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

“sonar that can blast sound across entire ocean basins; this bombardment harasses millions of animals, and can even kill them.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“runaway cancers. Dolphins everywhere, from Australia, to North and South America, to Tahiti, are so laden with industrial pollutants—pesticides, heavy metals, flame retardants, carcinogens of the most noxious kinds—that their bodies are disposed of as hazardous waste.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“I was surprised to learn that the dolphin genome, sequenced in 2011, bears a striking resemblance to our own.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“A clue emerged when dolphin brains, like humans’, were found to contain von Economo neurons: specialized cells that relate to higher notions like empathy, intuition, communication, and self-awareness.”
― 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

“my most enduring impression was how otherworldly the animals were.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“They moved with an unearthly grace, as though they were more presence than form.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“The dolphins had simply enfolded me in their gathering, and I could hear their clicks and buzzes underwater, their cryptic aquatic conversation.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“I saw fins touching like handholding, bellies brushing across backs, heads tilted toward other heads, beaks slipped under flukes.”
― 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

“In their science paper describing this event, the authors referred to “other utterances” that sounded like a “garbled human voice, or Russian, or similar to Chinese.”
― 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

“I didn’t understand their lineage or their language, they had somehow communicated with me.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“But while it’s tempting to project onto dolphins all the superpowers we wish we had ourselves, I knew (on an intellectual level, anyway), that these were creatures who have it in them to be cranky and withdrawn and have their own version of a bad day.”
― 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

“They know when another dolphin—or a human being—is pregnant or sick or injured.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“Certainly, dolphins have a laundry list of capabilities that qualify as magical. They can see with their hearing, deploying biological sonar to effectively produce X-ray vision: dolphins can literally see through objects.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“They inhabited what ancient Oceanic peoples called “the Dreamtime,” a gauzy, blissful place located somewhere between our generally-agreed-upon reality and any number of sublime alternate states.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“As they swam by me, they seemed to exist in a more hazily defined realm than our own hard-edged terrestrial one.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

“I got the impression there was somebody home behind each set of eyes, and the effect was surreal.”
― Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins