Swimming Pool Quotes

Last night you dreamt of a room -
a room full of fish,
and a swimming pool
where you waded knee-deep
and hauled them all in

except for one, already dead,
a large bluefish wedged
into a corner, its back stiff.

You remember it later: its eye
like a button,
a button on another person's coat. ~ Talvikki Ansel

It's great to have two cars and a swimming pool. But there are disappointments. After you've made some money and acquired some things, and after the initial excitement has passed, life goes on, just as bewildering as it always was, and the great problems of life and death once again come to the fore. ~ Robert Heilbroner

Most people exist in very clouded states of mind. It's sort of like when you're underwater in a big swimming pool and you open your eyes, and you can't see very far and everything is distorted. ~ Frederick Lenz

I deliberately ignored the sight of lean brown body cutting through the aqua water, glistening powerful arms dipping slow and steady in perfect rhythm with the strong kick of his long tanned legs.
I was going to have to work on my ignoring technique.
- Tim trying to ignore Jack in the swimming pool. ~ Josh Lanyon

The Swimming Pool

All around the apt. swimming pool
the boys stare at the girls
and the girls look everywhere but the opposite
or down or up. It is
as it was a thousand years ago: the fat
boy has it hardest, he
takes the sneers,
prefers the winter so he can wear
his heavy pants and sweater.
Today, he's here with the others.
Better they are cruel to him in his presence
than out. Of the five here now (three boys,
two girls) one is fat, three cruel,
and one, a girl, wavers to the side,
all the world tearing at her.
As yet she has no breasts
(her friend does) and were it not
for the forlorn fat boy whom she joins
in taunting, she could not bear her terror,
which is the terror
of being him. Does it make her happy
that she has no need, right now, of ingratiation,
of acting fool to salve
her loneliness? She doesn't seem
so happy. She is like
the lower middle class, that fatal group
handed crumbs so they can drop a few
down lower, to the poor, so they won't kill
the rich. All around
the apt. swimming pool
there is what's everywhere: forsakenness
and fear, a disdain for those beneath us
rather than a rage
against the ones above: the exploiters,
the oblivious and unabashedly cruel. ~ Thomas Lux

I swim all the time at night - I've always been a water girl. It's a black-bottom pool and my pool light was out, and as I've done a thousand times I just kind of did a little seal dive. I saw a huge bright light and I literally thought, 'That's it.' ~ Brooke Burns

The naked woman marched around the swimming pool, the corpses in the hearse rejoicing that she, too, was dead - these were the "down below" she had feared and fled once before but which mysteriously beckoned her. These were her vertigo: she heard a sweet (almost joyous) summons to renounce her fate and soul. The solidarity of the soulless calling her. And in times of weakness, she was ready to heed the call and return to her mother. She was already to dismiss the crew of her soul from the deck of her body; ready to descend to a place among her mother's friemd and laugh when one of them broke wind noisily; ready to march around the pool naked with them and sing. ~ Milan Kundera

Help,' Jo moaned. 'I think I'm in a coma.'

It was seven o'clock. The library walls were scrubbed clean and Allie's neck and shoulders ached whenever she even thought about raising her arms as she sat on the dust sheet next to Jo.

'Do your arms hurt?' Allie asked, rubbing her shoulders.

'God yes.'

'Then you're not in a coma.' Gingerly Allie stretched out her legs. 'Jesus. What have I got myself into? Rachel has a swimming pool and horses. Horses, Jo. I could be floating in a pool and petting soft pony noses if I were still at her house.'

'Here.' Jo turned to face her. 'My nose is soft. You can pet it.'

Allie stroked her nose tiredly. 'Wow. This is just like being at Rachel's. Where's the pool?'

'No pool,' Jo said. 'Showers.'

'Sucks.'

'Totally.'

'Are you two just going to lie there complaining? Or are you coming to dinner?' Allie looked up to see Carter standing above them, studying them doubtfully.

'Jo's in a coma,' Allie informed him. 'She no longer needs food.'

'Wait. Did you say food? I think I'm actually awake.' Jo scrambled to her feet.

'My God,' Allie said mildly. 'It's a miracle.'

'You've only been doing this one day, Sheridan.' Carter reached down to pull her up. 'You can't be tired already.'

'Everything hurts,' she said. 'Shoulders, arms, back …'

'Legs, feet, head …' Jo offered helpfully.
< ~ C.J. Daugherty

I am a member of the "career-less generation." Or the "screwed generation." Unlike previous generations, the members of my generation won't get jobs and respectable wages straight out of high school, let alone college. We don't have the means to buy homes and start families in our twenties. We're the first generation in a while who will be less well off and less secure than their parents'. Strangely, I seemed more okay with this than my parents. Not being able to afford an above-ground swimming pool and a kid wasn't some heartbreaking tragedy to me. ~ Ken Ilgunas

It is remarkable that a fist-gnawingly dire England performance still has the power to shock, when in some ways this one had all the exquisite unpredictability of Norman Wisdom approaching a banana skin in the immediate vicinity of a swimming pool...
The England shirt is the precise opposite of a superhero costume, turning men with extraordinary abilities into mild-mannered guys next door. Were Stephen Fry to pull it on, he would struggle to string a sentence together. Were Lucian Freud to slip it over his head he would turn his easel round to reveal a childlike scribble of a cat. ~ Marina Hyde

Shit, a hillbilly ho' MMA reality show? It could've aired right after Buckwild. All you'd need is an above ground swimming pool - one of those fancy ones from Sears with the wrap around decking - and you'd have the perfect cracker coliseum. Who wouldn't pay to see a couple spitting-mad, big-haired Daisy-Dukes kick the shit out of each other while some good-old-boys drank themselves stupid cheering them on? ~ E.V. Iverson

Marijuana has killed far fewer people than swimming pools; it's the war against it that does all the violence. ~ Lawrence Reed

This life is like a swimming pool. You dive into the water, but you can't see how deep it is. ~ Dennis Rodman

Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak, so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly. It's like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street. For instance, if we met a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor's yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story , you, upon hearing the words 'soccer' and 'neighbor' in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pele, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn't he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Tres Coracoes with Pele and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say, not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length. So my initial conversational gambit - that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor's dog - would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pele. Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories. ~ Garth Stein

I used to think love was like falling into a swimming pool, but maybe it was as delicate and slow building as a drizzle that turned into a heavy rain. ~ Dannika Dark

'Swimming Pool' was a very important moment for me because the character was written for me. ~ Ludivine Sagnier

On singing in the swimming pool: If I can move the water, I can move the people. ~ Michael Bolton

I grew up in northern California, where it was consistently in the hundreds in the summertime. My dad didn't think he should have to turn on the air conditioning when we had a swimming pool in our backyard; it was our built-in air conditioner. ~ Summer Sanders

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. ~ Strom Thurmond

A poem is all that's left of my lost loneliness ...
It is like a window that looks into a swimming pool ...
Or an a empty gun indentation in velvet ...
And a baby gazelle given as a gift ... ~ Chelsey Minnis

I was headfirst into the deep ocean before I learned how to control my dinghy in the swimming pool. ~ Jane S. Fancher

My most vivid memories of those times weren't the actual nuts and bolts, but just pleasant times sitting with Jack [Kirby] in his studio, going over the pages and looking out the window at my kids playing in his swimming pool . ~ Mike Royer

Cecelia turned her gaze away from the girls and looked at the shimmer blue of their kidney shaped swimming pool, with its powerful underwater light, the perfect symbol of suburban bliss, except for that strange intermit sound like a baby choking that was coming from the pool filter. ~ Liane Moriarty

I'm not in my element standing around in a bikini in front of strangers. I never stand up in a bikini, even at the swimming pool. I feel like a normal person when it comes to things like that. I'm like any other girl who doesn't want to show her bottom. ~ Elizabeth Hurley

One of my favorite things that Yahoo does on a regular basis is this story: "Wealthiest Rap Artists." That's an example of the internet just perpetuating this myth that we're all just sitting around in these mansions like Steven Tyler, bopping around in our swimming pool. It's bullshit. ~ DJ Shadow

2387. Isn't making a smoking section in a restaurant like making a peeing section in a swimming pool? (My sentiments exactly!) ~ Olav Laudy

Success will be when I can have a real swimming pool instead of the fifty-dollar one I buy at Kmart every year. But I don't want to get robbed of any authenticity to try and make money. ~ Nathaniel Rateliff

Being able to sync the same content among multiple devices provides a very convenient backup for Dropbox data. If your Mac laptop gets dropped in your backyard swimming pool, as long as it's been recently synced, you'll still be able to quickly access all of the files and folders stored in Dropbox folder on the desktop PC. ~ Ian Lamont

Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art. ~ Jerry Saltz

If I'm sad and feel like crying, I come to the swimming pool because if I cried at home, I'd cry and cry and be depressed for three days and three nights and then I couldn't stand it and I'd swallow a load of sleeping pills. Or drive east to the sea and just keep going straight into the water. Or walk off the edge of a clidd. So, I come here instead where there's so much water already I can weep in peace. ~ Xiaolu Guo

Today was the first day of summer, she realized, her spirits lifting like a kite. She loved milestones of any sort: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, checks on the calendar, notches on a growth chart. Today would be special, brand new. She felt it deep inside. Summer was here with sunny days and balmy nights, the informality of barbecues and dips in the swimming pool. She was so relieved to have the grind of the school year finished. She missed playing with her children. ~ Mary Alice Monroe

In China, we don't know about the swimming pool game, but we know about Marco Polo. ~ Zhu Zhu

Within our culture, every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or playing the piano then your dad viewed you as a sissy, basically. ~ Geoffrey Rush

In the current [Carter] administration, who can use the White House swimming pool and tennis courts is decided at the very highest level. President Ford did not bother himself with such minor details. He let me swim in the pool. He only got upset when I tried to walk across the water. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

The line, Lasko. Do you know anyone in San Francisco? Are you just gonna get off the train and take a streetcar to the swimming pool?" "I might. I could." "You have to have a plan, Lasko." "No, I don't. Not after this. I don't have to have a plan in the world. ~ Armistead Maupin

Creosote made Mandy think of the thrill of rushing through a garden sprinkler as a kid, of playing washer toss in the backyard, of spending nights in the neighbors' huge in-ground swimming pool when she was twelve, throwing glow sticks in the turquoise water during Canada Day block parties. She thought of Jud for a moment, how he'd loved doing all those things when he was a kid, but how, as he got older, it was all about popularity, sports, a life of illusion… and without warning, a totally different kind of memory filled her mind – the dull feeling of her head hitting the concrete walls near the wood shop at her old high school, the sounds of kids laughing, the sharp smell of sawdust, the buzzing of electric sanders nearby, the sound of Jud laughing while he beat her up… without realizing it, she'd started crying noiselessly. ~ Rebecca McNutt

Being happy outside the pool means fast swimming in the pool. ~ Eric Shanteau

Why do people say trees are majestic?" --- "Because they've earned it. After a sapling's roots take hold, they spread out to give it strength. Then, unstoppable, those roots continue to grow, and after years of withstanding rain, hail, snow and every other environmental disaster you can imagine, it has a root system stretching as wide as the tree is tall in every direction. Take this one," he said tilting his head back & gazing up at her penny tree. "If you could dig up all the roots, they'd probably fill our town's swimming pool. These trees are humbling because we're so much weaker as human beings, so flawed in comparison. ~ Holly Kennedy

Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool. ~ William Faulkner

The only way Congress can get one dollar to spend is to take that one dollar from Americans, borrow that one dollar from Americans, or inflate that one dollar from Americans. So, it's very much like the visual image of a swimming pool. A person notes there is a shallow end, so he takes the water out of the deep end and pours it in the shallow end, hoping to raise the height of the water in the pool - and you would call that person stupid. ~ Walter E. Williams

I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, I was involved in what the Negroes, I mean, blacks were thinking, what they were feeling. ~ Joe Biden

The reason we have the stars twinkle at night is because the light is being kind of blurred by the atmosphere around the Earth. That is why the Hubble Space Telescope is so good, because it is above the atmosphere. So it is kind of like looking at the sun from the bottom of a swimming pool, versus looking at the sun above the swimming pool. ~ Michael J. Massimino

I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A friend had been in an accident. Perhaps she would not live. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as "a pebble in water." I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded peri-winkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my friend's hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating. ~ Maggie Nelson

Prosperity Gospel". At his United Church Science of Living Institute in New York he would tell his congregation "close your eyes and see green. Money up to your armpits, a roomful of money and there you are, just tossing around in it like a swimming pool. ~ Reverend Ike

It feels like I'm in a swimming pool, and I am constantly trying to stay above water. Sometimes I feel like I'm slipping, and you try to come up for air, and that's how it is when looking for the next role. ~ Kym Whitley

Left alone in an interrogation room, some men will look as though they're well into their last ten seconds before throwing up. And they'll look that way for hours. They sweat like they just climbed out of the swimming pool. They eat and swallow air. I mean these guys are really going through it. You come and tip a light in their face. And they're bugeyed - the orbs both big and red, and faceted also. Little raised soft-cornered squares, wired with rust.
These are the innocent. ~ Martin Amis

The summers before that are a blur of baby oil and Sun-In and hating our bodies (I got big breasts; Tibby got no breasts) at the Rockwood public swimming pool. ~ Ann Brashares

Before I start a film or a play, I try to build a world in my mind. An imaginative world which the character lives in; and I create that with novels, with painting, with music, with films. I try and understand tone. Tone is so important. Is this a thriller, is this a Gothic romance, is this an action film, is this a love story? Then, once I understand that, I just jump into it. This might be like an incomplete way of describing it, but it's like I build a swimming pool, then I just dive in. Do you know what I mean? ~ Tom Hiddleston

Prove to me that you're no fool Walk across my swimming pool. ~ Tim Rice

This is fucking Washington! Who the hell has a below ground swimming pool? It rained 256 days of the year, for Pete's sake! On the off chance I found the blasted owners of it, I was going to put a bullet in their heads right then. ~ Eloise J. Knapp

Water in swimming pools changes its look more than in any other form its colour can be man-made and its dancing rhythms reflect not only the sky but, because of its transparency, the depth of the water as well. If the water surface is almost still and there is a strong sun, then dancing lines with the colours of the spectrum appear everywhere. ~ David Hockney

Jerry Lewis has been married twenty times. He gets married on a Tuesday, they find his wife dead in a swimming pool on Thursday. Maybe if you married someone who's old enough to swim next time, Ok Jerry? ~ Denis Leary

I was in Cancun, Mexico, sitting in a disappearing-edge swimming pool, on a bar stool that was actually under the water, watching palm trees sway in a sultry breeze against the unmistakable aqua splendor of the Caribbean Sea; drinking coconut, lime, and tequila from a scooped-out pineapple, with salt spray of breaking surf and sun kissing my skin.
Translation: I'd died and gone to heaven. ~ Karen Marie Moning

I never would've thought seeing a hundred naked people around a swimming pool would have been dullsville, but it is. ~ Mark Haskell Smith

I do a lot of swimming, both in the ocean and in the pool. ~ Catherine Zeta-Jones

I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol ... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

If I gave this guy more time, there would be a swimming pool and rattan furniture. ~ Joe Teti

I've enjoyed training again, I've enjoyed pushing myself in the pool and I'll keep on swimming until I feel I cannot get any more out of myself. ~ Ian Thorpe

No one likes to be typecast or stereotyped, especially actors. But who would know Esther Williams without a swimming pool, Bela Lugosi without a cape, or Elvis Presley without his guitar. Would we even care? ~ Susan Marg

I was three over. One over a house, one over a patio, and one over a swimming pool. ~ George Brett

At the Colony Club, Barbados, you could swim straight from your hotel room to the swimming pool, via a small stream off your balcony, lined with stunning waterfalls and plant life. ~ Mandy Smith

And secondly, admit defeat. Socialism (or anarchism) is not going to happen. And there is no national resurgence
of organic community coming our way. There will be no night-watchman state and libertarian utopia where the
public sector is all but removed. There will be no ecological-spiritual awakening spontaneously growing
from the goodness of your heart. And no, Mr. Conservative, there will be no rolling back of gay rights,
bike paths, vegan diets, animal rights and queer perspectives - they are all here to stay and expand. You can give up on all of that nonsense. Those were whispers of another time. Let them die hard. Clear your
head of these hallucinatory fantasies. They are about as meaningful today as belief in ghosts or Jesus walking
across King Herod's swimming pool. ~ Hanzi Freinacht

I don't. I take it he was homeless." Aaron shrugged. "That's my guess. A group of them have been congregating in that grassy patch across the street from the Santa Teresa Inn. Before that, they camped in the park adjacent to the municipal swimming pool." "Who called it in?" He took off his glasses and polished ~ Sue Grafton

Poppe, once a leading figure at a scientific research institute, found a job as a swimming pool attendant ~ Victor Sebestyen

of Weedpatch Camp were working in the fields. Perhaps as many as fifty children were playing baseball at the school or swimming in the pool when three cars driven by teenage boys began to circle the playground. The teenage boys got out of the cars and squared off in front of Eddie and a line of other sixteen-year-old boys from the camp. When the intruders hurled rocks into the swimming pool, the Okie boys charged forward and the Fight was on. Some men from the camp rushed over to the playground to restore order, but by then the invaders were in retreat with bloody noses and scuffed faces. That ~ Jerry Stanley

Hey what's the matter baby? said my wife, propped up on the bed.

I'm a fucking vampire! I cried, thinking of Bryan Ferry and his bursting flowers and his prancing horses and his flight of swallows and his hedged swimming pool and his lovely wife.

No, you're not. Come here, she said.

I crawled onto the bed and she pulled the covers away.

Listen, she said.

I put my ear against her distended stomach, her knapsack, and listened. I could hear little trapped people swimming around within.

They are eating me from the inside, she said.

Lucky them, I said.

I'm serious, she said.

But she had fallen asleep and I crawled off the bed across the floor, up the wainscot and along the paneled ceiling. I pressed my ear to the ceiling and listened. I could hear people gathering on the floor above. The ceiling vibrated. I recognized the voices as past collaborators, going back many years. They sounded fatigued as if depleted of oxygen, maybe, or as if someone has siphoned their blood away. I could hear them sobbing and cursing and consoling each other.

I fell asleep. ~ Nick Cave

The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead. ~ Ian Fleming

Taxation is paying your dues, paying your membership fee in America. If you join a country club or a community center, you pay fees. Why? You did not build the swimming pool. You have to maintain it. You did not build the basketball court. Someone has to clean it. You may not use the squash court, but you still have to pay your dues. Otherwise it won't be maintained and will fall apart. People who avoid taxes, like corporations that move to Bermuda, are not paying their dues to their country. It is patriotic to be a taxpayer. It is traitorous to desert our country and not pay your dues. ~ George Lakoff

In 1980, business at my company, Chuck E. Cheese's, was thriving and I was feeling flush. So I bought a very large house on the Champ de Mars in Paris, right between the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole Militaire. The home was quite amazing: At six stories, it spanned 15,000 square feet and featured marble staircases and a swimming pool in the basement. ~ Nolan Bushnell

I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve. ~ Xavier Cugat

The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You're in eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore. ~ Richard Siken

I could jump in a small swimming pool or dive in the big ocean, and I'd be equally as wet. So it is with love. Somebody get me a towel. ~ Jarod Kintz

I put a gentle hand to my chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise
blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It turned out to be just his sort of life in Melbourne [Florida]
a little three-room mini apartment to himself, and down on the strip, five different bars where you had women going around in bathing suits. In the backyard, his mother's new husband had grown a miraculous tree, a lemon trunk grafted with orange, tangerine, satsuma, kumquat, and grapefruit limbs, each bearing its own vivid fruit. Every morning, Jeff would go out and fill his arms, and squeeze himself a pitcher of juice, thick and sun-hot. That house was good for his mother, too. The swimming pool trimmed fifteen pounds off of her. She didn't seem to have moods anymore, and she didn't fly off the handle when Jeff beat her in the cribbage games they played most afternoons. ~ Wells Tower

The Doctor: Just had a fall. All the way down there, right to the library. Heck of a climb back up.
Amelia: You're soaking wet.
The Doctor: I was in the swimming pool.
Amelia: You said you were in the library.
The Doctor: So was the swimming pool. ~ Steven Moffat

Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of the four soldiers had finished he scraped some burnt rice and fish scales from the side of the cooking pot. A first-class private of some forty years, with slow, careful hands, he beckoned Jim forward and handed him his mess tin. As they smoked their cigarettes the Japanese smiled to themselves, watching Jim devour the shreds of fatty rice. It was his first hot food since he had left he hospital, and the heat and greasy flavour stung his gums. Tears swam in his eyes. The Japanese soldier who had taken pity on Jim, recognising that this small boy was starving, began to laugh good-naturedly, and pulled the rubber plug from his metal water-bottle. Jim drank the clear, chlorine-flavoured liquid, so unlike the stagnant water in the taps of the Columbia Road. He choked, carefully swallowed his vomit, and tittered into his hands, grinning at the Japanese. Soon they were all laughing together, sitting back in the deep grass beside the drained swimming-pool. ~ J.G. Ballard

You can't beat sex outdoors, but there are not many places I haven't done it. Forests, barns, in swimming pool changing rooms, on top of hills, you name it. ~ Katie Price

I'm old enough to have lived in a country where, if you were willing to work hard, you could have a fairly nice life. You could support your family, and even get a shot at owning your own home. But you never thought you'd get a swimming pool. Now culture has hypnotised people into thinking they're really nothing if they're not wealthy and a Kardashian. ~ Tom Petty

Doc awakened very slowly and clumsily like a fat man getting out of a swimming pool. His mind broke the surface and fell back several times. There was red lipstick on his beard. He opened one eye, saw the brilliant colors of the quilt and closed his eye quickly. But after a while he looked again. His eye went past the quilt to the floor, to the broken plate in the corner, to the glasses standing on the table turned over on the floor, to the spilled wine and the books like heavy fallen butterflies. There were little bits of curled red paper all over the place and the sharp smell of firecrackers. He could see through the kitchen door to the steak plates stacked high and the skillets deep in grease. Hundreds of cigarette butts were stamped out on the floor. And under the firecracker smell was a fine combination of wine and whiskey perfume. His eye stopped for a moment on a little pile of hairpins in the middle of the floor.
He rolled over slowly and supporting himself on one elbow he looked out the broken window. Cannery Row was quiet and sunny. The boiler was open. The door of the Palace Flophouse was closed. A man slept peacefully among the weeds in the vacant lot. The Bear Flag was shut up tight. ~ John Steinbeck

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one. ~ Joan Didion

If I could get any animal it would be a dolphin. I want one so bad. Me and my mom went swimming with dolphins and I was like, 'How do we get one of those?' and she was like, 'You can't get a dolphin. What are you gonna do, like, put it in your pool?' ~ Miley Cyrus

I invited Onyx to be my plus one. Of course she was all in when I added that Grandma A had a massive swimming pool and was within a short driving distance to a two-story bookstore. ~ K.R. Grace

I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in because the water is too cold. ~ Patrick Modiano

I am the bathtub of desire, but damnit woman, I saw you eyeing that swimming pool. ~ Jarod Kintz

There is a bus station in Henry, but it isn't on Main Street. It's one block north - the town fathers hadn't wanted all the additional traffic. The station lost one-third of its roof to a tornado fifteen years ago. In the same summer, a bottle rocket brought the gift of fire to its restrooms. The damage has never been repaired, but the town council makes sure that the building is painted fresh every other year, and always the color of a swimming pool. There is never graffiti. Vandals would have to drive more than twenty miles to buy the spray paint.

Every once in a long while, a bus creeps into town and eases to a stop beside the mostly roofed, bright aqua station with the charred bathrooms. Henry is always glad to see a bus. Such treats are rare. ~ N.D. Wilson

I told him how we were washed out to sea and how it was like making furious love to a clash of orgiastic rhinos in a swimming pool filled with broken glass, and how you made a fire by staring balefully down into the reflective bottom of an aluminum can until your immense force of will was concentrated and magnified by the parabolic mirror into a white-hot spark of pure Turtle rage that could light anything on fire, even the hearts of unwary high schoolers. ~ Gabriel Tallent

I believe that God felt sorry for actors so he created Hollywood to give them a place in the sun and a swimming pool. The price they had to pay was to surrender their talent. ~ Cedric Hardwicke

The dream pool is pushed out in the open and the dappled depths of our imagination become a uniformly blue intruder, often out of scale with its surroundings and nearly always discordant in colour and texture. ~ Elisabeth Beazley

I often remember in this false, distorted way, and the memories are often cloaked in the colour of the sun. Sometimes I feel nostalgia for things I knew I hated when they were happening, for days spent at the beach or the swimming pool with my sisters.
When I pick my memories apart, I realise my mind has merely played back the objective ingredients, the clichéd apparatus of happiness, the sun, the sound of splashing water, ice-cream on parched lips and cold fizzy drink on a hot tongue, and laugher too. My memory often peddles on the falsehood of past happiness. I should know this. ~ M.J. Hyland

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

The swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is. ~ Steven D. Levitt

One of my lungs is half gone, and the other half, because I smoked for years, has a lesion. So I can't swim anymore and had the swimming pool covered over. Now it's what I call the dance pavilion, and so I and my friends sit out and put music on and watch people dance. ~ Maya Angelou

The brilliant thing about swimming is that, while you're doing it, there's nothing else you could be getting on with, like the ironing or sorting out the children. My mind goes into free-float mode; some of the best ideas for plots come into my head while I'm ploughing up and down the pool. ~ Sophie Hannah

Most cats don't like water, and despite her pretensions of tigerhood, Julie was no different. Yes, tigers have stripes; so do tabbies. If you want to know the difference, try tossing one of each into your swimming pool. Then I would recommend running. ~ Seanan McGuire

Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool. ~ Liv Ullmann

Oh, welcome to this world of fools, of pink champagne and swimming pools, where all you have to lose is your virginity. Perhaps you'll have some fun tonight, just stick around and take a bite, of life. We don't need feebleness in this proximity. ~ Les Claypool

Some people dream of having a big swimming pool. With me, it's closets ~ Audrey Hepburn

Jacob Zuma built a 2 million rand swimming pool, but no one in the family knows how to swim ~ Julius Malema

The only thing marring the illusion is an empty swimming pool hanging halfway off the cliff on the edge of the grounds. ~ Susan Ee

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end. ~ John Shelby Spong