“I have learned one thing: not to look down
Too much upon the damned.”
Ovid in the Third Reich
Poetry
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Geoffrey Hill 27
English poet and professor 1932–2016Related quotes
“We spent too much damn time getting down. Now it’s time to get up.”
Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 9 “Paranoia: It Can Destroy Ya” (p. 258)

“I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.”
Quote in a letter to Ella Wolfe, "Wednesday 13," 1938, as cited in Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera (1983) ISBN 0-06-091127-1 , p. 197. In a footnote (p.467), Herrera writes that Kahlo had heard this joke from her friend, the poet José Frías.
1925 - 1945
Variant: I tried to drown my sorrows but the bastards learned how to swim.

A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911)

Sam Slick, in Sam Slick's wise saws and modern instances: or, What he said, did, or invented, Volumen 1 https://archive.org/details/samslickswisesaw00haliuoft (1853), p. 185, Hurst and Blackett.

Secretum Meum (1342), as translated in Petrarch's Secret : or, The Soul's Conflict with Passion : Three Dialogues Between Himself and St. Augustine (1911) edited by William Henry Draper