“Darwin's ArkThe fact is, I know those ancestors floating through my sleep: an animal that breathed water, had a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, undoubtedly hermaphrodite . . . I slide through all the oceans with these kin, salt water pulsing in my veins, and aeons follow me into the trees: a hairy, tailed quadruped, arboreal in its habits, scales slipping off my flanks . . . . I have sailed the ancients seas to come to the bones of Megatherium. . . . The thing I want to father most is the rarest, most difficult thing of all. Though knee-deep in these rivers of innocent blood, I want to be - a decent animal.”

“I knew, even as we touched that I had never wanted anything more in all my life. All my crabbed cravings were as a cupful of pond water beside the vast ocean of longing I felt surging through me. My head swam; my eyes blurred. I burned from the inside out as if my blood and bones were consumed with liquid fire.”

“He would have told her - he would have said, it matters not if you are here or there, for I see you before me every moment. I see you in the light of the water, in the swaying of the young trees in the spring wind. I see you in the shadows of the great oaks, I hear your voice in the cry of the owl at night. You are the blood in my veins, and the beating of my heart. You are my first waking thought, and my last sigh before sleeping. You are - you are bone of my bone, and breath of my breath.”

“My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water.”

“Music to me is the air I breathe it's the blood that pumps through my veins that keeps me alive”

“I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea - whether it is to sail or to watch it - we are going back from whence we came.[Remarks at the Dinner for the America's Cup Crews, September 14 1962]”