The Perfect Storm Quotes

“How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“There are houses in Gloucester where grooves have been worn into the floorboards by women pacing past an upstairs window, looking out to sea.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“A SOFT fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“Meteorologist see perfect in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“If the men on the Andrea Gail had simply died, and their bodies were lying in state somewhere, their loved ones could make their goodbyes and get on with their lives. But they didn’t die, they disappeared off the face of the earth and, strictly speaking, it’s just a matter of faith that these men will never return. Such faith takes work, it takes effort. The people of Gloucester must willfully extract these men from their lives and banish them to another world.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“Back in Gloucester, Chris Cotter has a similar dream. Bobby appears before her, all smiles, and she says to him, “Hey, Bobby, where you been?” He doesn’t tell her, he just keeps smiling and says, “Remember, Christina, I’ll always love you,” and then he fades away. “He’s always happy when he goes and so I know he’s okay,” says Chris. “He’s absolutely okay.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“As the helicopter fell, its dead rotors started to spin, and Ruvola used that energy to slow the aircraft down. Like downshifting a car on a hill, a hovering auto-rotation is a way of dissipating the force of gravity by feeding it back through the engine. By the time the helicopter hit the water it had slowed to a manageable speed, and all the torque had been bled out of the rotors;”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“During the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, winds were past 200 miles per house and people caught outside were sandblasted to death. Rescue workers found nothing but their shoes and belt buckles… In 1938, the hurricane put downtown Providence, Rhode Island, under 10 feet of ocean. The waves generated by that storm were so huge that they literally shook the earth; seismographs in Alaska picked up their impact 5,000 miles away.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“I look at the names on the mailboxes and the bells inside number 1940 and pick out a couple of women’s names and press the first one. I stand there waiting, feeling the image
build up and not thinking about what I’m going to say to her because I know
something will come to me like it always does. Nothing happens. I press the second doorbell and in a few minutes she buzzes the door, twice, and I walk into the hallway. The stairs are curved around an elevator and to the right and I go up them, not in a hurry or nothing, just taking them one at a time.
Its funny, isn’t it, how the first woman didn’t answer the bell or wasn’t home or something and just that little chance, you understand what I mean?”
― Sebastian Junger, A Death in Belmont

“The state's case against Smith, however, did claim to speak to his actual guilt or innocence, and it has to be considered carefully. The reason this is important has nothing to do with Roy Smith or Bessie Goldberg or even Al DeSalvo; they're all dead. In some ways there is nothing less relevant than an old murder case. The reason it is important is this: Here is a group of people who have gathered to judge--and possibly execute--a fellow citizen. It's the highest calling there is, the very thing that separates us from social anarchy, and it has to be done well. A trial, however, is just a microcosm of the entire political system. When a democratic government decides to raise taxes or wage war or write child safety laws, it is essentially saying to an enormous jury, "This is our theory of how the world works, and this is our proposal for dealing with it. If our theory makes sense to you, vote for us in the next election. If it doesn't, throw us out." The ability of citizens to scrutinize the theories insisted on by their government is their only protection against abuse of power and, ultimately, against tyranny. If ordinary citizens can't coolly and rationally evaluate a prosecutor's summation in a criminal trial, they won't have a chance at calling to task a deceitful government. And all governments are deceitful--they're deceitful because it's easier than being honest. Most of the time, it's no more sinister than that.”
― Sebastian Junger, A Death in Belmont

“Mayday comes from the French venez m’aider—come help me!—”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro in Boston ruled that the National Weather Service was negligent in their failure to repair the broken data buoy. Had it been working, he wrote, the Weather Service might have predicted the storm; and furthermore, they failed to warn fishermen that they were making forecasts with incomplete information. This was the first time the government had ever been held responsible for a bad forecast, and it sent shudders of dread through the federal government. Every plane crash, every car accident could now conceivably be linked to weather forecasting.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“Every boat has a degree of roll from which she can no longer recover. The Queen Mary came within a degree or two of capsizing off Newfoundland when a rogue wave burst her pilothouse windows ninety feet up; she sagged on her beam ends for an agonizing minute before regaining her trim. Two forces are locked in combat for a ship like that: the downward push of gravity and the upward lift of buoyancy. Gravity is the combined weight of the vessel and everything on it—crew, cargo, fishing gear—seeking the center of the earth. Buoyancy is the force of all the enclosed air in the hull trying to rise above water level.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“DAWN at sea, a grey void emerging out of a vaster black one. “The earth was without form and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Whoever wrote that knew the sea—knew the pale emergence of the world every morning, a world that contained absolutely nothing, not one thing.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“Anyone who has been through a severe storm at sea has, to one degree or another, almost died, and that fact will continue to alter them long after the winds have stopped blowing and the waves have died down.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“It’s better to take the seas head-on—at least that way you can see what’s comin’ at you.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“You’re in God’s country out there. You can’t make any mistakes.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“He had survived two days in his underwear on the North Atlantic. Later, when asked how long it took him to warm up after his ordeal, he said, without a hint of irony, “Oh, three or four months.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“The men could only look at each other through the falling snow, from land to sea, from sea to land, and realize how unimportant they all were. —SHIP ON THE ROCKS, NEWBURYPORT, MASSACHUSETTS, 1839, NO SURVIVORS. (SIDNEY PERLEY, Historic Storms of New England, 1891)”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“if you’re looking for enlightenment it’s not going to happen on a oil tanker”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“Some of these people have been heading there, unavoidably, for months; others made a bad choice just a few days ago.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“Billy's at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into meteorological hell.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“The reprieve doesn’t last long though; within a couple of hours the waves are back up to 70 feet. A 70 foot wave has an angled face of well over 100 feet. The Seastate has reached levels that no one on the boat, and few people one earth, have ever seen. When the Contship Holland finally limped into port several days later, one of the officers stepped off and swore he would never set foot on another ship again.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“Unfortunately for Mariners, the total amount of wave energy and storm does not rise linearly with wind speed, but to its fourth power. The seas generated by a 40 knot wind aren’t twice as violence as those from a 20 knot wind, they are seventeen times as violent. The ship’s crew watching the anemometer climb even 10 knots could well be watching their death sentence.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea