Mississippi Drowning Quotes

I've lined my throat
with the river bottom's best
silt,

allowed my fingers to shrivel
and be taken for crawfish.

I've laced my eyelashes with algae.

I blink emerald.
I blink sea glass green.

I am whatever gleams
just under the surface.

Scoop at my sparkle. I'll give you nothing
but disturbed reflection.

Bring your ear to the water
and I'll sing you

down into my arms.

Let me show you how

to make your lungs
a home for minnows, how

to let them flicker

like silver

in and out of your mouth
like last words,

like air. ~ Saeed Jones

What a culture we live in, we are swimming in an ocean of information, and drowning in ignorance. ~ Richard Paul Evans

How beautiful it is to be human.
That we can fall asleep
drowning
in tears
and pain
but wake to a new sunrise
on a new day
with a dry face. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

I get so scared, I can't stop it. It's like black waves, and I'm a little cork. I bob to the surface and think I'll do okay, and then another wave comes and I'm drowning again." I ~ Jean Hegland

The neurotic is always half-drowning in anxiety, and always being half-rescued. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

That poem you like, how does it end?"
He knows how it ends. He's looked it up by now, that's why he asks.
But I answer him anyway.
"'We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, by sea-girls wreathed
with seaweed red and brown, till human voices wake us, and we drown.'"
Eliot shakes his head. "It does not need the last three words. The last
three words are wrong."
I laugh at his correcting a Nobel prize-winning poet, but I agree. I
know what drowning feels like. It doesn't need water. And human voices,
if they say the right things, can save you.
"Eliot, do you have a pen I can borrow?"
I can feel him smiling in the dark, and we watch the sea caress the
sand.
"That man in the poem, Mr. Prufrock, he was a coward, wasn't he?"
Eliot says.
My answer to his question is the same as his answer to mine. ~ Ray Cluley

The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, "career," marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn't even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was the master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground.

And how had he done it? He wasn't afraid. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he'd taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him– somersaulting along a river-bed, head over heels– he would never come up from the water alive.

A training program. This was Houdini's secret. ~ Donna Tartt

That was my first impression of you, Aubrey. A wick drowning in melted wax, your flame in danger. Just one more gust of wind and you'd be lost. You'd become that lost girl, sad through and through. ~ Mimi Strong

Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors. ~ Julian Assange

I remember that morning vividly
my eyes crusted from crying
Staring across from you
your cheeks smudged with campfire ash.
We smiled weakly at each other,
and I told myself we were good.
I promised I would stop drinking so much.
You believed me.
I looked over the boat at my reflection in the water.
I looked kind of happy
for someone who was drowning. ~ Mary Lambert

Words.

I'm surrounded by thousands of words. Maybe millions.

Cathedral. Mayonnaise. Pomegranate.
Mississippi. Neapolitan. Hippopotamus.
Silky. Terrifying. Iridescent.
Tickle. Sneeze. Wish. Worry.

Words have always swirled around me like snowflakes - each one delicate and different, each one melting untouched in my hands.

Deep within me, words pile up in huge drifts. Mountains of phrases and sentences and connected ideas. Clever expressions. Jokes. Love songs.

From the time I was really little - maybe just a few months old - words were like sweet, liquid gifts, and I drank them like lemonade. I could almost taste them. They made my jumbled thoughts and feelings have substance. My parents have always blanketed me with conversation. They chattered and babbled. They verbalized and vocalized. My father sang to me. My mother whispered her strength into my ear.

Every word my parents spoke to me or about me I absorbed and kept and remembered. All of them.

I have no idea how I untangled the complicated process of words and thought, but it happened quickly and naturally. By the time I was two, all my memories had words, and all my words had meanings.

But only in my head.

I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old. ~ Sharon M. Draper

I am the love.
I am drowning in your love.
I am drunk with your love.
I am a dumb for your love.
I am crazy about your love.
I dream at night about love.
I know that you're my love,
but I forgot how to love
because I become the love. ~ Debasish Mridha

Ty plopped down in the seat next to Kelly and peered over at his friends. "What the hell happened to you two this morning?"
Nick began to snicker and Kelly rolled his eyes as he took a sip of coffee. "I fell out of the bed."
"Fell?" Zane asked. "Or you were pushed?"
"Legit fell. Rolled right out of that thing and took the covers with me. I dreamt I was being attacked by a giant squid and woke up thinking I was drowning."
"I woke up cold and very confused," Nick added. ~ Abigail Roux

You can't murder a book. Even I know that. But you know what you can do with a book, what you can do is burn it, or throw it out a window, or draw, mm, big hairy moustaches on all the ancient illustrations, and blacken the teeth of the women and children, and-- Oh God, don't. It's like talking about drowning babies. You are a terrible person. ~ Lady Jaida

Though Anne was born in Alabama and schooled in Mississippi, she had traveled North, and, like many Southerners, gained a theoretical understanding of the concept of cold. But the mind is an overprotective parent. What it doesn't care for, it hides. Like many inhabiting the subtropics, Anne had repressed the reality of subzero mercury. ~ Kathy Reichs

Also, although the great majority of the letters I've received from Hmong readers have been positive, most of the negative ones have criticized me for telling a story that was not mine to tell. I am no lover of identity politics; I believe that anyone should be allowed to write about anyone. Still, I would have harbored the same proprietary resentment had I been they. It was exactly how I felt thirty years ago, when women's voices were harder to hear because men were drowning them out. Now that young Hmong writers are starting to publish - including Mai Neng Moua, who edited a landmark literary anthology called Bamboo Among the Oaks, and Kao Kalia Yang, who wrote a fierce, sad memoir called The Latehomecomer - I am happy to shut up and listen. I hope The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is settling into its proper place not as the book about the Hmong but as a book about communication and miscommunication across cultures. ~ Anne Fadiman

We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown. ~ Henry Miller

And that someone would pay. Revenge is a cold bedfellow, Diana had said, but Emma didn't believe that. Revenge would let her think about her parents without a cold knot forming in her stomach. She would be able to dream without seeing their drowned faces and hearing their voices cry out for her help. ~ Cassandra Clare

Many years ago he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he'd folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it the edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. ~ Jennifer Egan

The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning. ~ Paul Theroux

Signý knew she would die a thousand deaths upon seeing another woman with him, bearing his children, raising them with him. All the while, Signý, caged in his dungeons, hearing all the painful details of his life with someone else, drowning in her own despair, her love for him turning to hatred. A more tragic life, she could not imagine. ~ Farrah Naseem

If you can't imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces of floating despair. And drowning in a train. ~ Markus Zusak

How can a person have so much noise inside their head and at the same time feel like they're drowning in silence? ~ Victoria Green

But the book! The siren song of the book! ~ Ellen Douglas

I had a list of ways I would prefer to die. Drowning was toward the bottom of the list. My top choice was "never." At ~ Lemony Snicket

She comes to life with a soft exhausted sound, like someone saved from drowning. ~ James Salter

I'm useless in water. I wake up at night drowning in my own saliva. ~ Karl Pilkington

As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it. ~ Willie Morris

It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. ~ Martin Van Buren

I grew up in Florida in different cities. I was born in Mississippi. My parents moved a lot, so I moved to Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, all through the South. But my family's roots were from central Florida, like Daytona Beach area, so we ended up moving there. ~ Diplo

The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season. ~ Iain M. Banks

You know what it's like having five kids? Imagine you're drowning. And someone hands you a baby. ~ Jim Gaffigan

He started moving slowly towards me, with each and every step my heart was pounding and my mind was asking, 'What will happen next?' When he was only inches away from me, he stood still and gazed straight into my eyes. I could feel his warm breaths as he exhaled. Slowly, he reached out and put his hands on my shoulders and then let his hands slide seductively down over my body. His light touch passing across my skin was killing me. My heart was beating hard as a drum. He brought his face nearer to mine, and then he nibbled my ear lobe as I closed my eyes and quietly moaned. I was drowning in a sea of arousal. ~ Delicious David

Had Nietzsche lived to be burned at the stake by outraged Mississippi Methodists, it would have been a glorious day for his doctrines. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The Mississippi coast is not like south Florida, but it always seems warm enough for sandals and short-sleeved shirts, except for now and then. ~ Ellen Gilchrist

The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying 'welcome, most welcome' and drowning each other in tea until the end of time. ~ Tony Horwitz

Even in a sea of names, a drowning mermaid has a way of standing out. ~ Erika Swyler

And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up. ~ Jack Kerouac

Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana. ~ Robert Plant

There was an anchor, tied around both of his ankles, and it was taking him deep, into black fathomless depths, drowning him slowly but surely.
I didn't tell him that he was dragging me down with him. ~ R.K. Lilley

It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to speak from under the water. And how do you know what it's like to try to speak from under water when you're drowned? ~ Jean Rhys

When you're standing in deep water
And you're bailing yourself out with a straw
And when you're drowning in deep water
And you wake up making love to a wall
Well it's these little time that help to remind
It's nothing without love, love, love ~ Jewel

Alison's words were falling stones. Carole reached to grab them, to hold them, to put them in order. It was so hard, the stones so heavy. The words kept coming. Her daughter's face was before her, her lovely, dear face, and she could no nothing to help her. Not now, not while the voices were drowning her out, burying sense and decency and love. ~ Sonja Yoerg

Now they were upon him, their tiny legs crawling over his bare skin; he tried to get up, but he was drowning in spiders. Fat Charlie wanted to scream, but his mouth was filled with spiders. They covered his eyes, and his world went dark ... . Fat Charlie opened his eyes and saw nothing but blackness, and he screamed and he screamed and he screamed. ~ Neil Gaiman

A carriage will start from Washington in the morning, the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup in New York the same day ... Engines will drive boats 10 or 12 miles an hour, and there will be hundreds of steamers running on the Mississippi, as predicted years ago. ~ Oliver Evans

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. ~ James Baldwin

Here I am referring to the types of books that thirtyish women devour at private swim clubs, often to the dismay of their drowning children. ~ Joe Queenan

Nixon is the kind of guy who, if you were drowning twenty feet from shore, would throw you a fifteen-foot rope. ~ Eugene McCarthy

There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan