Susan Casey > Quotes

“[The waves] move across a faint horizon, the rush of love and the surge of grief, the respite of peace and then fear again, the heart that beats and then lies still, the rise and fall and rise and fall of all of it, the incoming and the outgoing, the infinite procession of life. And the ocean wraps the earth, a reminder. The mysteries come forward in waves.”
― Susan Casey, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean

“No one knew exactly why the seals ate stones, but maybe, some thought, it was for ballast. Or to help digestion. Or to stave off hunger. Or, as Brown had written in the journal, 'maybe they're just weird.”
― Susan Casey, The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks

“While chasing birds, he had hitchhiked through some of the most desolate places imaginable. Nicaraguan jungles, Indian slums, Samoa fruit bat colonies. But when asked to name the least likable place he'd seen in the world, he instantly pointed to an affluent California suburb: Walnut Creek, no question.”
― Susan Casey, The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks

“How do you think humans got so cruel?” I asked Makili. He gazed at the ocean, then back at Turner and me. “We forgot,” he said, letting the words linger. “We forgot our responsibility. And we forgot that we are as equal as any living thing within the chain. There’s no hierarchy in this. Nah. We are part of the same family: living things. All the rest of it is just totally fucking bullshit.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“The devices meant to float at sea and capture the waves' power have been destroyed in short order by . . . the waves. "they've all been smashed up in storms," Challenor said, shaking his head.”
― Susan Casey, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean

“at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia, where wild bottlenoses are regularly fed fish by people standing in the shallows, biologists have documented—on twenty-three occasions—the dolphins reciprocating, swimming up to offer freshly caught tuna, eels, and octopi as gifts.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“The jellies living nearest the surface had transparent bodies, but their edges twinkled and flashed, as though traced by fiber-optic cables, blinking and undulating like neon signs. They were delicate; if you weren’t looking”
― Susan Casey, The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks

“(A few years ago in Fushun, China, two dolphins ate strips of their tank’s vinyl lining and were saved by Bao Xishun, a 7′9″ Mongolian herdsman who appears in the Guinness Book of World Records as “The World’s Tallest Man.” When surgical tools failed, Xishun reached down the dolphins’ throats with his forty-two-inch arms and extracted the plastic.)”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“UC Santa Cruz biologist had discovered elevated levels of radiation in fish swimming among some of the 47,500 barrels of nuclear waste that the navy had dumped in a 540-square-mile area around the Farallones between 1946 and 1970.”
― Susan Casey, The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks

“All three dolphins were magnificent, absolute marvels of the ocean, and by all rights they should have been out in the Pacific, doing what 55 million years of evolution had designed them to do in the most important ecosystem on earth, instead of in here, leaping to the beat of cheesy pop songs.

As I watched, sweat trickled down the back of my neck but something else was rising: anger. The show was soul-crushingly stupid. It was plainly and inanely stupid- all of this was stupid, everything that went on at the cove, the entire arrogant, selfish relationship we had with these animals and with all of nature, as though every bit of life existed only for our purposes. We behaved as though we were gods, deciding the fate of everything, but we weren't. We were just dumb. I felt a wave of despair wash over me.”
― Susan Casey

“Dolphins are strategists. They’re also highly social chatterboxes who recognize themselves in the mirror, count, cheer, giggle, feel despondent, stroke each other, adorn themselves, use tools, make jokes, play politics, enjoy music, bring presents on a date, introduce themselves, rescue one another from dangerous situations, deduce, infer, manipulate, improvise, form alliances, throw tantrums, gossip, scheme, empathize, seduce, grieve, comfort, anticipate, fear, and love—just like us.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“One little known fact: The water that spouts out of a whale’s blowhole in such a picturesque way reeks like the most toxic fart imaginable.”
― Susan Casey, The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks

“The human brain is the most unsuccessful adaptation ever to appear in the history of life on earth,” whale scientist Roger Payne once suggested.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“In any group of dolphins you’ll find cliques and posses, duos and trios and quartets, mothers and babies and spinster aunts, frisky bands of horny teenage males, wily hunters, burly bouncers, sage elders—and their associations are anything but random. Dolphins are strategists. They’re also highly social chatterboxes who recognize themselves in the mirror, count, cheer, giggle, feel despondent, stroke each other, adorn themselves, use tools, make jokes, play politics, enjoy music, bring presents on a date, introduce themselves, rescue one another from dangerous situations, deduce, infer, manipulate, improvise, form alliances, throw tantrums, gossip, scheme, empathize, seduce, grieve, comfort, anticipate, fear, and love—just like us.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“He even experimented on himself, hammering a sleeve into his own skull. Once this was accomplished, it was then possible to insert electrodes and inject chemicals “through small needles anywhere in the brain.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“In Taiji, the town was malefic and the people could be horrid, but the cove’s most demanding challenges were personal ones: How do you survive your own sadness?”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“Maybe it is selfish of me to want the sea for myself, to want the waves rushing only for me, to want every word strung into jagged loops of poetry to flow from my only tongue, but the world has emptied me out ; what is more filling than the sea who continues to drown itself”
― Susan Casey, Dolphins: Voices in the Ocean

“Australian pro surfer Dave Rastovich, straddling his board waiting for a wave, was astonished to watch a dolphin hurtle itself at a shark that was torpedoing toward him, sending it fleeing. (Coincidentally, only two days earlier Rastovich had launched a nonprofit group, Surfers for Cetaceans, to protect dolphins and whales.)”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“Delphinidae, or oceanic dolphins, are the largest family of toothed whales, containing approximately thirty-seven species that range from the four-foot-long Hector’s dolphin to the twelve-foot bottlenose dolphin to the twenty-five-foot orca, or killer whale.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“The dolphins’ evolutionary path is itself a preposterous feat: their predecessors were land mammals that resembled small, hooved wolves.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“In the annals of bad ideas, this is one for the hall of fame: trawling giant nets through water thousands of feet deep to catch thumb-size fish and wads of gelatinous tissue that nobody wants to eat, but that we could grind up to feed the farmed fish we’re now being forced to breed because of our previous indiscriminate trawling with giant nets.”
― Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

“But a strange thing happens when your worst nightmare is realized: nothing much is left to scare you.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“They can communicate at frequencies nearly an order of magnitude higher than anything humans can discern, and navigate electrical and magnetic fields imperceptible”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“Jaws is all about the hold-down,” he said. “Teahupoo is all about the bounce.”
― Susan Casey, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean

“As they swam by me, they seemed to exist in a more hazily defined realm than our own hard-edged terrestrial one.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“Spinners are known for their athletics, rocketing out of the water in aerial leaps whenever the urge strikes, but these dolphins were relaxed.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“I dove ten feet down and the big dolphin appeared beside me again, even closer. He had coloration like a penguin’s, dark on top and tuxedo white on his belly, with a long, slender beak. At eight feet long he was a powerful animal, but nothing in his body language suggested hostility. We stayed together for maybe ten minutes but the meeting felt eternal, as though time were suspended in the water with us.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“two photographers who accompanied him, Sonny Miller and Jeff Hornbaker.”
― Susan Casey, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean

“Now it’s apparent that nature runs as a massively interconnected system, with the deep sea as its motherboard. Yet even as we tinker with the machinery in potentially irreversible ways, we have only the foggiest notion of how it all works.”
― Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

“Porpoises are a separate band entirely, although in the past the words “dolphin” and “porpoise” were often used interchangeably. The seven species of porpoises, or Phocoenidae, are smaller, and distinct from dolphins. The road to Honolua Bay was red dirt against a gray sky, and it wound up the bluff in a series of steep switchbacks. I pulled over at the top, where the grade leveled off in a clearing. Usually”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins