Quotes from Peter Benchley

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

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.

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.

one of the few advantages man has over other animals is the ability to choose the way to bring on his own death. Food may well kill me, but it's also what has made life such a pleasure.

God isn't going to scribble across the sky, The shark is gone.

Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else.

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.

That's the only hitch in learning: it's humbling. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. Anyway, all that's a long way around saying that it's crazy to do things just to prove you can do 'em. The more you learn, the more you'll find yourself doing things you never thought you could do in a million years.

I guess I'm a hopeful optimist, because to be a pessimist is to be suicidal.

Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.

You're gonna need a bigger boat.

If people would make an effort to learn about the wonders that did exist, he thought, their appetite for dragons would be well satisfied.

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.

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.

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

don't mind. I just thought you might not want to." The three men

Don't go into the water if you're bleeding—at all, from anything, anywhere on your body.

Tenemos un pacto con la muerte y estamos en concierto con el infierno!

mean anything." She seemed subdued, sad.

We're going to need a bigger boat.

paper-pushers can't figure me out. all they understand is bullshit and politics, which amounts to the same thing.

ideologues of every stripe, as well as folks with interests economic, political, or personal, can interpret data and statistics to suit their own purposes...

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

odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high. He