the surface of the ocean? And how do you maintain yourselves in the requisite medium? Am I asking to much?" -Jules Verne
"Going to sea is going to prison, with a chance at drowning besides" -Samuel Johnson
"The sea had kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and his shipmates called him mad" -Herman Melville
"There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates. -James Russell Lowell
The Essence of Marine Literature
"It's no fish ye're buying, it's men's lives" -Sir Walter Scott, The Perfect Storm
"Two words: Jurassic Shark!" -Megalodon
"Stranger: What you just told me, about the day in the lab, makes me look at the water in a new way.
Fisherman: Yes, it's alive. At this time of year you'd probably catch a million living creatures in a cupful of this Sound water. Listen: The plants under the surface of a square mile of the sea may well exceed the amount of vegetation in a square mile of rain forest. And it's thought that there are more copepods in the oceans than all the other animals in the world–of all kinds–put together." —John Hersey, Blues
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"Up to now, the giant squid has revealed its secrets most reluctantly…No one has ever seen a living, healthy giant squid." -Richard Ellis, The Search for the Giant Squid
"The unfortunate Conseil had attacked an electric ray of the most dangerous kind, the cumana. This strange animal, immersed in water, which is an excellent conductor of electricity, can electrocute fish at a distance of several yards, so great is the power of its electric organ." -20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
"But when the sou'west has pushed all that warm, nutrient rich, surface water against the beach, bait feasting upon the plankton, bass and blues gorging upon that bait, who wants to wait in the wings for it to subside." -Twenty Years on the Cape
"Aside from the vast amount of data on feeding, growth, and diving behavior learned from Gigi in captivity, more observations on gray whales have been made during the years since Gigi's release than the previous fifty years. This may be the greatest gift that Gigi gave to us and her own kind–the motivation each year to look for that special gray whale." -Gigi
"Desolate and half desert as it is, this borderland of Cape has an extraordinary beauty, and for me the double attraction of mystery and wide horizons." -The Outermost House
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"It advanced slowly. Eight miles an hour, maybe ten. It moved west and slightly north and covered about two hundred miles a day, roiling the seas and erecting an electric wall of clouds visible to ships far outside its arc of influence." -Isaac's Storm
"On all these shores there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before, of the sea's eternal rhythms–the tides, the beat of surf, the pressing rivers of the currents–shaping, changing, dominating, of the streams of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean currents, from past to unknown future." -The Edge of the Sea
"Most of our dives have had a specific purpose–wreck exploration, de-mining, or experimenting in physiology, for instance. But occasionally we were able to steal hours of dawdling inside the sea, where a man could invite his senses to the nuances of color and light, listen for the lonely creaks of the ocean and finger the the water like a voluptuary." -The Silent World
"Millions
have lived without love. No one has lived without water."
- A Turkish businessman
quoted in Water:
The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, by Marq de Villiers