Anthony Doerr Quotes

I am really dedicated to understanding the planet/creature on which we live and know that means I must go beneath the sea to see 72 percent of what is going on.

Everyone loves to fly, and flying underwater is even better than flying in air because there are things around you.

I want everybody to go jump in the ocean to see for themselves how beautiful it is, how important it is to get acquainted with fish swimming in the ocean, rather than just swimming with lemon slices and butter.

When I was a child, I saw my father diving to the deepest point in the ocean with the U.S. Navy.

I have always had a very natural connection to the water, and that connection stems from the ocean itself.

As a young boy, I was very interested - as I still am - in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.

I swam with my first shark in the 1980s. I was 20 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, working with a group of marine scientists. Late in the day, a 5-foot long blue shark swam into our chum slick. For the next hour, I marveled at the animal's stunning indigo color and the elegant way she moved effortlessly through the sea.

My grandfather was Jacques Cousteau, a pioneer of ocean exploration and the co-inventor of scuba diving. Back in the 1940s when he tested out his invention which allowed humans to swim freely in the ocean with a portable air source for the first time in history, very little of the ocean had been explored let alone captured on film.

I love the ocean; growing up around Laguna Beach, I spent my summers surfing, diving, and snorkeling.

Being able to breathe underwater would be sweet. There is so much life underneath the water that we don't know about. I would love to check out the bottom of the ocean to see what's going on down there.

The oceans have been a part of my life for as long as I remember. As a child, I spent hours playing in the surf off Cape Cod. In college, I fished along the rocky coast of Nova Scotia with my school's fishing team.

People come to me and say, 'What'll I do if I go in the water and see a shark?' You don't have to do anything. The chances of that shark attacking you in any way is so remote. The sea should be enjoyed, the animals in it. When you see a shark underwater, you should say, 'How lucky I am to see this beautiful animal in his environment!'

I want to stay in the ocean. I'm not going to be able to do that from some holding cell in Japan.

For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen - skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women.

I have been passionate about the oceans since I dipped my toes in the water at the first age of three.

The amazing thing about the sea is that it is perhaps the last truly unexplored frontier; most oceanographers estimate that only about ninety-five per cent of the sea has been studied. Meanwhile, the oceans are believed to contain more animals than exist on land, a majority of which have never been discovered.

Everybody's got some fascination with undersea life, don't you think?

I closed my eyes and curled my fists around the things I knew for sure: That a scallop has thirty-five eyes, all blue. That a tuna will suffocate if it ever stops swimming. That I was loved. That this time, it was not me who broke

The naturalists of yore esteemed the ocean to be a treasury of wonders, and sought therein for monstrosities and organisms contrary to the law of nature, such as they interpreted it.

South Africa is not a jellyfish and is in many respects a swordfish.

Calamari isn't too bad. That's what I thought cuttlefish was gonna be that. I've eaten octopus and eel and shark and sea urchin before, and - and those are good.

I was always interested in the ocean and also in art. I had to figure out how to put the two together, but painting fish sounded boring.

I spent three weeks on a converted shrimp trawler with 17 people, two toilets, and one shower, all the while diving every day with very active sharks.

I really want to dive in the kelp forests of Monterey Bay in California. I hear it's like floating through a forest.

I was into Jacques Cousteau as a kid and started scuba-diving around 14, which blew my mind. It was all colour, another world.