Quotes By Author: Peter Benchley

“A man dies, girl, he isn’t any more, least not down here. Respect and all that crap doesn’t deserve the dead; it just makes the living feel better. The dead one, maybe he is somewhere else– maybe all he needs to be somewhere else is to believe he will be somewhere else. I won’t deny a man his belief, and I don’t know any more’n you about souls and all that stuff. But I know this: Speaking good or bad about something that isn’t anymore is a bloody waste of time. I can’t feature Saint Peter sitting up there saying: ‘Hey, Adam, there’s folks bad-mouthing you down there. What’d you do to merit that?”

“Life’s full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else […] In the next few days, you’ll have more chances to hurt yourself than most men get in a lifetime. It’s learning things and doing things right that make it worthwhile, make a man easy with himself. When I was young, nobody could tell me anything. I knew it all. It took a lot of mistakes to teach me that I didn’t know goose shit from tapioca.”

“You could start now, and spend another forty years learning about the sea without running out of new things to know.”