Quotes about swimming

A collection of quotes on the topic of swim, swimming, likeness, doing.

Quotes about swimming

“If teardrops could be bottled
There'd be swimming pools filled by models
Told a tight dress is what makes you a whore
If "I love you" was a promise
Would you break it, if you're honest
Tell the mirror what you know she's heard before
I don't wanna be you anymore”

Billie Eilish (2001) American singer-songwriter

"Idontwannabeyouanymore" · Official video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tn2S3kJlyU Dont Smile At Me (2017)

Whore, Love, Making love

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Motivational, Deep, Happy, Inspirational

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Courageous, Wise, Deep, Inspirational

“Brooklyn saw me, empty at the news
There's no water inside this swimming pool
Almost over, had enough from you
And I've been praying, I never did before
Understand I'm talking to the walls
I've been praying ever since New York”

Harry Styles (1994) English singer, songwriter, and actor

"Ever Since New York", written by Harry Styles, Mitch Rowland, Jeff Bhasker, Ryan Nasci, Alex Salibian, Tyler Johnson
Lyrics, Harry Styles (2017)

Understanding, Water

“You mortals are like fish
swimming in a globe of glass.
That globe is your world.
You do not see beyond it.”

Tamora Pierce book Lady Knight

Source: Lady Knight

World, Fish

“I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

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.

Learning

“I compare my situation to a person on board a ship. When there is a shipwreck the passenger then falls in the ocean and has no choice but to keep swimming. What happened in our society was that the laws overturned every right that women had. I had no choice. I could not get tired, I could not lose hope. I cannot afford to do that.”

Shirin Ebadi (1947) Iranian lawyer, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

From 2006 interview with Ebadi by Harry Kreisler (translator, Banafsheh Keynoush) about her newly released book, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope. From May 10 2006 interview with Ebadi at Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people6/Ebadi/ebadi-con3.html (retrieved Oct. 15, 2008)

Women, Law, Hope, Personality

“There are two kinds of bathing suits, those that are adapted for use in the water, and those that are unfit for use except on dry land. If you are going to swim, wear a water bathing suit. But if you are merely going to play on the beach and pose for your camera friends, you may safely wear the dry land variety.”

Annette Kellerman (1886–1975) Australian swimmer, vaudeville star, film actress and writer

How to Swim (1918), pp. 47–48

Water

“Every flower and insect, every bird, and all the creatures that live upon the land and swim within the rivers and seas, are part of the Tree of Life. You are connected to the whole of life. Whatever happens to the myriad forms of life in the world around you, has a direct affect on you”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: Universal consciousness

“Practice is necessary. You can't learn to swim just by reading a book about swimming. Otherwise, you will continue to look for teachers at each stop.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Reading, Learning, Teachers, Books

“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

Water

“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Wild Geese

Life, Way, Reading, Personality

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Way, Boy, Hell, Fish

“Don't wait for your ship to come in, swim out to it.”

Cathy Hopkins (1953) English writer

Waiting

“Fate is never fair. You are caught in a current much stronger than you are; struggle against it and you'll drown not just yourself but those who try to save you. Swim with it. and you'll survive”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Fate

“A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him up for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Lovers, Happiness

“In my dream, I was drowning my sorrows
But my sorrows they learned to swim”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

Dreams, Learning

“I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.”

Patrick Rothfuss (1973) American fantasy writer

Reading

“Where is God? Where can I find him?" we ask. We don't realize that's like a fish swimming frantically through the ocean in search OF the ocean”

Ted Dekker (1962) American writer

God, Search, Fish

“I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Variant: I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows. But now the damned things have learned to swim, and now decency and good behavior weary me.

Feeling, Learning

“I remained standing in the middle of the room, swaying on my feet as though I had received a blow. I thought of my life and saw what it had been. No one could swim against such a current of mud. I had been a man so horrible that he could have no friend. But wasn't that, I asked myself, because I had always been incapable of wearing a disguise? If all men went through life with unmasked faces, as I had done for half a century, one might be surprised to find how little difference there was between them. But, in fact, no one lives with his face uncovered, no one. Most men ape greatness or nobility. Though they do not know it, they conform to certain fixed types, literary or other. This the saints know, and they hate and despise themselves because they see themselves with unclouded eyes. I should not have been so universally condemned had I not been so defenseless, so open, and so naked.”

Francois Mauriac (1885–1970) French author

Source: Viper's Tangle

Life, Men, Hate, Universe

“I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

“Stop swimming around in your own mind. That is a dangerous neighborhood that you should not go into alone.”

Marc Levy (1961) French writer

“Our strength comes from that magic, from the earth and the sky, from the fire and the water. Fly high, swim deep, give back to the earth what she gives you…”

Juliet Marillier book Daughter of the Forest

Source: Daughter of the Forest

Water, Flying

“The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Section VIII: “Monopoly, or Opportunity?”, p. 117 http://books.google.com/books?id=rxC4IG60KTwC&pg=PA177&dq=%22man+who+is+swimming%22 1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

Water

“I was already almost 30, and by then everyone was talking about the Americans. Picasso was irrelevant. He was history. I found myself in this deep pool, and there were all these figures swimming around, like Rauschenberg and Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein|Lichtenstein]]. I wanted to go where they were. Seeing Pollock and Fontana in Kassel had given me a sense of what it meant to be a modern artist and take risks, but it was a distant admiration because they were a different generation. This was my generation”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

on the art academy in Düsseldorf
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Art, History, Sense, Distant

“If she's cool and unwilling to be wooed,
Just take it, don't weaken; in time she'll soften her mood.
Bending a bough the right way, gently, makes
It easy; use brute force, and it breaks.
With swimming rivers it's the same—
Go with, not against, the current.”
Si nec blanda satis, nec erit tibi comis amanti, Perfer et obdura: postmodo mitis erit. Flectitur obsequio curvatus ab arbore ramus: Frangis, si vires experiere tuas. Obsequio tranantur aquae: nec vincere possis Flumina, si contra, quam rapit unda, nates.

Ovid book Ars amatoria

Book II, lines 177–182 (tr. James Michie)
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)

Way, Mood, Time

“Most of the time you don't even know they're there. Now, that's the scary thing. It's really strange and invading, but I'm still working it all out. I try to not let it bother me. And if I want to swim naked in my pool, I'm still going to do it. I certainly don't want to feel that I have to change everything in my life that I do to cater to them. I just won't let it happen.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Speaking on his problems with the paparazzi, as quoted in the National Post (May 2001).

Life, Feeling, Change, Time

“I saw, all of a sudden, an odd-looking bird making its way through the water to the opposite bank, followed by a great commotion. I found it was a domestic fowl which had managed to escape impending doom in the galley by jumping overboard and was now trying frantically to swim across. It had almost gained the bank when the clutches of its relentless pursuers closed on it, and it was brought back in triumph, gripped by the neck. I told the cook I would not have any meat for dinner. I really must give up animal food. We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing we do. There are many crimes which are the creation of man himself, the wrongfulness of which is put down to their divergence from habit, custom, or tradition. But cruelty is not of these. It is a fundamental sin, and admits of no argument or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, its protest against cruelty is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us ⎯ in fact, any one who does not join in is dubbed a crank. … if, after our pity is aroused, we persist in throttling our feelings simply in order to join others in their preying upon life, we insult all that is good in us. I have decided to try a vegetarian diet.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Glimpses of Bengal http://www.spiritualbee.com/tagore-book-of-letters/ (1921)

Life, Food, Way, Feeling

“The essence of striving to the far-off worlds is contained in the assimilation of a consciousness of our life in them. The possibility of life on them becomes for our consciousness, as it were, a channel of approach. Indeed, this consciousness must be dug through as a channel. People are able to swim, yet a considerable portion of them do not swim. Such an obvious fact as the far-off worlds completely fails to attract humanity. It is time to cast this seed into the human brain.”

Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, enlightener, philosopher

§ 44
New Era Community (1926)

Life, People, World, Time

“Swimming upon water teaches men how birds do upon the air.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XVII Flight

Men, Bird, Water

“You must give heed unto virtue, O men, which swims forth even with a man who has suffered shipwreck, and, on his coming naked to land, will render him more honoured than the happy Phaeacians.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 397

Men, Suffering, Happiness

“To swim in the open sky. To achieve the tenderness of clouds. To suspend these masses in the distance, very far away in the grey mist, make the blue explode. I feel all this coming, dawning in my intentions. What joy and what torment! If the bottom were still, perhaps I would never reach these depths. Did they do better in the past? Did the Dutch achieve the poetry of clouds I seek? That tenderness of the sky which even extends to admiration, to worship: it is no exaggeration.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Diary-note of Boudin, 3 December, 1856; as cited in the description of his painting 'Sky, Setting Sun, Bushes in Foreground' http://www.muma-lehavre.fr/en/collections/artworks-in-context/eugene-boudin/boudin-skies, by the Muma-museum, Le Havre A quote from Boudin's personal diary sheds remarkable light on a small group of his sky studies 1850s - 1870s

Feeling, Past, Joy

“We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 12

Feeling, Star, Fish, Weather

“The peerless cup afloat
Of the lake-lily is an urn some nymph
Swims bearing high above her head.”

Robert Browning Paracelsus

Part 4.
Paracelsus (1835)

“In late June, my mother moved out of the Summit Town Homes and bought a house in West Hills. It was the first time my mother bought a house, as she had only rented in the past. The house had recently undergone a renovation, so it was practically brand new. The house had a swimming pool and was located in a nice enough area, though I would have still preferred it if my mother had gotten married to a wealthy man and moved into a mansion. I still continued to pester her to do this, and she still stubbornly refused. I will always resent my mother for refusing to do this. If not for her sake, she should have done it for mine. Joining a family of great wealth would have truly saved my life. I would have a high enough status to attract beautiful girlfriends and live above all of my enemies. All of my horrific troubles would have been eased instantly. It is very selfish of my mother to not consider this.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Perspective on incelness

Life, Family, Beauty, Home

“My main difficulty was that I could not paint fast enough. My pictures are all moments of my life – I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously. When I begin to paint, it's like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim. Well, it was Kandinsky who taught me the technique of swimming. I mean that he taught me to work fast enough, and with enough self-assurance, to be able to achieve this kind of rapid and spontaneous recording of moments of life.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 120

Life, Water, Painting

“Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water.”

Steven Weinberg Scientist: Four golden lessons

Scientist: Four golden lessons (2003)

Learning, Water

“Our own opinions. The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about a matter is usually not our own, but only the customary one, appropriate to our caste, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim near the surface.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 571
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation

“Deep water is what I am wont to swim in.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. book Doctrine and Covenants

Doctrine and Covenants, 127:2 (1 September 1842)
1840s

Water

“That Descartes' Cartesian way of looking at animals, like they're machines… It is outdated, and quite frankly, 100% insane. Because, if we all understand that animals use their eyes to see, ears to hear, noses to smell, mouths to eat, legs to walk, feathers to fly, fins to swim, genitalia to procreate, bowels to defecate.. I'm always perplexed that most people don't believe that they can also use their brains to think, feel, be rational, be aware and be self-aware! Am I supposed to believe, that every body part of an animal functions just like it's supposed to, except the brain?”

Gary Yourofsky (1970) animal rights activist

Part of the speech to the students of the Georgia Institute of Technology, On animal intelligence (Summer 2010)

People, Way, Feeling, Understanding

“As I saw that they were very friendly to us, and perceived that they could be much more easily converted to our holy faith by gentle means than by force, I presented them with some red caps, and strings of beads to wear upon the neck, and many other trifles of small value, wherewith they were much delighted, and became wonderfully attached to us. Afterwards they came swimming to the boats, bringing parrots, balls of cotton thread, javelins, and many other things which they exchanged for articles we gave them, such as glass beads, and hawk's bells; which trade was carried on with the utmost good will. But they seemed on the whole to me, to be a very poor people. They all go completely naked, even the women, though I saw but one girl. All whom I saw were young, not above thirty years of age, well made, with fine shapes and faces; their hair short, and coarse like that of a horse's tail, combed toward the forehead, except a small portion which they suffer to hang down behind, and never cut. Some paint themselves with black, which makes them appear like those of the Canaries, neither black nor white; others with white, others with red, and others with such colors as they can find. Some paint the face, and some the whole body; others only the eyes, and others the nose. Weapons they have none, nor are acquainted with them, for I showed them swords which they grasped by the blades, and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron, their javelins being without it, and nothing more than sticks, though some have fish-bones or other things at the ends. They are all of a good size and stature, and handsomely formed. I saw some with scars of wounds upon their bodies, and demanded by signs the of them; they answered me in the same way, that there came people from the other islands in the neighborhood who endeavored to make prisoners of them, and they defended themselves. I thought then, and still believe, that these were from the continent. It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion. They very quickly learn such words as are spoken to them. If it please our Lord, I intend at my return to carry home six of them to your Highnesses, that they may learn our language. I saw no beasts in the island, nor any sort of animals except parrots.”

Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506) Explorer, navigator, and colonizer

12 October 1492; This entire passage is directly quoted from Columbus in the summary by Bartolomé de Las Casas
Journal of the First Voyage

Women, People, Age, Faith

“Wherever wood can swim, there I am sure to find this flag of England.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Statement at Rochefort (July 1815)

“They can't be worse than vampires. And you did all right with them."
"Did all right with them? By which I take it you mean we survived?"
"Well..."
"Faeries," Jace went on, as if Simon hadn't spoken, "are the offspring of demons and angels, with the beauty of angels and the viciousness of demons. A vampire might attack you, if you enter its domain, but a faerie could make you dance until you died with your legs ground into stumps, trick you into a midnight swim and drag you screaming underwater until your lungs burst, fill your eyes with faerie dust until you gouged them out at the roots-"
"Jace!”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Clary snapped.
Simon, Jace, and Clary, pg. 146-147
The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Beauty, Angels, Dance

“One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto [Jorge Luis] Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.”

John Barth (1930) American writer

Boston Sunday Globe, C7 (2 Nov 2008)

Way, Bird, Reading

“Admitting to where you are feels simultaneously like pain and like relief. The energy required to resist where you are is exhausting. Admitting to where you are feels like letting yourself float downstream after swimming upstream against river rapids for years.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Pain, Feeling

“Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

“… most men and women will yield to the strong currents sucking them into the seas of ruin. Only the strongest in mind and spirit will swim against that current.”

Ted Dekker (1962) American writer

Source: Red: The Heroic Rescue

Women, Men, Strong, Sea

“If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

Water, Reading

“Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

“We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”

Adam Gopnik book Paris to the Moon

Source: Paris to the Moon

“You don't accomplish much by swimming with the mainstream. Hell, a dead fish can do that.”

Kinky Friedman (1944) Singer, songwriter, novelist, humorist, politician

Hell, Fish, Dead

“I should learn to run, to wrestle, to swim, to ride horses, to row, to drive a car, to fire a rifle. I should fill my soul with flesh. I should fill my flesh with soul. In fact, I should reconcile at last within me the two internal antagonists.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek

Cars, Soul, Learning, Horse

“I'm swimming in your cadences that you permeate my very language.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

“You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.”

Nicholson Baker book The Anthologist

Source: The Anthologist

“Whiskers of the cat,
Webbed toes on my swimming dog;
God is in the details.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Source: The Book Of Counted Sorrows

God, Dogs, Cats

“The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”

John Shelby Spong (1931) American bishop

Source: Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell

“What a culture we live in, we are swimming in an ocean of information, and drowning in ignorance.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: A Step of Faith

“Happiness had never been like this before. Now it came like sun showers, the sun and the rain together. Happiness was happier than it had been - sharp, piercing, and snatched, like a breath while swimming in surf.”

Elizabeth Knox (1959) New Zealand writer

Source: Dreamhunter

Sun, Happiness

“When stuck in the river, it is best to dive and swim to the bank yourself before someone drops a large stone on your chest in an attempt to hoosh you there.”

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

“He tried to drown his troubles but they knew how to swim.”

Rita Mae Brown (1944) Novelist, poet, screenwriter, activist

“After all, you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

2001 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2001ar/2001letter.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“If your ship hasn't come in, swim out to it.”

Mary Engelbreit (1952) American illustrator

“There is dew
on these poems in the morning,
and at night a cool breeze may rise from them.

In the winter they are blankets, in the summer a place to swim.

I like talking to you like this. Have you moved
a step closer?

Soon we may be
kissing.”

Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet

Kiss, Winter, Summer, Night

“If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

“And unless I'm remembering it wrong, mermaids don't sing and sirens don't swim."
"Ariel sang in 'The Little Mermaid'," Corey said.
Sam came over to join us. "Do I even want to know why you remember her name?”

Kelley Armstrong (1968) Canadian writer

Source: The Calling

Singing

“I'd love to have the whole place swimming in roses”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Love

“She was a sea: and I had to swim in her.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Source: Books of Blood: Volume Two

Sea

“I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.”

Joanne Harris book Five Quarters of the Orange

Source: Five Quarters of the Orange

Moving On, Home

“Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.”

W.C. Fields (1880–1946) actor

Fish, Dead

“It is easy to be religious when religion is in fashion; but it is an evidence of strong faith and resolution to swim against a stream to heaven, and to appear for God when no one else appears for Him.”

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Theologician from Wales

Source: Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible

God, Faith, Religion, Fashion

“One's character is set at an early age. The choices you make now will affect you for the rest of your life. I hate to see you swim out so far you can't swim back.”

Wendelin Van Draanen Flipped

Source: Flipped

Life, Hate, Age

“You can swim, too." he says. "Where did you learn that in District Twelve?"
"We have a very big bathtub.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Learning

“Your nearness is the nearness of planets. I am the void between you. If I withdraw there will be no void for you to swim in.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer

“Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Source: The Secret Sharer and other stories

Thinking

“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

Fish, Dead, Forgetting

“Do you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.”

Michael Crichton book Sphere

Source: Sphere

People, Understanding, Water

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running -- that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach….”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

Way, Wine, Singing, Happiness

“But what I really want is to just swim around in a warm baby pool of these friends, jump in their dry leaf pile-to rub them all over myself, without words and clothes.”

Dave Eggers (1970) memoirist, novelist, short story writer, editor, publisher

Baby, Clothes

“Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Source: Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Reality

“I caught Bast’s arm when she was a few steps from the bank.
“Stay away from the water.”
She frowned. “Carter, I’m a cat. I’m not going for a swim. But if you want to summon a river goddess, you really need to do it at the riverbank.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Cats, Water

“She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.”

Barbara Kingsolver Animal Dreams

Source: Animal Dreams

Life

“Now I felt like I was drifting, sucked down by an undertow, and too far out to swim back to the shore.”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Source: Dreamland (2000)

“Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Mermaid Chair

Source: The Mermaid Chair

“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Truth, Thinking, Silence, Time

“When this is over… we will got to the rainforest, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Sea

“Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Sea

“She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims…”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

Secret, Flowers

“Do we have any chlorine? It seems to be kind of explosive when mixed with other stuff."
"Like what, your socks? No, we don't have chlorine. No swimming pool.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

“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.”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Source: Dreamland (2000)

Water

“… "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.”

Tracy Kidder (1945) writer

Source: Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

“Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Courage, Learning

“August 2, 1914: Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

War

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Undated letter to his daughter "Scottie" (Frances Scott Fitzgerald).
Quoted, Letters
Variant: All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Water