Quotes / Graceful in Their Element

For the first time in several human lifetimes, they have emerged, en mass, from the New England waves, slick and dripping. They have come to land, where they seem more clumsy. You would almost laugh to see them hop-step, until you remember at what terrifying speeds they glide down under the water. Up here, they move with deliberate slowness, as though the passage of time means little to them.

—The Buzzing, The Secret World

Can swim up to 100mph in the water but unfortunately made their home on land where they flop at approximately 3mph if the wind is favorable.

—Flavor Text for the Eelies, Slurpy Derpy

Shepard: The way you describe it, the Hanar sound like weaklings.

Thane: Out here, they are. But if you could see them in the Encompassing - the oceans of Kahje - you would see them differently. [slipping into memory] A stream of silver in the dark. Looping, diving. So fast the eye can't follow. Laughter like the squeals of a child vibrates the water. They fly over the black of the seabed, like birds plumed with the light of heaven...

—Mass Effect 2

Often, to amuse themselves, the men of a crew
Catch albatrosses, those vast sea birds
That indolently follow a ship
As it glides over the deep, briny sea.
Scarcely have they placed them on the deck
Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.
That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!
One man worries his beak with a stubby clay pipe;
Another limps, mimics the cripple who once flew!
The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,
His giant's wings prevent him from walking.

—The Albatross by Charles Baudelaire (William Aggeler translation)

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