You don't know how big a fish you are till you try a big pond.

Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.

...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.

You're like a fisherman who fishes for years and catches a small fish. Sometimes a medium fish. [You] get lucky and get a big fish. But you know that there's a real big fish under there that always gets away. You and your group are going to get a lot of serial killers and they're going to help you. But with the real good ones, the only way you're going to know what goes on under the water is to go under the water. The fisherman drowns going underwater. But I can take you there without drowning. If I trust you. And if I decide.

I got to be quite the fish, I must say.

My big fish must be somewhere.

(mimicking a big fish talking to a little fish)

Let your hook be always cast in the pond. when you least expect it, there will be fish.

The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called — appropriately enough — the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

They may the better fish in the water when it is troubled.

Even a little dog can piss on a big building.

He felt as if he’d dived into a deep, clear lake and discovered it was a shallow, knee-deep pond. What did you do? Well, you stood up. You rinsed your mud-caked knees and pulled your feet out of the muck. And you were more cautious after that. You knew, from then on, that the world was a smaller place than you’d expected. (Chapter 17, p275)

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful.