Peter Benchley Quotes

Trying to get retribution against a fish is crazy.

Come up fish. Come to Quint.

Other fish run from bigger things. That’s their instinct. But this fish doesn’t run from anything. He doesn’t fear.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They’re beautiful―How beautiful they are! They’re like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They’re as graceful as any bird. They’re as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses―except for hunger―they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and everyone is different from every other one.

Look, Chief, you can’t go off half-cocked looking for vengeance against a fish. That shark isn’t evil. It’s not a murderer. It’s just obeying its own instincts.

He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime.

The great fish moved silently through the night water.

What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.

Suppose you fell over with this fish. Is there anything you could do? Sure. Pray. It’d be like falling out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping you’ll land in a haystack. The only thing that’d save you would be God, and since He pushed you overboard in the first place, I wouldn’t give a nickel for your chances.

The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future. It’s depressing if you spend too much time reliving the old joys. You think you’ll never have anything as good again.

Hooper ladled chum, which sounded to Brody, every time it hit the water, like diarrhea.

Sharks are like ax-murderers, Martin. People react to them with their guts. There’s something crazy and evil and uncontrollable about them.

Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of—let alone in—water above his head give him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and a ache in his stomach—essentially the sensation some people feel about flying.

In Brody’s dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned.

Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They’re six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I’m getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What’s to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be?

God isn’t going to scribble across the sky. “The shark is gone.”

One of the few advantages man has over other animals is the ability to choose the way to bring on his own death.

The fish might well have disappeared already, but Brody wasn’t willing to gamble lives on the possibility: the odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high.

Food may well kill me, but it’s also what has made life such a pleasure.

Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing.

You have to understand. There’s nothing in the sea this fish would fear.

A terrible, painful sadness clutched at Ellen. More than ever before, she felt that her life—the best part of it, at least, the part that was fresh and fun—was behind her. Recognizing the sensation made her feel guilty, for she read it as proof that she was an unsatisfactory mother, an unsatisfied wife. She hated her life, and hated herself for hating it. She thought of a line from a song Billy played on the stereo: “I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday.”