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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“(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

“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

“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

“Louch logged countless hours in the North Atlantic in his day; he had traversed the Southern Ocean off Antarctica”
― Susan Casey, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean

“Our relationship might even have included literal conversation. In his 350 BC Historia Animalium, Aristotle wrote, “The voice of the dolphin in air is like that of the human in that they can pronounce vowels and combinations of vowels, but have difficulties with the consonants.”
― 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

“The Guardian reported that a beluga whale named Noc had, after seven years in captivity, begun to mimic human speech. Belugas, members of the toothed whale family along with dolphins, have been nicknamed “the canaries of the sea,” for their expressive vocals.”
― 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

“Given our curiosity about the bigger questions, our hunger to know more about the purpose and scope of our lives, it’s really not that unreasonable to wonder if behind their Mona Lisa grins, dolphins might be in on some good cosmic secrets.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“any special set of credentials. “I didn’t choose that particular path,” she said. But she knew these dolphins. She had observed their society in action, day in, day out, for twenty-six years. She knew their habits and their quirks, their likes and dislikes and the body language that expressed them, their fondness for playing with the leaves that fluttered down from hala trees into the ocean.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“adulthood.” This loss of hope, Eiseley pointed out, is a very sad thing.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“The dolphins were traveling in small but distinct clusters—couples, threesomes, klatches of four or five—and within those little groups they maintained close body contact.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“When waves or fire or an unplanned encounter with rocks disabled a ship”
― Susan Casey, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean