97 Quotes by Peter Benchley

There’s nothing in the sea this fish would fear. 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. It’s depressing if you spend too much time reliving the old joys. You think you’ll never have anything as good again.

Sharks don’t target human beings, and they certainly don’t hold grudges.

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. Trying to get retribution against a fish is crazy.

I’ve never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchins.

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

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

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

The young man was tall and slim. He wore sandals and a bathing suit and a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem stitched to the left breast, which caused Brody to take an instant, instinctive dislike to the man. In his adolescence Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealth and position. All the summer people wore them. Brody badgered his mother until she bought him one – “a two-dollar shirt with a six-dollar lizard on it,” she said.