“All things want to float.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

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Rainer Maria Rilke 176

Austrian poet and writer 1875–1926

David Bottoms (1949) American writer

“I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.”

Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

“Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?”

Nick Flynn book Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

Source: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

“At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like "That's a busted tire floating by" and "That's an old shoe?"”

Peggy Noonan (1950) American author and journalist

"Death, Taxes and Mrs. Clinton" in The Wall Street Journal (30 November 2007) http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110010924

“Love is such a magic thing. It can make you feel like your floating in the clouds without a trouble in the world.”

Lois Gladys Leppard (1924–2008) American writer

Source: Mandie and the Courtroom Battle

“Feel we these things? — that moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit's.”

John Keats Endymion

Bk. I, l. 789
Endymion (1818)
Context: Ghosts of melodious prophesyings rave
Round every spot where trod Apollo's foot;
Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit,
Where long ago a giant battle was;
And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pass
In every place where infant Orpheus slept.
Feel we these things? — that moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit's. But there are
Richer entanglements, enthralments far
More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,
To the chief intensity: the crown of these
Is made of love and friendship, and sits high
Upon the forehead of humanity.

“The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

"Taboo and Metaphor"
The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)
Context: The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.

“Money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of "how much?" Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which they cover.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

The Metropolis and Modern Life (1903)

“My heart stopped. It just stopped beating. And for the first time in my life, I had that feeling. You know, like the world is moving all around you, all beneath you, all inside you, and you're floating. Floating in midair. And the only thing keeping you from drifting away is the other person's eyes. They're connected to yours by some invisible physical force, and they hold you fast while the rest of the world swirls and twirls and falls completely away.”

Wendelin Van Draanen Flipped

Flipped (2001)

“All things want to float.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke 176

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