“More life on the bottom of the ocean than anywhere else. In the vents....” — Colum McCann Quote

“More life on the bottom of the ocean than anywhere else. In the vents. The layers. The currents. Things down there betray all the categories.”

“I suppose we go out to sea because we want, eventually, to come home. I know this now, but it was new to me then. The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while. Then, when it is gone, you can know what it is. You can yearn to return to it. It is a form of wounding. You welcome the scar so it will remind you of where you once were.”

“Stupid to think that our wine will never turn.”

“I had begun to think that there might be something monumental here. A vague element of the mythical. The velocity of who we are. Every scrap of existence colliding inside the tubes: the weak force, the strong force, the theory of everything. And, of course, every inanity was whirling inside there too. All of it tumbling in unison along the sea floor.”

“Nothing, not even words, can stop the flow of time.”

“The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.”

“You're going to see a lot of it. People getting ahead unfairly because of the category into which they were born: male or white or straight or rich. I'm in a few of those categories myself, which is why I make it a point to reach out and help those who aren't, those who might not necessarily be seen if I didn't make the effort. We need to shake this field up, you know? We need more people with different points of view and experiences and thought processes so we can keep innovating and moving ahead.”

“Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It's the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. This is high-impact entrepreneurship.”

“Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.”

“Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?”

“Dirac found that the ratio of the electric force to the gravitational force of an electron-proton pair is roughly equal to the ratio of the age of the universe to the time it takes light to traverse an atom.”