Michael Parfit > Quotes

“Being what we humans are, what else could we do but wrong?”
― Michael Parfit, The Lost Whale: The True Story of an Orca Named Luna

“We all cast our own shadows and chose where they fall, and the lives of men and women and otters and dogs and whales are linked forever across the reaches of time. We distance ourselves from them with our hunger for flesh, or our carelessness, or our cruelty. But what of the forces that bind us together?”
― Michael Parfit, The Lost Whale: The True Story of an Orca Named Luna

“That summer, there was a Name the Babies contest, an annual event organized by the Whale Museum on San Juan Island. A young girl from Bellingham submitted the winning entry. The little orca should be named "Luna", she wrote, because "the whale explores the ocean like the moon explores the Earth.”
― Michael Parfit, The Lost Whale: The True Story of an Orca Named Luna

“Against the towering mountains behind, this group of family and friends looked like a tiny remnant of an ancient group that had lived here once in abundance, now clustered together for bare survival, singing ancient songs. They were oddly like L Pod, Luna's family. The whales, too, were a tiny remnant of an ancient greatness, a family of survivors that had been decimated by captures and killings, poisoned by debris humans have fed to their world as waste, scarred by sonar, starved by the fading of the salmon, still singing sings to the past.”
― Michael Parfit, The Lost Whale: The True Story of an Orca Named Luna

“But this thing that we share came to us through every single drama of our unbelievably many lives only because it is necessary. If it had just been optional as we wandered across those deserts or those storms, we would have thrown it aside. In the tumble of time and the ferocity of living, the casual falls away. Nothing we did not require could pass through the stone filter of time. If you don't need it, it's gone. Yet it came with us, you and me and all like us, because we had to have it. It made us who we are because it got us here. Every day our hearts read the message in the blood and act upon it, and the message overwhelms us: We do not live alone. We care about one another.”
― Michael Parfit, The Lost Whale: The True Story of an Orca Named Luna