Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

by Robert Kurson

A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else. In this way, liberated from instincts, he becomes a freak of nature.

“Fix the first problem fully and calmly before you even think about the second problem.”

If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. — If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. — Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.

Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever. — Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. — It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.

The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world.

The worst possible decision is to give up.

in the water, self-contained, a man could be what he was meant to be, and when that happened it was impossible to be lost.

Along the way, each marveled at how easy it was to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important it would be to further rely on oneself.

“When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself. It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is.