Oxygen Quotes

“I continue to train. The depths still beckon me. On that dive in 2016, when I turned 102 metres down, although my eyes were closed I could feel the pull of untold volumes of water yet below me. What am I still chasing, one might ask, in that submerged realm? Shakespeare spoke of the lure of ‘unpathed waters, undreamed shores’. If George Mallory, who perished somewhere near the summit of Everest in 1924, had been a freediver, he would have justified himself with the words ‘because it’s everywhere’. My first teacher, Umberto Pelizzari, dived to ‘look inside’. These concepts have all rung true for me, too. As did the insight of the elderly Bahamian lady who was asked why she thought I dived, and replied: ‘He wants to see what he is.’ I don’t have to go deep — sometimes I dive just to be, as Mervyn Peake says, ‘at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every coloured sponge’. Long after my final record or my final competition dive, I will continue to frequent that ‘world of wavering light’ where it all began, for me and for life as we know it. I dive to go home.”
― William Trubridge, Oxygen: A Memoir

“One of the hardest skills in freediving is to distinguish between instinct and fear.”
― William Trubridge, Oxygen: A Memoir

“There is no break in that family line; no child who didn’t look more or less the same as their parent. The first tetrapods to leave the water breathed by swallowing air into their digestive system, and absorbing oxygen through the gut lining. Pockets of the gut evolved into the lungs we have today. Now, today, I was lying on the surface of the Blue Hole having taken a full breath and swallowed bites of air into my lungs to fill them with all the oxygen they could take. Satisfied that I had taken onboard enough for the dive, I rolled over to face the blue depths below me.”
― William Trubridge, Oxygen: A Memoir

“I would train and I would have patience, and when I was ready, when I knew that there could be no other outcome, then I would allow what was inevitable to have its day.”
― William Trubridge, Oxygen: A Memoir