“The ocean, after all, is not about stability but about change. Change is normal. Everything changes. All the time.”

“Everything is octopusied.”

“and now I laugh at how the world changed me, and I think life chose me . . . after all.”

“The dissection started out smoothly enough. Several boys lifted the thawed carcass out of its container and put it on the lab table. Then a line of girls elbowed their way in to form a phalanx at the dissecting table. They looked like groupies in a mosh pit. There was no room in the front line for the boys, who stood behind and watched, arms folded across their chests....One girl spent most of her time in a trancelike state picking the sharp little rings out of the squid's suckers. She was deeply intent on trying to harvest as many of the toothed rings as possible. Later that day she went home and shocked her mother by saying she wanted to switch her career goal from baking to marine science.”

“Without an engine, Beebe's bathysphere dangled helplessly from the topside support ship like a ball of yarn suspended from knitting needles.”

“Cambrian animals were not particularly large at first, but they were plentiful and innovative. Jaws appeared. Eyes appeared. Nature began experimenting with weaponry.”

“Sometimes the dendrites leading into the nonsensory neuron are so plentiful that, under a microscope, they look very much like a richly branched coral, or perhaps like a piece of finely tatted lace”