“But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.”

“When you argue with someone, you always argue at the level of the person with the lowest level of intelligence. You never argue up.”

“Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.”

“The first man he came to was running about in a great hurry, as if his thoughts were several yards in advance of his body, which they could never drag on fastt enough.”

“We had been naive enough to believe that we were invincible; that we could run blind through the hairpin turns of life at treacherous speeds and never crash.”

“But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.”