Quotes about swimming
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“I kind of killed it in college. You know that saying "big fish in a small pond"? At Dartmouth college, I was freakin' Jaws in a community swimming pool.”

Mindy Kaling book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Communication, Fish

“He looked at the silver pocketknife in his hand. An idea came to him – possibly the stupidest, craziest idea he’d had since he thought, Hey, I’ll get Percy to swim in the River Styx! He’ll love me for that!”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Love, Idea

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

Jonathan Winters (1925–2013) American comedian, actor, and artist

“Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

“Leo waited while the fish centaur put away his supplies. Aphros's lobster-claw horns kept swimming around in his thick hair, and Leo had to resist the urge to try and rescue them.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Fish, Waiting

“You fish, swim, eat, laze around, and everyone's so friendly. It's such simple stuff, but… If i could stop the world and restart life, put the clock back, i think I'd restart it like this. For everyone.”

Alex Garland book The Beach

Source: The Beach

Life, World, Thinking, Fish

“Those big blue eyes were swimming, and he was afraid that if the first tear fell, he would break and carry her off anywhere she wanted to go.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Daring to Dream

Tear

“Even the rats are drowning,' Alex said.
Nah,' Kevin said. 'They've been taking swimming lessons at the Y.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer The Dead and the Gone

Source: The Dead and the Gone

“Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.”

Jeffrey McDaniel (1967) American writer

Dead

“I'm not going anywhere without you. We're swimming to China together. And if the worst happens, I'm dying with you before I'm living without you.”

Ann Brashares book My Name is Memory

Source: My Name Is Memory

“In matters of style, swim with the current: in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

As quoted in Careertracking: 26 success Shortcuts to the Top (1988) by James Calano and Jeff Salzman; though used in an address by Bill Clinton (31 March 1997), and sometimes cited to Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) no earlier occurence of this has yet been located.
Disputed

Motivational, Leadership, Back To Work

“You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and not get wet.”

Norton Juster book The Phantom Tollbooth

Source: The Phantom Tollbooth

Knowledge, Sea

“I'm right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim…”

Jack Kerouac book Desolation Angels

Source: Desolation Angels

“You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not
          harmless. You are not
                    breathing.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Source: Crush

“When swimming into a dark tunnel, there arrives a point of no return when you no longer have enough breath to double back. your choice is to swim forward into the unknown…. and pray for an exit”

Dan Brown book Inferno

Source: Inferno

“Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”

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

Past, Sea, Beauty

“Whatever happened to him?" Silk asked.
"He went swimming in the Nedrane."
"I didn't know that Thulls swam all that well."
"They don't–particularly not with large rocks tied to their feet.”

David Eddings book Queen of Sorcery

Source: Queen of Sorcery

“If you know someone who tries to drown their sorrows, you might tell them sorrows know how to swim.”

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (1940) American writer

Source: P.S. I Love You

“If you believe in your heart that you are right, then you must fight with all your might to do it your way. Only dead fish swim with the stream all the time.”

Linda Ellerbee (1944) journalist

Way, Fish, Time, Heart

“You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

Life, Parent

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

Malcolm Gladwell book Blink

Source: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Understanding, Knowledge, Decision

“Just for you non-sea-god types out there, don't go swimming in New York Harbor. It may not be as filthy as it was in my mom's day, but that water will still probably make you grow a third eye or have mutant children when you grow up.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

God, Children, Moms, Water

“I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present.”

Meg Rosoff What I Was

Source: What I Was

Sea

“Before you swim, you gotta be okay to sink.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Light Grenades (2006)

“He sees things from every point of view. He's an extraordinarily hard worker. I think he's worked for a long time, in every field. He's talented, passionate and has had an incredibly hard and full life that I'm sure you know about. I can not imagine myself having some of his experiences. You either swim or drown, but some like him go on and make every moment important. I think that's what he does.”

Nastassja Kinski (1961) German actress

On Roman Polanski, as quoted in Nastassja Kinski: June 2004 Interview with Tony Bray http://www.nastassja-kinski.jp/article/tvnow_jun04/index.html

Life, Imagination, Thinking, Passion

“There was no real need…of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till’s guts.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“Good marriages seem to function something like a buddy system-- the people in them swim in their own waters but keep a protective eye on each other, and should the whistle blow, turn up quickly to hold each other's hand. It's more important today than ever before to know what your priorities are because life links us with more people than our hearts can hold, so men who know what they will go to the wall for, as well as for whom, are the ones whom it is nicest to be married to, presuming you're the one they have at the top of their list.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Life, Men, Marriage, People

“At present [around 1960-1970] I make objects (whether a type-writer, wheelbarrow, bed or fishingboat..) very 'hourloupés' [like his painting: Courre Merlan (Whiting Chase), 1964. What I mean is that I am swimming upstream against the 'l'Hourloupe' current. I am approaching it from the opposite direction: instead of starting out with indeterminate lines that eventually give me a wheelbarrow, I start out with the idea of making a wheelbarrow and then add my indeterminate lines. In effect what I am doing is making the current run simultaneously in both directions at the same time.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Source: posthumous, Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, 2006, p. 81; Comment of Dubuffet on the occasion of his 1984 exhibition at the Venice Biennale

Idea, Time, Painting

“A fish swims through the sea
While the sea is in a certain sense,
Contained within the fish!
Oh, what am I to think
Of what the writing of a thousand lifetimes
Could not explain
If all the forest trees were pens
And all the oceans - ink?”

Aaron Weiss

The Dryness and the Rain.
Brother, Sister (2006)

Thinking, Sense, Fish, Tree

“The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1984) The threats to computing science http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html (EWD898). 1980s

Question, Thinking

“Where do purple bubbles swim,
But upon the goblet's brim?
Drink not deep, howe'er it glow
Sparkles never lie below.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Golden Violet - Lady Isabelle’s First Song
The Golden Violet (1827)

Lie, Drink

“[I]f neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits and never touch dry land.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

The Mysteries of Berkeley (March 2002)

Housing

“The ancestral canids that would eventually produce coyotes sprang from North American stock, a line of animals that evolved in the American Southwest. That ancient coyote line spawned animals that migrated to Eurasia and eventually to Africa to become Old World jackals. In North America, archeological sites from the late Pleistocene have yielded coyote remains from as far east as Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and genetic evidence indicates that coyotes thronged eastward out of their core range in the American West in at least two swarms, roughly between three hundred and nine hundred years ago. The truth is, roaming coyotes have probably been swimming the Mississippi River to eastern America during most decades since there have been coyotes.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

Truth, World, Animals

“Sparkling and bright in liquid light
Does the wine our goblets gleam in;
With hue as red as the rosy bed
Which a bee would choose to dream in.
Then fill to-night, with hearts as light
To loves as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim on the beaker’s brim
And break on the lips while meeting.”

Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806–1884) United States poet and novelist

Sparkling and Bright (published 1840).

Love, Dreams, Light, Bee

“Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They’d chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom.
It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are swimming in it, and I get to float around on the surface, on my Zodiac, announcing that they're in trouble. What I really want to do is make a difference. But I'm not sure I have, yet.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 11

God, People, World, Feeling

“A drop of water when you are thirsty gives such relief. The same drop in a fountain inspires you with its beauty. The same water in a dirty drain is repelling. And the same drop in the river makes you want to swim there and take a bath. And when the same water goes in the sea it thrills you with its power.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

On the theme of water.
Music is a Prayer:An interview with Hariprasad Chaurasia by Ian Gottstein

Beauty, Water, Sea

“Dear Richard, I just received your letter; I will send the money order f 10 [10 guilders] immediately for the swimming of Saar [their daughter, 10 years old]. She seems to be going well ahead, I think, at least if she can jump off the springboard by herself. Her letter was nice and cheerful. Yes I would have liked her to come here [in Heeze] but I am just afraid that I may not be able to work regularly or that she will get rather bored.”

Suze Robertson (1855–1922) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Suze Robertson's brief:) Lieve Richard [ nl:Richard Bisschop ], Zo even ontving ik je brief; ik zal de postwissel zenden f 10 [10 gulden] meteen voor het zwemmen van Saar [hun dochter, 10 jaar oud]. Ze schijnt me nogal goed vooruit te gaan, tenminste als ze alleen van de plank af springt. Aardig was haar briefje en opgewekt. Ja wel graag had ik dat ze hier [Heeze] kwam maar ik ben alleen bang dat ik misschien niet geregeld zal kunnen werken òf dat zij zich nogal zal vervelen.
In a letter of Suze Robertson from Heeze, Summer 1904, to her husband Richard Bisschop in The Hague; as cited in Suze Robertson 1855-1922 – Schilderes van het harde en zware leven, exhibition catalog, ed. Peter Thoben; Museum Kemperland, Eindhoven, 2008, p. 10
1900 - 1922

Money, Thinking, Daughters

“(about her beginnings) "People assume I always wanted to be a violinist. It was actually just one of many other hobbies that I had. I had very enthusiastic parents. They gave me swimming lessons and horseback riding and gymnastics and ballet. My mom put me on the piano when I was about 3i. I asked for the violin when I was 4 because I wanted something that was smaller and more portable. I auditioned for the Juilliard School when I was about 6. During the week, I went to a regular school in Philadelphia so I could be with kids my own age." and "I started my career when I was 8 with two debuts in New York and Philadelphia, and then I started recording when I was 9. When you're so young, you don't realize the impact of a New York Philharmonic debut. You're told to do something and you go out and do it and you don't ask too many questions. I think the questions come later when you're in your teens. By the time I was 14, I was spending probably half the year in Europe. So I was out of school a lot. I did most of my homework by e-mail or fax. We made it work because my professors were incredible."”

Sarah Chang (1980) violinist

Newsweek September 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14870541/site/newsweek/?page=6

People, Age, School, Moms

“Mercifully, we stay our hand. Earth’s cities will not be bombed. The free citizens of Venus Republic have no wish to slaughter their cousins still on Terra. Our only purpose is to establish our own independence, to manage our own affairs, to throw off the crushing yoke of absentee ownership and taxation without representation which has bleed us poor.
In doing so, in so taking our stand as free men, we call on all oppressed and impoverished nations everywhere to follow our lead, accept our help. Look up into the sky! Swimming there above you is the very station from which I now address you. The fat and stupid rulers of the Federation have made of Circum-Terra an overseer’s whip. The threat of this military base in the sky has protected their empire from the just wrath of their victims for more then five score years.
We now crush it.
In a matter of minutes this scandal in the clean skies, this pistol pointed at the heads of men everywhere on your planet, will cease to exist. Step out of doors, watch the sky. Watch a new sun blaze briefly, and know that its light is the light of Liberty inviting all of Earth to free itself.
Subject peoples of Earth, we free men of the free Republic of Venus salute you with that sign!”

Robert A. Heinlein book Between Planets

Source: Between Planets (1951), Chapter 6, “The Sign in the Sky” (p. 74) - Speech given before the destruction of the nuclear-armed satellite Circum-Terra.

Men, People, Stupidity, Light

“The salmon swimming upstream to spawn may be wily in a hundred ways, but she cannot even contemplate the prospect of abandoning her reproductive project and deciding instead to live out her days studying coastal geography or trying to learn Portuguese. The creation of a panoply of new standpoints is, to my mind, the most striking product of the euprimatic revolution.”

Daniel Dennett book Freedom Evolves

Freedom Evolves (2003)

Way, Study, Learning

“Villain, a horse--
Villain, I say, give me a horse to fly,
To swim the river, villain, and to fly.”

George Peele (1556–1596) English translator and poet

Battle of Alcazar (acted 1588-1589, printed 1594), act V, l:104, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Published anonymously, but attributed with much probability to Peele.

Horse, Flying

“The Yugoslavs accuse us of allegedly being chauvinists, of interfering in their internal affairs, and of demanding a rectification of the Albanian -Yugoslav borders. A number of our friends think and imply that we Albanian communists swim in such waters. We tell our friends who think thus that they are grossly mistaken. We are not chauvinists, we have neither demanded nor demand rectification of boundaries. But what we demand and will continually demand from the Titoites, and we will expose them to the end for this, is that they give up perpetrating the crime of genocide against the Albanian minority in Kosova and Metohia, that they give up the white terror against the Albanians of Kosova, that they give up driving the Albanians from their native soil and deporting them 'en masse' to Turkey. We demand that the rights of the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia should be recognized according to the Constitution of the People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Is this chauvinist or Marxist?”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

Speeches, Moscow Address

People, Thinking, Water

“There was a time when I should have felt terribly ashamed of not being up-to-date. I lived in a chronic apprehension lest I might, so to speak, miss the last bus, and so find myself stranded and benighted, in a desert of demodedness, while others, more nimble than myself, had already climbed on board, taken their tickets and set out toward those bright but, alas, ever receding goals of Modernity and Sophistication. Now, however, I have grown shameless, I have lost my fears. I can watch unmoved the departure of the last social-cultural bus—the innumerable last buses, which are starting at every instant in all the world’s capitals. I make no effort to board them, and when the noise of each departure has died down, “Thank goodness!” is what I say to myself in the solitude. I find nowadays that I simply don’t want to be up-to-date. I have lost all desire to see and do the things, the seeing and doing of which entitle a man to regard himself as superiorly knowing, sophisticated, unprovincial; I have lost all desire to frequent the places and people that a man simply must frequent, if he is not to be regarded as a poor creature hopelessly out of the swim. “Be up-to-date!” is the categorical imperative of those who scramble for the last bus. But it is an imperative whose cogency I refuse to admit. When it is a question of doing something which I regard as a duty I am as ready as anyone else to put up with discomfort. But being up-to-date and in the swim has ceased, so far as I am concerned, to be a duty. Why should I have my feelings outraged, why should I submit to being bored and disgusted for the sake of somebody else’s categorical imperative? Why? There is no reason. So I simply avoid most of the manifestations of that so-called “life” which my contemporaries seem to be so unaccountably anxious to “see”; I keep out of range of the “art” they think is so vitally necessary to “keep up with”; I flee from those “good times” in the “having” of which they are prepared to spend so lavishly of their energy and cash.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“Silence is Golden,” p. 55
Do What You Will (1928)

Life, People, World, Fear

“It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really 'knows', 'thinks', etc., because we're hard put to define these things. We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

" The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/little.html", Psychology Today, December 1983, pp. 46–49. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, ISBN 0893915351 1980s

Understanding, Thinking, Fish

“The French call such an anima figure a femme fatale. The sirens of the Greeks and the Lorelei of the Germans embody these dangerous aspects of the anima-in a word, destructive illusions. The following Siberian tale gives a particularly apt portrayal of such a destructive anima:
: A solitary hunter once had the experience of seeing a beautiful woman appear on the opposite bank of a river. She waved to him and sang, "Come, come. I've missed you, missed you. Now I want to put my arms around you, put my arms around you. Come, come, my nest is nearby, my nest. Come, come, lonely hunter, right now in the stillness of twilight." As he threw off his clothes and began swimming across to her, she suddenly flew away in the form of an owl, laughing mockingly. Swimming back, he drowned in the ice-cold river.
Here the anima symbolizes an unreal dream of love and happiness, of motherly love and security (the nest), an illusion that holds a man back from life. The hunter freezes to death because of his pursuit of an erotic fantasy.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Anima as the Woman within the Man, p. 311

Love, Life, Death, Happiness

“You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: Between Man and Man (1965), p. 148

Way, Knowledge, Thinking

“There have always been two aspects to my work: formal innovation and strong content. That goes for Steve’s tape pieces as well. To make a work together, we had to be engaged by the subject matter, and we shared an interest in technology as it has advanced. Looking back at the Hindenburg and Bikini Atoll, and forward in “Dolly” to new technologies, was a way of rethinking and understanding the soup in which we swim. We call this a theater of ideas, but its success as a work depends on the strength of the video and the music.
“Hindenburg” itself begins with the crash of the zeppelin in 1937 and ends with a view of its burnt-up carcass on the landing field in Lakehurst, New Jersey, taken from an airplane. What interested us here in viewing the archival material and listening to recordings of the period was the overwhelming conviction that technology was the sure way to progress. Naturally, after the atom bomb, a darker view of progress began to appear.”

Beryl Korot (1945) American artist

Beryl Korot, in: " Steve Reich and Beryl Korot by Julia Wolfe http://bombmagazine.org/article/2521/steve-reich-and-beryl-korot," BOMB 81, Fall 2002

Music, Way, Idea, Understanding

“The brain is encased in the head, the part of the body which in most walking, flying or swimming animals is the leading end of the moving body (with few exceptions: starfish, cuttlefish, humans, penguins when they are not swimming). The obvious risks which this localization entails are apparently compensated by the advantage of direct short connections with the sense organs localized in or on top of the head (olfaction, taste, vision, audition, vestibular sense), which together with the brain could be seen as something like the cockpit of the animal, or the pilot if one prefers.”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

Valentino Braitenberg (2007) " Brain http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Brain". Scholarpedia, 2(11):2918.

Sense, Animals, Parting, Flying

“Well first of all, I'd just like to say that 2005 was a great year, if you like swimming through crap.”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

Last Laugh ‘05 (2005)

“It was all practical stuff. Why? Because that's the way you train soldiers: practical stuff. Soldiers don't freaking need to do a flag, you don't need to do handstands. You need to run and sprint and vault over obstacles. They need to balance on stuff, and they need to climb to crawl to lift and carry, throw and catch. They need to do all these things. They need to fight, to swim.”

Erwan Le Corre (1971)

Julie Angel (2016). Breaking the Jump: The Secret Story of Parkour's High-Flying Rebellion, Arum Press.

Way, Fight, Training

“Well I think we do have to define torture. One man’s torture is another man’s CIA’s sponsored swim lesson.”

Rachel Marsden (1974) journalist

On waterboarding
CNN The Situation Room, October 31, 2007

Thinking

“Something about the way your hair falls in your face
I love the shape you take when crawling towards the pillowcase
You tell me where to go and
Though I might leave to find it,
I'll never let your head hit the bed
Without my hand behind it.And if you want love,
We'll make it.
Swim in a deep sea
Of blankets.
Take all your big plans
And break them,
This is bound to be a while.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Your Body Is a Wonderland
Song lyrics, Room for Squares (2001)

Love, Way, Sea

“When you grow to become visible in the world / and build a nest / above your head / there are times when you fly up there / and it is light and swims in the air”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

From Taivas päivystää (The Sky's on Duty, 1996. 88 Poems, WSOY, 2000, ISBN 951-0-24783-9. Translated by Anselm Hollo).

World, Light, Time, Flying

“It is very easy to sail along with the majority -- easy to sail the way the boats are going -- easy to float with the stream; but when you come to swim against the tide, with the men on the shore throwing rocks at you, you will get a good deal of exercise in this world.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Men, World, Way, Exercises

“You must not dither - swim like you're running through a minefield.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

Outside Magazine, 13 April 2009 http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/dropping-in/The-Ice-Bear-Cometh.html?page=all Speaking & Features

“(Woman sitting by swimming pool) To me the most important quality in a kitchen is that it be in someone else's house, or in a restaurant.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 124

Housing

“[I] launched a new offensive against the fortress of painting. First, white thinned out in linseed oil as a general base. Second, color the entire surface lightly by applying very large areas of different colors that swim into one other and that must remain free of any effect of chiaroscuro. Third, a drawing, independent of and substituting for the unformulated tonal values. Then, at the end, some bass notes to ward off flabbiness, not too dark, but colored bass notes. This is the style that connects drawing and the realm of color, a saving transfer of my fundamental graphic talent into the domain of painting”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1911), Diary # 875; as cited by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee Part Four', : Klee as an Expressionist and Constructivist Painter http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev27.htmlparagraph 1911 - 1914

Color, Drawing, Painting

“There's enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well!”

Roald Dahl book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Source: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Ch. 15, "The Chocolate Room"

Country

“I tolerate cold water. Anyone who says they love swimming in freezing water is either lying or has never done it.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

Website

Love, Lying, Water

“We just dreamed it up, water would go into Ricou's eye-holes, so the only way he could see me was to turn upside down. During the whole sequence, he was supposed to be swimming underneath me and I wasn't supposed to know he was there. Every now and then I'd feel this scaly hand come up and skim my leg or my bottom and I'd say, 'Oh, Ricou must be there.”

Ginger Stanley (1931) American model, actress and stunt woman

Dreams, Way, Feeling, Water

“It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 6, "Christian Marriage"
Mere Christianity (1952)

Life, Death, Women, Men

“You can't make a sculpture, in my opinion, without involving your body. You move and you feel and you breathe and you touch. The spectator is the same. His body is involved too. If it's a sculpture he has to first of all sense gravity. He's got two feet. Then he must walk and move and use his eyes and this is a great involvement. Then if a form goes in like that – what are those holes for? One is physically involved and this is sculpture. It's not architecture. It's rhythm and dance and everything. It's do with swimming and movement and air and sea and all our well-being. Sculpture is involved in the body living in the spirit or the spirit living in the body, whichever way you like to put it.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Art Talk, conversations with 15 woman artists', (1975), p. 21

Way, Feeling, Sense, Dance

“No matter how far the understanding of the soul is able to stretch itself, that is nothing in comparison to what it experiences when it is lifted beyond itself and placed in the bosom of God. Then the soul understands, finds its delight, and rests in the divine goodness; it cannot bring back any report of this, because it is completely beyond what the intelligence can conceive, and beyond words; but in this state the soul swims.”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, p. 208

God, Soul, Intelligence, Understanding

“What is significant in one's own existence one is hardly aware, and it certainly should not bother the other fellow. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?”

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

"Self-Portrait" (1936), p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=Q1UxYzuI2oQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false 1950s, Out of My Later Years (1950)

Life, Fish, Water

“Poverty is uncomfortable, as I can testify; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for himself.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

"Elements of Success", as published in President Garfield and education. Hiram college memorial (1882), compiled by B. A. Hinsdale, p. 331

Time

“As I swim through the summer tide of vulgarity, I find that's what I'm looking for: Movies that at least feel affection for their characters. Raunchy is OK. Cruel is not.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/american-pie-1999 of American Pie (9 July 1999) Reviews, Three star reviews

Feeling, Summer

“There's a double beauty whenever a swan
Swims on a lake with her double thereon.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Her Honeymoon; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
20th century

Beauty

“Look, if George W. Bush and his Republican cronies walked on water, I'd be the guy out there yelling that they couldn't swim. But don't take it from me: we've now heard it from the military commanders and our intelligence community: George Bush's actions in Iraq have not made us safer. They've done the opposite.”

James Carville (1944) political writer, consultant and United States Marine

October 2006 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/oct/6/20061006-120023-9171r/

Guy, Intelligence, Communication, Water

“Now that man can fly through the air like a bird … and swim in the sea like a fish, wouldn't it be wonderful if he could just walk the earth like a man?”

Jack Paar (1918–2004) American author, radio and television comedian and talk show host

My Saber is Bent http://books.google.com/books?id=MO-mqER9TrsC&q=%22Now+that+man+can+fly+through+the+air+like+a+bird%22+%22and+swim+in+the+sea+like+a+fish+wouldn't+it+be+wonderful+if+he+could+just+walk+the+earth+like+a+man%22&pg=PA79#v=onepage (1961)

Bird, Fish, Flying, Sea

“I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.”

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

Books
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Books, Thinking, Reading

“You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy text adventure game (1985), published by Infocom.

School

“I liked beaches, swimming pools, and clinics
for there they were the bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.
I pitied them and myself, but this will not protect me.
The word and the thought are over.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"They Will Place There Telescreens" (1964), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Bobo's Metamorphosis (1965)

“To lave in the wave,
Majestic and chilly,
Tomorrow I crave;
But today it is silly.
It is pleasant to look at the ocean;
Tomorrow, perhaps, I shall swim in it.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

Many Long Years Ago (1945), Pretty Halcyon Days

“Well, I didn't ever think about Australia much. To me Australia had never been very interesting, it was just something that happened in the background. It was Neighbours and Crocodile Dundee movies and things that never really registered with me and I didn't pay any attention to it at all. I went out there in 1992, as I was invited to the Melbourne Writers Festival, and I got there and realised almost immediately that this was a really really interesting country and I knew absolutely nothing about it. As I say in the book, the thing that really struck me was that they had this prime minister who disappeared in 1967, Harold Holt and I had never heard about this. I should perhaps tell you because a lot of other people haven't either. In 1967 Harold Holt was prime minister and he was walking along a beach in Victoria just before Christmas and decided impulsively to go for a swim and dove into the water and swam about 100 feet out and vanished underneath the waves, presumably pulled under by the ferocious undertow or rips as they are called, that are a feature of so much of the Australian coastline. In any case, his body was never found. Two things about that amazed me. The first is that a country could just lose a prime minister — that struck me as a really quite special thing to do — and the second was that I had never heard of this. I could not recall ever having heard of this. I was sixteen years old in 1967. I should have known about it and I just realised that there were all these things about Australia that I had never heard about that were actually very very interesting. The more I looked into it, the more I realised that it is a fascinating place. The thing that really endeared Australia to me about Harold Holt's disappearance was not his tragic drowning, but when I learned that about a year after he disappeared the City of Melbourne, his home town, decided to commemorate him in some appropriate way and named a municipal swimming pool after him. I just thought: this is a great country.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

The pool was under construction before he disappeared and is located in the electorate he represented.
Interview with Stanford's Newsletter (June 2001)

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