Into the Deep Quotes

“The third thing Arthur Brooks said you need to do as you speed past 75 toward 80 and beyond is to “just say no.” When new ideas enter your mind or new opportunities come along, resist the urge to jump in.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Second, Brooks said, it’s important to focus less on yourself and more on mentoring others.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“this point in life, he said, there are three things you need to do. The first is to develop deeper friendships, and he had the perfect analogy for it. He urged us to look at the giant redwoods. They can grow to more than 300 feet tall, even though their roots sink less than six feet deep. How do they keep from falling over as they grow older? They reach out to the other trees around. Like the redwoods, Brooks suggested, we must develop a deeper network of friends and family, intertwining our roots so we stand tall together.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“As I realized when I got rejected from Scripps when I was all of 20-something, every failure is a learning lesson. Since then, I’ve grown to love failure. It’s not something you should try to avoid, but rather embrace and learn from—and then beat. You don’t go around it—you go through it.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Either we would find her plane, or we would rule out the Nikumaroro hypothesis. That is what science is all about: testing hypotheses and ruling out the ones that don’t stand up to scrutiny.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Then, one day in March 2015, I was driving home from my office, and I heard a segment on the radio about a book called The Dyslexic Advantage. What I heard felt familiar. Could I have had dyslexia without even realizing it? I ordered the book that night, and when I began reading it, I couldn’t put it down. Tears were streaming down my face. Here I was, 72 years old, and this book, finally, was explaining me to me. Even now I think of it as my first autobiography.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“When I give talks to kids, I’ll say at the beginning that I’m dyslexic and ask if any of them are. No one raises a hand. But by the time I finish my presentation, I ask them again, “How many of you are dyslexic?” And now they raise their hands. They have learned that someone just like them has followed his passion and gone on to have a successful life. That is what I want them to remember. Not that I found Titanic, but that I set goals and kept working to achieve them—and that my dyslexia actually helped me get to where I am today.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“I look at the nature versus nurture question this way: Your genes are the nouns and the verbs, and your nurturing is the adjectives and the adverbs. Together they make a sentence, with your genes, like all nouns and verbs, having the strongest impact.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“That nine-foot-tall clock was a fitting place to meet. Bronze and mahogany, topped with a gold statue of Lady Liberty, it had been a gift from Queen Victoria to the United States, first displayed at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Then John Jacob Astor IV acquired it for his opulent hotel. Nineteen years later, Astor died in the Titanic tragedy.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“I spoke out against the grave robbing and called for international legal protections. An agency within the United Nations approved a convention in 2001, calling on nations to protect “all traces of human existence having a cultural, historical or archaeological character” that had been underwater for more than 100 years. But it had been just 92 years since Titanic had gone down, so those protections did not apply.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“By 2000, RMS Titanic Inc. had returned to the site four more times, using French or Russian submersibles. In a game of Finders Keepers, they pocketed more than 6,000 artifacts and displayed them in a museum, charging people to see them. The company even broadcast a documentary showing how it took the objects. All told, the items included eyeglasses, shoes, handbags, luggage, and even a bronze cherub statue from the Grand Staircase. A bell and a light from the foremast were removed, and the salvagers even raised a chunk of the hull weighing 18 tons. They sold pieces of coal from the engine room for $25 a block. They created a website, so you could peruse the collections online. Documentary filmmakers and wealthy sightseers visited the site in mini-subs. And, perhaps most grotesque of all, a couple were married in a submersible perched on Titanic’s bow. I wouldn’t think of a mass grave as romantic, but I guess some couples are into that.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“After I found Titanic in 1985, I could have obtained salvage rights if I’d wanted to, according to international maritime law. But I wasn’t interested in retrieving artifacts. I believed we should respect the passengers and crew who had died there and leave their grave site undisturbed. Survivors, like Eva Hart, agreed. She was seven when the ship sank. “I saw all the horror of its sinking,” she told me. “And I heard, even more dreadful, the cries of drowning people.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Hollings had played a major role in creating NOAA—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—when Richard Nixon was president. He loved Jacques Cousteau, and he kept calling me “the new Cousteau.” The fact is, I explored much deeper parts of the ocean than Cousteau—the parts that were less interesting to most people unless they contained an important piece of human history.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“When Eroni took us to Nauru Island, I had picked up two coconuts at the base of the tree where he had found Kennedy. Back in Mystic, I hired a wood carver to make replicas of Kennedy’s hand-carved message on them. One I still have. The other I presented to Fritz Hollings, whom I invited to our private screening of National Geographic’s television special, The Search for Kennedy’s PT-109. I wanted to help him make up for what he had lost in the fire, and he was moved by the gesture.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“It seemed solid confirmation of the theory that the Black Sea changed from a freshwater lake to a saltwater interior sea about 7,500 years ago, just as suspected. The salt water brought in by the flood was heavier than the freshwater it replaced. It fell to the bottom and stagnated over time, losing its oxygen below about 330 feet. Although we couldn’t confirm that this event was the same as Noah’s Flood, our findings did support Ryan and Pitman’s theory that a catastrophic event had created the odd mix of water in the Black Sea.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Critics complain that I don’t play by their rules, that I operate outside the box. That’s true. I only have one rule of my own: I don’t work with jerks. I find my own way, but I also love to have a guide, someone who knows the world I’m operating in and has the credentials to help open doors.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“William Ryan and Walter Pitman, authors of Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History, had spent a half decade using core samples to try to prove that the Black Sea region had undergone a massive flood, which they believed to be the historical origin of the tale of Noah’s ark. The idea of a massive flood wasn’t unique to the Bible, they pointed out. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in the 18th century B.C., also described a flood that wiped out nearly all living things. The Bible even suggested the location for the flood, stating that the ark ultimately rested on the slopes of Mount Ararat, in northern Turkey, less than 200 miles from the shores of the Black Sea.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“It was such a beautiful and meticulous re-creation of the ship, too, from the Grand Staircase to the crow’s nest. I knew what the old lady looked like in her grave, and Jim showed me what she’d looked like as a young lady when she’d sailed from England. Cameron’s movie also captured the random nature of who lived and who died. I must say, that’s a question that has stuck with me ever since my summer in Army boot camp.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“So Jim found a cooperative theater 30 miles from our house and sent a limo to carry me, Barbara, and not-quite-three-week-old Emily to an 8 a.m. showing of Titanic. Barbara was so exhausted from lack of sleep that she had the limo stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts to buy some coffee. Then we settled down in the center seats of this giant theater, just the three of us. It’s a long movie. Halfway through, Barbara had to go to the bathroom. I stood up and said, “Stop the movie!” Can’t do that every day.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Jim was obsessed with getting all the details of the ship right, and sometimes he’d call late at night from the set in Ensenada, Mexico, or the editing room in Hollywood, and he’d be all excited and ask me a bunch of technical questions. When the movie was about to come out in December 1997, Jim invited me to attend a Hollywood screening.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“I was talking a lot to James Cameron, too. He had already directed Terminator and Aliens, and now he was making Titanic. Not long after we’d found the ship, Cameron had visited me at Woods Hole. He wanted to learn all he could to dramatize the story accurately.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Finally, two heads popped up, then two hands with “thumbs-up” signals. We had stolen success out of the jaws of failure. My people, and my gear, were safe after all. We also had determined that the coal dust could have helped trigger the second explosion on Lusitania—and now had compelling evidence for historians to analyze.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“I wanted to get a look at the area near that forward magazine, but I wasn’t sure if that would be possible, because Lusitania was resting on her starboard side. The wreckage also had become a favorite place for local fishermen to set their nets, and some of the nets had broken off and gotten caught on the ship’s superstructure, forming a giant spider’s web that could endanger our manned mini-sub Delta, our newly developed Jason robot, and a smaller remote-controlled vehicle called Homer. The first step was to use Jason and its sophisticated sonars to make a 3-D model of the wreck. We could then superimpose the ship’s original engineering drawings onto that map to locate the forward magazine precisely. Fortunately, the angle of Lusitania’s hull made it possible for Homer to slip under the bow and determine that the forward magazine was completely intact. Whatever had caused the second explosion had not been stored there.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“We positioned Northern Horizon, our command ship, 11 miles off Ireland’s southern coast. We knew where Lusitania lay—that wasn’t the issue. Our goal was to investigate the mystery of what had sent the grand ship to her watery grave, taking the lives of about 1,200 passengers and crew members in May 1915.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Cyril Spurr, a British munitions expert who was with us, had noted that if the German torpedo had hit behind the forward magazine, it would have struck a coal bunker. Because Lusitania was nearing the completion of her long voyage across the North Atlantic, the large bunker would have been nearly empty, filled with a thick layer of warm coal dust. If the torpedo had violently pushed that coal dust up into the well-oxygenated air inside the bunker, a spark could have ignited and set off the second explosion.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“also found a new passion in genealogy. I’d received a rush of letters from Ballards all over the country who wondered if they were related to me. After giving a lecture in North Carolina, I dug into the archives at Guilford College in Greensboro. It turns out that eight generations of Ballards had been Quakers there—and most of them had signed their names with X’s—before my great-grandfather had moved to Wichita. I was amazed that someone like me, who had invested so much of his life in military service, had come from a family of Quakers. Indeed, although I was able to trace the whole, long Ballard family saga back to the sheriff of Nottingham in 1325, I could find only one ancestor who wore a military uniform, Col. Thomas Ballard, a member of the British colonial militia in Virginia.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“In fact, the first lecture I gave after I found Titanic was a benefit for the Falmouth Youth Hockey organization. Dougie said some of the girls were so impressed with what I’d done that he got a few dates out of the deal.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“On our way up, we landed on the poop deck and used Alvin’s mechanical arm to leave behind a plaque dedicated to Bill Tantum, who had died in 1980, and to all those who had perished there.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“I headed back to the North Atlantic for a second visit to Titanic aboard Woods Hole’s R/V Atlantis II, the mother ship for Alvin. Because we had discovered Titanic with only four days left in our 1985 expedition, we needed to go back and photograph the wreckage more thoroughly. Most important, I wanted to send a robot inside.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Not long after the White House dinner, I was asked to give lectures on Titanic aboard Queen Elizabeth 2 on a trip from England. They gave us two first-class cabins, and Margie, Dougie, and one of his friends came along. The odd thing was that we had to be diverted from New York to Baltimore. The reason? A warning about icebergs.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic