Shadow Divers Quotes

Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver," she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.

A song of despair The memory of you emerges from the night around me. The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea. Deserted like the dwarves at dawn. It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one! Cold flower heads are raining over my heart. Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked. In you the wars and the flights accumulated. From you the wings of the song birds rose. You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss. The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse. Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver, turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank! In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded. Lost discoverer, in you everything sank! You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire, sadness stunned you, in you everything sank! I made the wall of shadow draw back, beyond desire and act, I walked on. Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost, I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you. Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness. and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar. There was the black solitude of the islands, and there, woman of love, your arms took me in. There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle. Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms! How terrible and brief my desire was to you! How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid. Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs, still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds. Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs, oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies. Oh the mad coupling of hope and force in which we merged and despaired. And the tenderness, light as water and as flour. And the word scarcely begun on the lips. This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing, and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank! Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you, what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned! From billow to billow you still called and sang. Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel. You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents. Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well. Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank! It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all the timetables. The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore. Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate. Deserted like the wharves at dawn. Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands. Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything. It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself. It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is. Some people never get that moment. The U-Who is my moment. What I do now is what I am.

Most men, it seemed to them, went through life never really knowing themselves. A man might consider himself noble or brave or just, they believed, but until he was truly tested it would always be mere opinion.

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: "Love has no ending. "I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, "I'll love till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky. "The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world." But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: "O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. "In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss. "In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy Tomorrow or today. "Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow. "O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed. "The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead. "Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer, And Jill goes down on her back. "O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress; Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. "O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbor With all your crooked heart." It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on.

In a world where even the moon had been traveled, the floor of the Atlantic remained uncharted wilderness, its shipwrecks beacons for men compelled to look.

Many dead divers have been found inside shipwrecks with more than enough air remaining to have made it to the surface. It is not that they chose to die, but rather that they could no longer figure out how to live.

In the United States, of the ten million certified scuba divers, it is likely that only a few hundred dive deep for shipwrecks. To those few, it is not a matter of if they will taste death, only of whether they'll swallow.

This was the writer's true doppelgänger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work -- Roderick Usher, Eric Waldensee, Francis Macomber, Dick Diver -- whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life's very course.

If a deep-wreck diver stays in the sport long enough, he will likely either come close to dying, watch another diver die, or die himself. There are times in this sport when it is difficult to say which of the three outcomes is worst.

He rolled with the unexpected—and much was unexpected on Seeker trips—because he believed in “No matter what.

and when he sat against trees to catch his breath he marveled at how full life felt when a person got to be excellent,

To those few, it is not a matter of if they will taste death, only of whether they’ll swallow.

Nature Boy I was just a boy when I sat down To watch the news on TV I saw some ordinary slaughter I saw some routine atrocity My father said, don't look away You got to be strong, you got to be bold, now He said, that in the end it is beauty That is going to save the world, now And she moves among the sparrows And she floats upon the breeze She moves among the flowers She moves something deep inside of me I was walking around the flower show like a leper Coming down with some kind of nervous hysteria When I saw you standing there, green eyes, black hair Up against the pink and purple wisteria You said, hey, nature boy, are you looking at me With some unrighteous intention? My knees went weak, I couldn't speak, I was having thoughts That were not in my best interests to mention And she moves among the flowers And she floats upon the smoke She moves among the shadows She moves me with just one little look You took me back to your place And dressed me up in a deep sea diver's suit You played the patriot, you raised the flag And I stood at full salute Later on we smoked a pipe that struck me dumb And made it impossible to speak As you closed in, in slow motion, Quoting Sappho, in the original Greek She moves among the shadows She floats upon the breeze She moves among the candles And we moved through the days and through the years Years passed by, we were walking by the sea Half delirious You smiled at me and said, Babe I think this thing is getting kind of serious You pointed at something and said Have you ever seen such a beautiful thing? It was then that I broke down It was then that you lifted me up again She moves among the sparrows And she walks across the sea She moves among the flowers And she moves something deep inside of me She moves among the sparrows And she floats upon the breeze She moves among the flowers And she moves right up close to me

Not all divers succumb to panic as Drozd did. A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else. In this way, liberated from instincts, he becomes a freak of nature. To

That doubt and trouble, fear and pain, And anguish, all, are shadows vain, That death itself shall not remain; That weary deserts we may tread, A dreary labyrinth may thread, Thro’ dark ways underground be led; Yet, if we will one Guide obey, The dreariest path, the darkest way Shall issue out in heavenly day; And we, on divers shores now cast, Shall meet, our perilous voyage past, All in our Father’s house at last!’ R. C. TRENCH.

—  If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. —  If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. —  Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. —  Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever. —  Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. —  It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.

The man was naked. He was all bones and ribs and snarling mouth. The front of him was caked in blood, a smear of charcoal black in the dim red glow of Palmer’s dive light. There was just a flash of this grisly image before the man crashed into Palmer, knocking him to the ground, desperate hands clenching around his throat. Palmer saw pops of bright light as his head hit the floor. He couldn’t breathe. He heard his own gurgles mix with the raspy hisses from the man on top of him. A madman. A thin, half-starved, and full-crazed madman. Palmer fought for a breath. His visor was knocked from his head. Letting go of the man’s wrists, he reached for his dive knife, but his leg was pinned, his boot too far away. He pawed behind himself and felt his visor, had some insane plan of getting it to his temples, getting his suit powered on, overloading the air around him, trying to shake the man off. But as his fingers closed on the hard plastic—and as the darkness squeezed in around his vision—he instead swung the visor at the snarling man’s face, a final act before the door to that king’s crypt sealed shut on him. A piercing shriek returned Palmer to his senses. Or it was the hands coming off his neck? The naked man howled and lunged again, but Palmer got a boot up, caught the man in the chest, kicked him. He scrambled backward while the man reeled. The other diver. Brock’s diver. Palmer turned and crawled on his hands and knees to get distance, got around a desk, moving as fast as he could, heart pounding. Two divers. There had been two divers. He waited for the man’s partner to jump onto his back, for the two men to beat him to death for his belly full of jangling coin— —when he bumped into the other diver. And saw by his dive light that he was no threat. And the bib of gore on the man chasing him was given sudden meaning. Palmer crawled away, sickened. He wondered how long the men had been down here, how long one had been eating the other. Hands fell onto his boots and yanked him, dragging him backward. A reedy voice yelled for him to be still. And then he felt a tug as his dive knife was pulled from its sheath, stolen. Palmer spun onto his back to defend himself. His own knife flashed above him traitorously, was brought down by those bone-thin arms, was meant to skewer him. There was a crunch against his belly. A painful blow. The air came out of Palmer. The blade was raised to strike him again, but there was no blood. His poor life had been saved by a fistful of coin. Palmer brought up his knee as the man struck again—and shin met forearm with a crack. A howl, and the knife was dropped. Palmer fumbled for it, his dive light throwing the world into pale reds and deep shadows. Hand on the hilt, his knife reclaimed, he slashed at the air, and the man fell back, hands up, shouting, “Please, please!” Palmer scooted away, keeping the knife in front of him. He was weak from fitful sleep and lack of food, but this poor creature before him seemed even weaker. Enraged and with the element of surprise, the man had nearly killed him, but it had been like fighting off a homeless dune-sleeper who had jumped him for some morsel of bread. Palmer dared to turn his dive light up so he could see the man better. “Sorry. I’m sorry,” the man said. “Thought you were a ghost.” The

Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.

If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. —  If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss

Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. —  Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever. —  Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. —  It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong. —  The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world. —  The worst possible decision is to give up.

Along the way, each marveled at how easy it was to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important it would be to further rely on oneself.

Christopher reached out to pet Hector, who nuzzled against his hand. His gentleness with the animal was reassuring. Perhaps, Beatrix thought hopefully, he wasn’t as angry as she had feared Taking a deep breath, she said, “The reason that I named him Hector--” “No,” Christopher moved with startling swiftness, trapping her against the post of the stall. His voice was low and rough. “Let’s start with this: did you help Prudence to write those letters?” Beatrix’s eyes widened as she looked into his shadowed face. Her blood surged, a flush rising to the surface of her skin. “No,” she managed to say, “I didn’t help her.” “Then who did?” “No one helped her.” It was the truth. It just wasn’t the entire truth. “You know something,” he insisted. “And you’re going to tell me what it is.” She could feel his fury. The air was charged with it. Her heart thrummed like a bird’s. And she struggled to contain a swell of emotion that was almost more than she could bear. “Let me go,” she said with exceptional calm. “You’re doing neither of us any good with this behavior.” His eyes narrowed dangerously. “Don’t use your bloody dog-training voice on me.” “That wasn’t my dog-training voice. And if you’re so intent on getting at the truth, why aren’t you asking Prudence?” “I have asked her. She lied. As you are lying now.” “You’ve always wanted Prudence,” Beatrix burst out. “Now you can have her. Why should a handful of letters matter?” “Because I was deceived. And I want to know how and why.” “Pride,” Beatrix said bitterly. “That’s all this is to you…your pride was hurt.” One of hands sank into her hair, gripping in a gentle but inexorable hold. A gasp slipped from her throat as he pulled her head back. “Don’t try to diver the conversation. You know something you’re not telling me.” His free hand came to the exposed line of her throat. For a heart-stopping moment she thought he might choke her. Instead he caressed her gently, his thumb moving in a subtle swirl in the hollow at the base. The intensity of her own reaction astonished her. Beatrix’s eyes half closed. “Stop,” she said faintly. Taking her responsive shiver as a sign of distaste or fear, Christopher lowered his head until his breath fanned her cheek. “Not until I have the truth.” Never. If she told him, he would hate her for the way she had deceived and abandoned him. Some mistakes could not be forgiven. “Go to hell,” Beatrix said unsteadily. She had never used such a phrase in her life. “I am in hell.” His body corralled hers, his legs intruding amid the folds of her skirts. Drowning in guilt and fear and desire, she tried to push his caressing hand away from her throat. His fingers delved into her hair with a grip just short of painful. His mouth was close to hers. He was surrounding her, all the strength and force and maleness of him, and she closed her eyes as her senses went quiet and dark in helpless waiting. “I’ll make you tell me,” she heard him mutter. And then he was kissing her. Somehow, Beatrix thought hazily, Christopher seemed to be under the impression she would find his kisses so objectionable that she would confess anything to make him desist. She couldn’t think how he had come by such a notion. In fact, she couldn’t really think at all.

A telegraph on display in a diver’s living room, therefore, is much more than a shiny object; it is an announcement. It says, If someone had been to this ship’s wheelhouse before me, he would not have left this telegraph behind.

As Nagle spiraled deeper into alcoholism and resentment, Chatterton managed much of his friend’s business, so that the Seeker could remain viable.

Dove, Cannery Row, The Godfather, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Odd Sea, The World According to Garp, Siddhartha. Thirties: Rabbit Is Rich, The Golden Notebook, In Cold Blood, Crime and Punishment, The Last Boy, The Professional, Roots, Great Heart, Tropic of Cancer, King of the World, Judgment Ridge, Islands in the Stream, The Devil’s Teeth. Forties: The Islandman, Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Right Stuff, The Last Duel, War and Peace, The Orchard, The Secret History, Of Human Bondage, A River Runs Through It, Death Comes for the Archbishop, A Moveable Feast, We Took to the Woods, Nine Mile Bridge, A Fine Balance. Fifties: Miriam at Thirty-Four, The Hair of Harold Roux, The Horsemen, Give Me My Father’s Body (reissued in a revised and updated edition as Minik), Endurance, As I Lay Dying, Snow Falling on Cedars, Emma, The Long Lavender Look, Shadow Divers, The Devil’s Candy, Moriarty, The Last Place on Earth, The Power and the Glory. Sixties: Bleak House; The Sound and the Fury; Catherine the Great; Last Train to Memphis; The

When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself. It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is. Some people never get that moment.

In May of that year, forty-one U-boats were destroyed by Allied forces, a disaster that came to be known as “Black May” and which Dönitz described as “unimaginable, even in my wildest dreams.” The “Happy Time” had yielded to Sauregurkenzeit, or “Sour-Pickle Time.

Throughout the mission the divers were going to be shadowed by a new remote-controlled device that everyone called a “flying eyeball.” These unmanned orbs, operated from the surface, were about the size of a big beach ball, functioned as mobile klieg lights, and were equipped with cameras so that topside supervisors could watch subsea operations for themselves rather than rely exclusively on garbled Chipmunk narrations.

One day Nagle paid him the highest compliment by saying, “When you die no one will ever find your body.

When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself. It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is.

an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it.—If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving.—Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.—Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever.—Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.—It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.—The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world.—The worst possible decision is to give up.

Life is a matter of luck, and the odds in favor of success are in no way enhanced by extreme caution. — WWII German U-Boat Commander Eric Topp

The amount of coal required to propel a single 10,000-ton ship across the ocean was far less than the amount required to drive two 5,000-ton ships across the same distance.

~ If an undertaking was easy, someone els already would have done it. ~ If you follow in another's footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. ~ Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. ~ Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever. ~ Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. ~ It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong. ~ The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn't care any more, who has said, "I'm already dead -- the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself," is the most formidable force in the world. ~ The worst possible decision is to give up.

~ If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. ~ If you follow in another's footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. ~ Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. ~ Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever. ~ Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. ~ It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong. ~ The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn't care any more, who has said, 'I'm already dead -- the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,' is the most formidable force in the world. ~ The worst possible decision is to give up.

That is one reason why shipwreck divers don’t spend hours working underwater; the decompression time for a two-hour dive might be as long as nine hours.

It is not that they chose to die, but rather that they could no longer figure out how to live.

Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. —Franz Kafka, Diaries