Voices in the Ocean Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“(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

“dolphins were masters of the world of sound, that they used their sonar to paint exquisitely nuanced pictures of their surroundings, discerning details down to the molecular composition of an object.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“Along with the big population of spinners, they could reliably find even more exotic dolphin species here, deepwater creatures like pilot whales, false killer whales, rough-toothed dolphins, striped dolphins, dwarf killer whales, Risso’s dolphins, and melon-headed whales. Bottlenose and spotted dolphins regularly showed up, too.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“Dolphin lovers worldwide sought her out, flying to Hawaii to attend her weeklong workshops, which were often sold out months in advance.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“But a funny thing happens when you refuse to compromise your heart’s desires: after years of contending with all manner of uncertainties and obstacles, life yields and pours itself into a you-shaped mold, one that has never existed before. After decades of out-of-the-box “participatory research” with dolphins, and quite against the odds, Ocean had forged a prosperous, even settled, existence. Dolphin lovers worldwide sought her out, flying to Hawaii to attend her weeklong workshops, which were often sold out months in advance.”
― 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

“desperately needed to hear, albeit telepathically. From that point on, Ocean’s purpose was clear: introducing people to cetaceans.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“She prayed. She meditated, asking for better ways to help people. What she got back in her mind’s eye were images of dolphins (and the occasional whale). She began to seek them out: bottlenoses in Florida, orcas in British Columbia, spinners in Hawaii, botos in Brazil. Every encounter with them lifted her spirits—why, she wondered, wouldn’t this be the same for others? She felt the animals were communicating messages of love and wisdom, imparting information that we”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“In the years before she became immersed in dolphins, Ocean had spent gritty time in the human realm, counseling abused children, delinquent teenagers, battered women, fractured families. She had empathy, she cared, and she tried with everything she had to coax her clients out of destructive patterns, only to watch in frustration when they repeated”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“We have become like a family who swim, meditate, and work together. Swimming among the dolphins day after day, we are in deep communication with them.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“Many of us who live here have been called by the dolphins.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“They called it “Dolphinville,” though it was less an actual place than a shared state of mind. “There are approximately 200 of us, and we live in separate homes along a 30-mile stretch of the Kona Coast, connected in spirit to each other,” I read, in a description of the group.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“But I had come to the Big Island to look down, rather than up. It was the depths that interested me, the universe below the ocean’s surface; and it was there, underwater, that I hoped to find my own connecting point: these waters teemed with dolphins.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“scary. I felt their beguiling mix of mystery and reality; I felt a sense of bottomless wonder. The one thing I didn’t feel was alone.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“And what about those haunting sounds they made? Their whistles and clicks and squeals seemed to me like a liquid symphony, a communiqué from another realm, a galaxy of meaning conveyed in a language that defied translation.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“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

“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

“When we were children we wanted to talk to animals and struggled to understand why this was impossible,” the naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote. “Slowly we gave up the attempt as we grew into the solitary world of human”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“so they occupy a singular place in our imaginations. They take us back to our earliest years, to that little blip of time when we believed that we could communicate with other creatures, because there was no separation between their world and ours.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“The image of a sea creature poking its head above the water to speak to us is like something out of Alice in Wonderland or the latest Pixar masterpiece—an irresistible thrill. Theoretically, anyway, dolphins have the brainpower and the communication skills to do this,”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“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