“With my equipment, I walked toward a thatched cottage from which I saw smoke emerging. I was scarcely within pistol-shot range when I was surrounded by a large number of savages. They were very surprised to meet me, because I think I was the first they had seen dressed in bottles. And, to confound even more all the interpretations they might have given to this attire, I walked almost without touching the ground. They could not know that any jostling of my body raised me off the ground because the dew was heated by the noonday sun and that more bottles of dew might have taken me upwards into the air.”
The Other World (1657)
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Cyrano de Bergerac 57
French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist 1619–1655Related quotes
Quoted in Geoff Pevere, "Getting noticed: the spooky side of celebrity," http://www.toronto.com/movies/article/525796 toronto.com (2007-08-10)

Interview by Kate Sullivan for Allure, April 2010

“If my critics saw me walking over the River Thames they would say it was because I couldn't swim.”
Attributed to her in http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/3637706/Quite-Interesting.html and other sources. Actually an adapted Lyndon Johnson quote "If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'"
Misattributed

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131

Chap. IX
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)

Source: In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965 (1972), p. 18