Scientists call it the mammalian dive reflex or...the Master Switch of Life, and they've been researching it for... fifty years. ...[C]oined by Per Scholander ...it refers to variety of physiological reflexes in the brain, lungs, heart [etc.] that are triggered the second we put our face in the water. The deeper... the more pronounced... Ancient cultures... employed it... to harvest sponges, pearls, coral and food hudreds of feet below the surface of the ocean...

When I was older I was a sailor On an open sea But now I'm underwater And my skin is paler Than it should ever be

welcomed the opportunity to become the first astronaut trained underwater in a swimming pool to simulate the effects of neutral buoyancy, trying to maneuver in a weightless environment in space. Some of my colleagues thought I was being eccentric, but the sensations in the pool prepared me for what it might feel like drifting along at 17,500 miles an hour, tethered to a spacecraft.

Since early morning he had been swimming in the river, in company with his friends the ducks. And when the ducks stood on their heads suddenly, as ducks will, he would dive down and tickle their necks, just under where their chins would be if ducks had chins, till they were forced to come to the surface again in a hurry, spluttering and angry and shaking their feathers at him, for it is impossible to say quite all you feel when your head is under water.

I felt like I'd been swimming so hard, and the water growing warmer and warmer the closer I got to the top. I wasn't there yet, but now I could see the surface, rippling just beyond my fingers.

I’ve had the privilege of living underwater on 10 different occasions. It has enabled me to get to know individual moray eels, individual groupers, even individual lobsters. They all have faces, they have attitudes. They have sensory systems much like our own. And yet we somehow harden ourselves to think they don’t feel pain. We pride ourselves on being “humane” but it doesn’t translate to the way we treat animals in the sea.

I floated like driftwood in the ocean. I wasn’t worried about sharks, because my bathtub is much too shallow.

Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.

I am so plunged and submerged in the source of his infinite love, as if I were quite underwater in the sea and could not touch, see, feel anything on any side except water

Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.

Myself at the age of six, when I believed I was a little girl, raising with a very great care the skin of the sea in order to observe a dog sleeping in the shadow of the water.

Sensations are the great things, after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations; they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.

Some days I was fine and some days I was under water, barely breathing

Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction — up, down, sideways — by merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel.