A Quote by Rachel Carson
The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is the home of the great white shark, two-thousand-pound killer of the seas, and of the hundred-foot blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It is also the home of living things so small that your two hands might scoop up as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way.
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At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue.
Why are atoms so small? ... Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water, then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if you then took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.
Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distances that their trajectories are rectilineal; nevertheless, from time to time, two of them may come near enough together to be deviated from their course, like a comet that passed too close to Jupiter. In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.
Surely a man needs a closed place wherein he may strike root and, like the seed, become. But also he needs the great Milky Way above him and the vast sea spaces, though neither stars nor ocean serve his daily needs.
I haven't lived in Sweden since I was a teenager. We lived in southern Sweden, about two hours north of Copenhagen, where my family's home base has been since 1970. Our parents bought a schoolhouse in preparation for self-sufficient living. They wanted to create a place to do all the things they believed in.
Take the Long Way Home is a song that I wrote that's on two levels - on one level I'm talking about not wanting to go home to the wife, 'take the long way home' because she treats you like part of the furniture. But there's a deeper level to the song, too. I really believe we all want to find our true home, find that place in us where we feel at home, and to me, home is in the heart. When we’re in touch with our heart and we're living our life from our heart, then we do feel like we found our home.
I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both.
Don't eat shrimp - it's one of the most unsustainable fish. For every pound that's caught, 10 or 20 pounds of other stuff is killed and dumped back overboard. It's the number one killer of juvenile sea turtles in Mexico. Two good sustainable seafood guides that I'd recommend are from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Blue Ocean Institute.
There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion - that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it's too late.
When you're a six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound dude, you're not the romantic lead.
When we hear a Mozart piano concerto today, we're most likely to hear the piano part played on a modern concert grand. In the hands of a professional pianist, such a piano can bury the strings and the winds and hold its own against the brass. But Mozart wasn't composing for a nine-foot-long, thousand-pound piano; he was composing for a five-and-a-half-foot-long, hundred-and-fifty-pound piano built from balsa wood and dental floss.
Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here, nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life.
The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it's a very simple plot - there's only one white whale in the ocean. When you're a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it's unique: it's happening only to you.
So when I was 13, I basically left home and never returned and lived at home again. I would come home for a week at Christmas and two weeks in the summer only.
I'm not a vegetarian by any means; I eat fish. But the problem with shark finning is they catch the shark, cut their fins and throw them back in the ocean, and to me, that's wrong. If you're going to kill an animal, you should use the entire animal and do it humanely. I'm definitely not a big fan.
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.
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