Jaws Quotes

“You're gonna need a bigger boat.”
― Peter Benchley

“The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.”
― Peter Benchley, Jaws

“There's nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That's their instinct. But this fish doesn't run from anything. He doesn't fear.”
― Peter Benchley, Jaws

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore.”
― Peter Benchley, Jaws

“Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful―God, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses―except for hunger―they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and everyone is different from every other one.”
― Peter Benchley, Jaws

“In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“Look, Chief, you can't go off half-cocked looking for vengeance against a fish. That shark isn't evil. It's not a murderer. It's just obeying its own instincts. Trying to get retribution against a fish is crazy.”
― Peter Benchley, Jaws

“Suppose you fell over with this fish. Is there anything you could do? Sure. Pray. It'd be like falling out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping you'll land in a haystack. The only thing that'd save you would be God, and since He pushed you overboard in the first place, I wouldn't give a nickel for your chances.”
― Peter Benchley, Jaws

“Any weapon's only as good as the man using it, and a good man can make a good weapon out of most anything.”
― Peter Benchley, The Deep

“The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives.”
― Peter Benchley, Jaws

“To become a better you, secure your dreams from the jaws of people who discredit your ambitions.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Become a Better You

“Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of—let alone in—water above his head give him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and a ache in his stomach—essentially the sensation some people feel about flying. In Brody's dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned.”
― Peter Benchley, Jaws

“If you have food in your jaws you have solved all questions for the time being.”
― Franz Kafka, Investigations of a Dog

“Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else.”
― Peter Benchley, The Deep

“The fish might well have disappeared already, but Brody wasn't willing to gamble lives on the possibility: the odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high.”
― Peter Benchley, Jaws

“To fantasies', he said. 'Tell me about yours.' His eyes were a bright, liquid blue, and his lips were parted in a half smile.”
― Peter Benchley

“Wow. That's sort of pretty. In a Jaws kind of way.”
― Jim Butcher, Summer Knight

“Carcharadon carcharias. Six thousand
pounds of muscle powering a hoop
of butcher's knives. The only animal
that ate its weaker siblings in the womb.
Immune from cancer. Constantly awake.”
― Mark Haddon

“Jaws 4 is so bad it makes Jaws 3 look like Jaws 2.”
― Neil Perryman, Adventures with the Wife in Space

“Promises are meant to be broken, n so are the jaws of those who say so...”
― Nitya Prakash

“My hero is the mayor in Jaws. He's a fantastic guy, and he keeps the beaches open, if you remember, even after it's demonstrated that his constituents have been eaten by this killer fish. Of course, he was proved catastrophically wrong in his judgment, but his instincts were right.'

Boris Johnson is the mayor of London.
Taken from Time Magazine interview: June 25, 2012; page 76.”
― Boris Johnson

“Ever think about how much that sucks? Sunday is the weekend, but it's also a school night. Kind of ruins the whole day. Like if you get quiet enough on a Sunday night, you can almost hear Monday taunting you with the theme from Jaws.”
― Caprice Crane, Confessions of a Hater

“The night is bilingual. Its jaws open everywhere.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“The horror of Jaws
is not the rows of teeth, but the endless sea
of white faces who are afraid
of losing money knowing the ocean
has always been full of sharks, blood, and everything else they cannot see.”
― Monica Rico

“Mongooses lack the larynx and jaws for speech, to say nothing of the motivation.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Curious Case of the Talking Mongoose

“I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are—an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality.”
― Donald Barthelme, Forty Stories

“Jaws would make a lasting impression on me and my friends. This imagination manifested itself into our playground games. We built our very own Orca. A large dose of childlike imagination, the vital ingredient here.

With buckets, watering can, old bits of corrugated iron, anything we could muster, the Orca took shape. A game invented, for downtime, between screenings of Jaws.”
― Haydn Wheeler, A CARD FROM THE JAWS OSESSION

“You can’t be princesses all your life,” Mrs. Shaw said.
Joanna Shaw tried to smooth things over (with Robert's daughters). “Your father and I are just used to it, that’s all,” she told the girls. “At least you have a private bathroom. We had to share an outhouse with two toilets when we were your age.”
The girls’ eyes opened wide. They could not understand why there would be two toilets in one room, but to Joanna it seemed completely normal. “It was all we had,” she said. “We kept each other company. We chatted while we pooped.”
― Christopher Shaw Myers, Robert Shaw: An Actor's Life on the Set of JAWS and Beyond