Havboka Quotes

“Unfortunately, the vocabulary, which was previously so rich in describing the nuances of nature, has severely diminished over the past decades. As the words disappear, so does the knowledge of complex ecological connections. Our view of the various landscapes is reduced, we attach less meaning to them, and they become less valuable to us. And that also makes them easier to destroy, in our pursuit of short-term gains.”
― Morten A. Strøksnes, Havboka

“The sea will do just fine without us. We cannot survive without the sea.”
― Morten A. Strøksnes, Havboka

“Un noto biologo evolutivo una volta ha descritto noi esseri umani, non importa quanto educati e illustri, come un canale di dieci metri in cui passa il cibo. Tutto quello di cui ci siamo dotati attraverso l'evoluzione – cervello, ghiandole, organi, muscoli, scheletro e via dicendo – è solo «equipaggiamento accessorio» costruito intorno a questo canale.”
― Morten A. Strøksnes, Havboka

“Two men in a small boat, never sure what they might encounter out on the sea or what they might pull up from the abyss, beneath melted stars and electric full moons, where breakers and swells assault the islets like hysterical herds of cattle and the lunatic eye of the lighthouse never lets us out of its sight.”
― Morten A. Strøksnes, Havboka

“Goodbye and farewell, I'm going out to the sea, which is free and endless, rhythmic and swaying like the old sea chanteys sung across the oceans of the world on ships traveling to classic harbors like Marseille, Liverpool, Singapore, and Montevideo, while the deckhands hauled on the lines to set, trim, or reef the sails.”
― Morten A. Strøksnes, Havboka

“The deep, salty, black sea rolls toward us, cold and indifferent, lacking all empathy. Detached, merely itself. This is what the ocean does every day. It doesn't need us for anything. It doesn't care about our hopes and fears, not does it give a damn about our descriptions. The dark weight of the sea is a superior power. Many have been in this situation every since some of our overconfident ancestors set a hollowed out tree trunk in the water and paddled off on languid waves, only to venture out too far where the currents were stronger than their arms or paddles. Or maybe like us, they were surprised by a storm. All of them must have felt the same cold shiver when they realized the sea is truly without sentimentality or memory. Whatever it swallows is gone, becoming food for the fish, crabs and annelid worms. For the lamprey, hag fish, flat worms, ring worms, and all the parasites of the deep. To be drowned and embraced by the eternal, indeterminate all.”
― Morten A. Strøksnes, Havboka

“Like many other sharks, Greenland sharks are equipped with so-called ampullae of Lorenzini. Through these jelly-filled, half-inch-long ampullae, it can sense changes in electric fields down to a few billionths of a volt. That’s probably how it detects prey buried in the sand and how it manages to sneak up on seals lying or sleeping on the ocean floor before attacking.”
― Morten A. Strøksnes, Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean

“monster with many hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind it, with potentially fatal poisons in its bloodstream and teeth like that of an oversized steel trap, only a lot more of them.”
― Morten A. Strøksnes, Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean

“years. That makes it by far the oldest vertebrate on the planet.”
― Morten A. Strøksnes, Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean

“Sharks are the most hardy and adaptable of any large animal ever created by evolution. Some smaller species like lampreys, horseshoe crabs, sponges, and jellyfish have been around for longer but they seem somehow like anomalies or accidents. On the other hand, several types of very big sharks like the anvil shark, goblin shark, frilled shark, and possibly even the greenland shark have been around for forever and a day. No other species can match this record. They have survived everything that has been thrown at them including volcanic eruptions, ice ages, meteor impacts, parasites, bacteria, viruses, acidification, and other catastrophes that have lead to mass extinctions. By the time the dinosaurs appears, sharks had already existed for eons. And they continued to thrive even as the dinosaurs and countless other species went extinct.”
― Morten A. Strøksnes, Havboka