Dolphins Quotes

“Never trust a species that grins all the time. It’s up to something.”
― Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

“The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins. They are so much brighter that they soon realised that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronized rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human's eye and get away with it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

“The deep roar of the ocean.

The break of waves on farther shores that thought can find.

The silent thunders of the deep.

And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming trillings, wordlings, and half-articulated songs of thought.

Greetings, waves of greetings, sliding back down into the inarticulate, words breaking together.

A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth.

Waves of joy on--where? A world indescribably found, indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.

A fugue of voices now, clamoring explanations, of a disaster unavertable, a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words.

And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in the implications of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of it, the fight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins gone.

Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear.

"This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans. We bid you farewell."

And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly gray bodies rolling away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“All right," Shannen says slowly, tucking a lock of dark brown hair behind her ear. "Why did you glue that dolphin upside down?"
Okay, so I'm a little distracted. "He's doing the back stroke.”
― Tera Lynn Childs, Forgive My Fins

“Son of a bitch, I'm sick of these dolphins.”
― Wes Anderson, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

“I couldn't help wondering where porpoises had learned this game of running on the bows of ships. Porpoises have been swimming in the oceans for seven to ten million years, but they've had human ships to play with for only the last few thousand. Yet nearly all porpoises, in every ocean, catch rides for fun from passing ships; and they were doing it on the bows of Greek triremes and prehistoric Tahitian canoes, as soon as those seacraft appeared. What did they do for fun before ships were invented?
Ken Norris made a field observation one day that suggests the answer. He saw a humpback whale hurrying along the coast of the island of Hawaii, unavoidably making a wave in front of itself; playing in that bow wave was a flock of bottlenose porpoises. The whale didn't seem to be enjoying it much: Ken said it looked like a horse being bothered by flies around its head; however, there was nothing much the whale could do about it, and the porpoises were having a fun time. ”
― Karen Pryor, Lads Before the Wind: Diary of a Dolphin Trainer

“sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new songs”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“If factory farming for meat of cats, dogs, squirrels, swans and guinea pigs began in western Europe, you can be sure some of the bacon and sausage gorging public would be out protesting. Although other cultures regularly eat some or all of these animals, everybody draws the line somewhere. Most would balk at the idea of eating dolphin, gorilla, orangutan or human flesh, but really the differences between the species are minimal and whether we are a rabbit, horse, chimpanzee or human, we all have an innate desire to live our lives freely and avoid violation.”
― Mango Wodzak, Destination Eden - Eden Fruitarianism Explained

“As he [Sir Malcolm Sargeant, conductor of the London Philharmonic] stood in waist deep in the shallows of Whaler's Cove, the littler spinners came drifting over, sleek and dainty, gazing at him curiously with their soft dark eyes. Malcolm was a tactful, graceful man in his movements, and so the spinners were not afraid of him. In moments, he had them all pressing around him, swimming into his arms, and begging him to swim away with them. He looked up, suffused with delight, and remarked to me, 'It's like finding out there really are fairies at the bottom of the garden!”
― Karen Pryor, Lads Before the Wind: Diary of a Dolphin Trainer

“Dolphins... Yeah, dolphins... A lot of people like dogs, cats, and - for some reason I've never been able to fathim - even snakes and toads. But dolphins? Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY loves bloody dolphins. Don't they? Goes way back, to the ancient Greeks, when shipwrecked sailors would wash up on beaches yammering out crazy stories of how they was staring down a watery grave, when out of nowhere, flipper shows up and pushes them safely back to the shore. Heartarming - and say what you will about aquatic mammal public relations, but that was one ispired move, because here we are two thousand years later and everybody still loves them bloody dolphins. What you don't hear are the other stories, the ones where flipper's watching poor Artemides doggy paddling away and inhaling the warm, salty waters of the Adriatic... and flipper things, "Yeah, sure I could save him, but sod that for a can of sardines" and instead of pushing Artemides back to shore, flipper pushes the poor sod out to sea... in the immortal words of Sir Johnny of the Cash, "Just to watch him die..." See, moral is, if you're gonna be a bastard, be like a dolphin - think big picture, protect your image and above all, leave no trace. Because in the bloodshot, bleary eyes of the world, once you're a bastard, you're always a bastard.”
― Simon Oliver, The Hellblazer #3

“I've known for a long time about dolphins getting caught in nets and drowning there. But knowing is not the same as seeing it with your own eyes. I feel heavy, sad and responsible.”
― Helen Dunmore, The Crossing of Ingo

“Dolphins are sunflowers of the water. They adore the Sun, they love the ocean and are kind to the land. They remind us to stay playful, keep our inner child safe and stand by loved ones.”
― Reena Doss

“It does appear that some parts of our evolutionary process seem inevitable. It is striking that throughout evolutionary history, the eye evolved independently fifty to a hundred times. This is strong evidence for the fact that the different rolls of the dice that have occurred across different species seem to have produced species with eyes regardless of what is going on around them. Lots of other examples illustrate how some features, if they are advantageous, seem to rise to the top of the evolutionary swamp. This is illustrated every time you see the same feature appearing more than once in different parts of the animal kingdom. Dolphins and bats, for example, use echolocation, but they evolved this trait independently at very different points on the evolutionary tree.”
― Marcus du Sautoy, The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science

“The swans have returned and so have the dolphins to the Canals of Venice. Nature creates the most beautiful art!”
― Avijeet Das

“I felt all of existence swelling in my veins. Letting my umbrella drop, I flung back my head to open myself to the wind and the suns. It was as though in the course of one night I had cast away the emptiness I had so long held in my arms.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

“I just lay on the bed, lost in the wilderness of a completely new world as the clock continued ticking long into the night. It was a world of poetry. It was a world of dolphins where the sea kissed the sky. It was the world of love – a world I had never been at and yet have never felt so familiar.”
― Tshetrim Tharchen, A Play of the Cosmos: Script of the Stars

“To spin like everyone else was the key to fitting in, and if she could only hear the music of the ocean like everyone else, she too would be able to tune in and do it.”
― Laline Paull, Pod

“Free, wild dolphins are among the most joyous creatures on Earth.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“They could draw many parallels between dolphins and Xenomorphs.”
― Tim Lebbon, Alien: Invasion

“It's not generally realized that camels have a natural aptitude for advanced mathematics, particularly where they involve ballistics. This evolved as a survival trait, in the same way as a human's hand and eye coordination, a chameleon's camouflage and a dolphin's renowned ability to save drowning swimmers if there's any chance that biting them in half might be observed and commented on adversely by other humans.”
― Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

“He got up, came back, and unlocked the door to my cell, then led me back to his desk and indicated the bench along the wall. I sat down, and he pushed a bundle of letters over to me. I was reading one of the letters—it was from a young girl who said she loved Flipper and wanted to know if there was anything she could do to help either Charlie Brown or me—when suddenly Sgt. Pepper grabbed my hair and banged my head twice—Bang! Bang!—against the wall. Through clenched teeth he growled, “You come here to steal dee fish! You bess tell me de trut, man. You come to steal dee fish!”
“Dolphins are not fish!” I yelled back at him.”
― Richard O'Barry, Behind the Dolphin Smile: One Man's Campaign to Protect the World's Dolphins

“Dolphins work on the reward system,” I explained. “When they’ve had enough to eat, that’s a wrap.” I shrugged.
The director eyed me with a frown, and I realized that he was playing a role himself, the role of the stereotypical director. Hollywood is full of them. Bald-headed, short, and heavyset, he had a white moustache and goatee, an electric megaphone, and—of all things—a gold cigarette holder with a 100 mm filter cigarette in it. The only part of his costume missing was a pith helmet, which was probably optional. “Hmmmm,” he said as though musing to himself, “like actors, then.”
― Richard O'Barry, Behind the Dolphin Smile: One Man's Campaign to Protect the World's Dolphins

“Fisher ramped back the engine while I waited, watching as the line of the horizon turned into dots and dashes- and then something slim and black and white lifted out of the water in a soaring arc that looked like nothing but celebration.
"Dolphins," I said, laughing. "It's dolphins."
Hundreds of them, streaking toward us, faster than our boat could ever go. They overtook us, wave after wave of flashing tails and gleaming backs. For what must have been ten minutes we stood, stunned, as the dolphins flowed around our boat. Finally, the last wave passed and we watched as they traveled on, leaving a foaming white trail for us behind them.
"I think we can call that a welcome," Fisher said.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The Scent Keeper

“When it comes to marine life, our existence depends upon their existence.”
― June Stoyer

“In the late 1960s, a park could purchase an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin for about $300. Today, that same species will cost more than $100,000. Indeed, this spike in price has forced zoos to change their entire philosophy. “The attitude was these marine mammals were an expendable commodity,” a former vice president of Sea World confided. “If these animals perished, you’d just go out and replace them. The ease didn’t drive a great deal of research of what they needed to keep them healthy.[...] Yet if “expendability” was the industry’s previous philosophy, “reproduction” came to be its new one.”
― Jason Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance

“Humans are the only species that destroy anything and everything they do not have a need for or don't understand!”
― June Stoyer

“NOBODY taught me how to swim.
So, I swam and followed the rivers,
hoping that I'd end up in the ocean; the calm seas.
To see some dolphins and the colourful fish.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“The river that chose me was long
with hard turns, blockages, and fishing traps.
On some days, the river would run dry,
leaving me nowhere but in the middle of hard cracks.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“But I had a dream that was heavier than my challenges.
So I continued with my journey,
following the stream of the river.
Hoping to reach the ocean; the calm seas.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Once upon a time, pink dolphins swam not far from shore. He and Yas would wade out to see the newest calves and swim alongside Mira and Hira--- the names they'd given the sweetest two with matching crooked fins.”
― Aisha Saeed, Forty Words for Love