Quotes from Frank Schätzing

Dr Samantha Crowe.

Cuanto más quiero a alguien, más tonto me pongo cuando trato de decírselo. En cuanto a ti, debo de ser el tonto más grande de todos los tiempos

Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no struck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes.

Merkwürdige Rasse, die Menschheit. Flog zum Mond und schändete kleine Kinder.

But I hope you're not about to give me some kind of conspiracy theory. This is Norway, not America.

And yet most people would be lost without the idea that life increases in value the more it resembles our own.

Children in America drew six-legged chickens because drumsticks came in packs of six, while adults drank milk from a carton, and recoiled at the sight of an udder. Their experience of the world was stunted, but it only fuelled their arrogance.

Gut gesprochen, gut gelernt, eilfertig herausgespien aus dem Fundus Eures Unverstands und unter konsequenter Umgehung des Nachdenkens.

You know the classic lines you get in sci-fi? Whatever it is, it's coming our way, or Get me the President on the line? Well, there's always the one about the enemy being superior, though by the end of the story you mostly feel cheated. This time you won't. The yrr are superior.

On the one hand our body is our temple, but on the other we despise it for being mere machinery. We've become accustomed to valuing mind over body. We feel nothing but contempt for the factors relating to our physical survival.

Culture is nothing but a set of successful patterns of behaviour grounded in our struggle to survive.

Imagine an alien spaceship lowering cameras to Earth. Each captures only a few square metres at a time. The first zooms in on the Kalahari desert. The second takes a snap of the Mongolian steppes. A third is lowered over Antarctica, and the fourth hovers over a city and films just a few square metres of grass and a dog peeing up against a tree. What impression would the aliens have? No sign of intelligent life, though primitive life-forms are sporadically present.

Actually, no. In The Abyss the alien creatures come from space. The film makes them out to be a nicer version of humans. They're supposed to have a moral message. The main difference, though, is that those aliens aren't interested in toppling us from our throne at the top of terrestrial evolution, which is what any intelligent species that had developed in parallel to us and that shared our planet would want to do.

There's plenty of life down there. The trouble is, it sees us coming and steps aside.

Los pueblos originarios siempre viven dosificadamente de algo que los blancos luego despilfarran. Una vez que lo han despilfarrado, se frotan los ojos y quieren protegerlo. Entonces lo protegen de aquellos de quienes nunca fue necesario protegerlo, y presumen de ello.

Just before I quit, I heard the nuclear whale programme had taken a big leap forward. They mentioned a name. It was something to do with neurology and neural network computers. They said that to exercise full control over the animals you needed to know about Professor Kurzweil. Maybe it's nothing, but I just thought I'd tell you.

People are learning to grasp the diversity of nature, to understand its unifying principles and to sweep away the hierarchies and see the real connections.

For us to perceive intelligence, it has to fit within our behavioural framework.

Li wondered whether she should give the White House a call. Not that there was anything to report, but the President liked talking to her - he admired her intellect. That was the way things stood between them, and Li knew it, but she kept it to herself. It was better that way. She was one of only a handful of female American generals

Nothing, you coward. You think you can lecture me on responsibility? Leon, my life might be pathetic, but you? You're dead already.' Anawak replayed the words in his mind. 'Yes,' he said slowly. 'You're right.' He got up. 'But thanks for saving my life.

We're so obsessed with assuring our own perpetuity that our goals seldom coincide with what would be good for humankind

Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no truck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes. A particular stretch of water might have an average wave height of ten metres, but if you were hit by a one-off thirty-metre monster that statistically didn't exist, the average would be of precious little comfort: you would die.

They're telling us is that this is their planet - which they've been ruling for a hundred and eighty million years, maybe more. They're telling us they've got genetic memory, the magnetic field is their compass, and they're everywhere where there's water. They want us to know that we're in the here and now, whereas they're everywhere and for ever. Those are the facts. It's all in the message, and it says a lot.

I'm a reasonable kind of guy. If I hear something that seems to make sense, I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. If the alternative explanation has to be pounded into shape before it fits the mould of our experience, it seems to me that it's unlikely to be true.