- Captain Nolan: I brought this gun to shoot him. Yes, yes I did. But I knew when it came time to do it, I couldn't do it. So I got to thinking and I thought, Well if what-if what you say is right. That whales can communicate. Then I thought I'd look at him. Right in the eye. And I'd tell him the killing of his wife and his child was a terrible accident. That I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. I'd tell him that I was sorry. I hope he'd forgive me.
- Rachel: [while listening to Orca's sounds through a hydrophone] What is he saying?
- Captain Nolan: You're me, he says... I'm you, he says... you're my... drunk driver... he says...
- Umilak: It is known that they have great memory and even after many years they will always remember the human being who has tried to harm them.
- Captain Nolan: Can you commit a sin against an animal?
- Priest: Why, you can commit a sin against a blade of grass. Sins are really against oneself.
- [Captain Nolan has just seen the orca kill a member of his crew after the orca knocked the house into the ocean. He then looks out to the water & sees the killer whale leaping out of the water, breaching]
- Captain Nolan: You revengeful sonofabitch! You win!
- [the orca keeps breaching, as if taunting Captain Nolan]
- Captain Nolan: You want revenge? Well, you'll have it! I'll come out and fight you! You revengeful sonofabitch!
- [Nolan's boat, the 'Bumpo', steams out of the little harbor the next morning with the fishermen watching as he goes to fight the orca]
- Rachel: You're planning to capture and sell a fellow creature! He's like you - he has warm blood, he breathes air, he's a mammal, but with intelligence!
- Rachel: Did I tell you that that animal has a right to be left alone?
- Captain Nolan: No, but I have a notion you're about to.
- Rachel: Their sonar is like X-ray vision. If we could see in each other if someone was happy or sad, indifferent or aroused, healthy or suffering from a tumor, it would be meaningless to say, How are you? What we call language they might call unnecessary, or retarded.
- Rachel: With the growing cold came a growing quiet. From the crew, from Nolan, everything.It was numbing like the chill, and palpable.
- Captain Nolan: Orcas. I can't stop thinking about them. Nature's greatest pricks, the end point of millions of years of evolutionary arseholery.
- Rachel: I'd insisted on leaving South Harbor with them. I told myself that somehow I was responsible for Nolan's state of mind. That I had filled his head with romantic notions about a whale capable not only of profound grief, which I believed, but also of calculated and vindictive actions, which I found hard to be believe, despite all that had happened.
- Captain Nolan: If you're so sure I can't catch a killer whale, why are you so upset?
- Rachel: Listen, you won't catch one, but you might butcher a couple dozen in the attempt!
- Captain Nolan: Oh, that's not my style at all.
- Rachel: [after Orca's mate washes ashore, dead with Nolan's harpoon in her, mockingly to Nolan] You won't kill one. Its not your *style*.
- Captain Nolan: I won't fight him at all.
- Rachel: But you'll murder him - you'll sit here safe on the jetty, and shoot him through the eye? You're not a man, you're an animal! Its creatures like you science should be observing!