Peter Westwick > Quotes

“As big-wave pioneer Buzzy Trent put it, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of fear.”
― Peter Westwick, The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing

“Hawaii is the only place in the United States where you can go into a McDonald’s and buy a bowl of rice to go with your Big Mac.”
― Peter Westwick, The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing

“Surfing is the first lifestyle sport. X Game staples like skateboarding and snowboarding were inspired directly by surfing. Being a surfer involves a different level of commitment from being a golfer or basketball player. Surfing is more than an athletic pursuit that you do a couple days a week at a course or in a gym. Even when surfers are out of the water, they are watching the weather, tides, and wind, monitoring distant swell patterns, and mentally tuning in the ocean. Surfing defines your life, in the same way that work—being a farmer or a carpenter or a blacksmith—used to define people’s lives. Forty years ago Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock called surfers “a signpost pointing to the future” for their embrace of a leisure-time “lifestyle,” and in this case Toffler was right.”
― Peter Westwick, The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing