The Drowned Quotes

We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003.

Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make. ~ Bill Lambrecht

I've read plenty of J.G. Ballard, but I'm not really a Ballardian. I've met Ballardians, and I know when I can't compete. I like Ballard in his relatively unchallenging apocalyptic mode: 'Vermilion Sands,' 'The Drowned World,' 'The Burning World,' 'The Crystal World.' ~ Lev Grossman

The Drowned God plays savage japes upon us all, but men are crueler still. ~ George R R Martin

[[diving into the wreck]]

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade
[...]
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here...
[...]
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
[...]
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear. ~ Adrienne Rich

The drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody's saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain. ~ David Foster Wallace

Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned. ~ Thomas Bernhard

His remorse was purely physical. Only his body, strained nerves, and cowering flesh were afraid of the drowned man. Conscience played no part in his terrors, and he had not the slightest regret about killing Camille; in his moments of calm, when the spectre was not present, he would have committed the murder over again had he thought his interests required it. ~ Emile Zola

Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment ... ~ Primo Levi

The sound of the wind stretches its limbs.
The jazz music witholds some of its ruckus.
Hands move something in the dark.
I say: just an old romanticism...
No matter, the place will fit everything.

Vision descends upon flaccid pathways
and rides them on cheap metal.
Dried out trees and others take their water
from the drowned sand by force.
I say: a passing depression.
No matter, the place will fit everything.
During the day the sun approaches the mountain,
places its hand upon it,
its cold hand of lovers,
strikes stone with stone.
Mountain scrub dances behind the stone.
The sun does not see it.
Only the moon shines upon it all the way beyond the bend
and the guardian stones watch from afar.
I say: a passing coincidence.
No matter, the place will fit everything. ~ Ashur Etwebi

I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned. ~ Arthur Koestler

She'd survived the Drowned Cities because she wasn't anything like Mouse. When the bullets started flying and warlords started making examples of peacekeeper collaborators, Mahlia had kept her head down, instead of standing up like Mouse. She'd looked out for herself, first. And because of that, she'd survived. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

When the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel. ~ Thomas Dolby

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and sub ~ Derek Walcott

The last reports from Las Vegas described the abandoned gambling capital sitting half-submerged in a lake of rain-lashed water, its wheels stilled, the dying lights of its hotels reflected in the meadows of the drowned desert, a violent mirror reflecting all the failure and humiliation of America. ~ J.G. Ballard

Phantasm, a pink-palmed jinn, a ghost from one of the drowned cities. ~ Diana Abu-Jaber

The Drowned Cities hadn't always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn't belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty soon the place was a roaring hell because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

The sea can smack the rocks like a hand smacking a cheek. It can hiss or gurgle or even kiss. But when it wants, it can go quiet. 'And then', said Anya Rothrock, 'you can hear the voices of the drowned'. ~ Caroline B. Cooney

Botha swimmer and a drowned man are in the water; the latter is borne by the water and controlled by it, while the swimmer is borne along by his own power and of his own volition. Every movement made by the drowned man - indeed, every act and word that issue from him - comes from the water, not from him ... The saints are like this. They have died before death. ~ Rumi

The shore is of pebbles, and huge tangles of seaweed float in the bay and look like the hair of the drowned. ~ Hannah Kent

That wasn't a true dream, but an ancient organic memory millions of years old. The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm have been awakened. The expanding sun and rising temperatures are driving you back down to the spinal levels into the drowned seas of the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total psychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons. ~ J.G. Ballard

However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if some of you survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers." -- SS Officer, quoted in The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi ~ Robert Harris

They are the lost books," he turned his head, grasping his cane and raising it aloft, as if speaking more to the books than to me. "The destroyed books, the burnt books, the missing, the stolen, the drowned, the forgotten. Those ruined by water, fire, mold, man's malice or neglect or, perchance…time itself. They're all here, every last one, Darius. At least for a time. ~ Darius Jones

Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer's plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian's; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl's ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay. ~ Gary Inbinder

The Drowned God did not answer. He seldom did. That was the trouble with gods. ~ George R R Martin

Having a child isn't a deal you strike with life. As I said: a child is a gift. And what remains after a child is gone is the memory of the years it was allowed to live. Not its death ~ Carsten Jensen

Her father would return from China. He'd come back with all his soldiers. He'd pick her up in his strong arms and say that he'd never meant to leave, that he hadn't meant to sail away and leave her and her mother alone in the canals of the Drowned Cities as the Army of God and the UPF and the Freedom Militia came down like a hammer on every single person who'd ever trafficked with the peacekeepers. A stupid little dream for a stupid little war maggot. Mahlia hated herself for dreaming it. But sometimes she curled in on herself and held the stump of her right hand to her chest and pretended that none of it had happened. That her father was still here, and she still had a hand, and everything was going to get better. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Running. She was always running. Like a rabbit chased by coywolv. Always hunting for some new safe bolt hole, and every time, the soldier boys found her, and forced her to rabbit again. The doctor was wrong. There was no place to hide, and she'd never be safe as long as she remained close to the Drowned Cities. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years. ~ Larry McMurtry

Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. ~ Herman Melville

Put yourself in Hamlet's shoes. Suppose you were a prince, and you came back from college to discover that your uncle had murdered your father and married your mother, and you fell in love with a beautiful girl and mistakenly murdered her father, and then she went crazy and drowned herself. What would you do? Go back for a masters? ~ Art Buchwald

So I wonder: Will a person who has drowned,
Or almost drowned, always feel
Like they're drowning,
Even after they've been saved? ~ Sherman Alexie

Have you killed a man, drowned a crocodile, hunted a wolf, or raped an abuser? Stop pretending you love someone. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim. ~ Marilyn French

I dreamt I saw a shadow with a burning heart butchering a golden stag, aye. I dreamt of a man without a face, waiting on a bridge that swayed and swung. On his shoulder perched a drowned crow with seaweed hanging from his wings. I dreamt of a roaring river and a woman that was a fish. Dead she drifted, with red tears on her cheeks, but when her eyes did open, oh, I woke from terror. All this I dreamt, and more. ~ George R R Martin

Your boyfriend dive into, like, three feet of water. He didn't come up, either.He is probably drowned or turned into a merman. Honestly, I don't know which would be worse. .. ~ Meg Cabott

Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat. ~ Ann Landers

No one has ever drowned in sweat. ~ Lou Holtz

I had a dream that I was being drowned in a flood and I realized it was a flood of people. ~ Ellen Burstyn

A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy. ~ Josephine Tey

We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel. ~ Peter De Vries

I was a woman unaccustomed to guilt, and it drowned me - pulling me deeper, cutting off my air supply. ~ Alessandra Torre

Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

Some days I'm to sip you. Some days I'm to be drowned. ~ Erica Alex

I wish I hadn't cried so much! said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out.
I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears ! ~ Lewis Carroll

Impressed. Lord. He had nearly drowned. ~ Katherine Paterson

A girl that's born for hangin' ain't likely to be drowned. ~ L.A. Meyer

She is drowned already, sir, with salt water, though I seem to drown her remembrance again with more. ~ William Shakespeare

Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned. ~ George Monbiot

Good swimmers at length are drowned. ~ George Herbert

Aphrodite makes us understand why women have drowned their babies. ~ P.C. Cast

Une immense esprance a travers la terre', he read somewhere, and his comment was:'
and it's darned-well drowned everything worth having. ~ D.H. Lawrence

He were found drowned. He were coming home very hopeless o' aught on earth. He thought God could na be harder than men; mappen not so hard; mappen as tender as a mother; mappen tenderer. I'm not saying he did right, and I'm not saying he didn't wrong. All I say is, may neither me nor mine ever have his sore heart, or we may do like things. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

My brain was so noisy and opinionated that it drowned out my heart. ~ Julia Day

So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade; All love, all liking, all delight Lies drowned with us in endless night. Then while time serves, and we are but decaying; Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a Maying. ~ Robert Herrick

You have always fought against your dreams, and 'I want' has never even shown its face. It was always drowned out by 'I must' or 'I hope' or 'I need ... ' ~ Paulo Coelho

In a great River great fish are found, but take heede, lest you bee drowned. ~ George Herbert

A half-drowned stranger was more exciting than a bruised and exhausted daughter. She could be dying for all they'd care, she thought angrily, picking at a deep scratch on her leg, trying to make it bleed again. ~ Vivien Alcock

Ten minutes before I would have drowned in his come. Now I just wanted it off me. I wanted him off me. ~ Jettie Woodruff

But then I'm not easily shocked. I've had several friends who drowned or got murdered or died in weird accidents. In Alaska you get used to strange stuff happening. ~ Jon Krakauer

They died, he wrote, as if overcome by sleep - or, according to a second translation: as if drowned in a dream. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

I don't know. I never heard anything about her again after I landed her man," she said, peering back at me. "She was drowned in my wake. You better hope you can swim if you go up against me."
This bitch was lucky I was letting her leave in one piece. "Like a damn fish. ~ Nicole Williams

There were some days that deserved to be drowned at birth and everyone sent back to bed with a hot brandy, a box of chocolates and a warm, energetic companion. Today was without question one of those days. ~ Diana Pharaoh Francis

One of life's joys was to have friends who gave you reality checks ... who would call you on your crap before it rose so high you drowned in it. ~ David Brin

Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it. ~ Jim Harrison

No one has ever drowned in sweat"

Lou Holtz ~ Jason Jauron

Anna: Ash, I don't have anything planned with my Mother ... She's dead.
Ashley: What?
Anna: She died when I was seven. She drowned. It's just my Dad and me. I didn't tell you before because I just wanted a fresh start here, because before I moved, everybody knew about it and ... I'm sorry.
Ashley: ... You're like a Disney Princess! ~ Jessi Kirby

She flooded my thoughts. I drowned in peace. ~ Faraaz Kazi

Edain came out of Midhir's hill, and lay
Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,
Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds
And Druid moons, and murmuring of boughs,
And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made
Of opal and ruhy and pale chrysolite
Awake unsleeping fires; and wove seven strings,
Sweet with all music, out of his long hair,
Because her hands had been made wild by love.
When Midhir's wife had changed her to a fly,
He made a harp with Druid apple-wood
That she among her winds might know he wept;
And from that hour he has watched over none
But faithful lovers. ~ W.B.Yeats

He'd always liked women who'd talk back to him just a little bit. "Girls with balls" were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells. ~ Warren Ellis

Drowned, dead, duplicitous slut! ~ Christopher Moore

Whoever pushes America's sex button must be prepared for sirens and alarms. Whatever else we do in our lives will be drowned out by them. ~ Erica Jong

Reason tried to whisper a warning, but Libido drowned him out. ~ Catherine Mulvany

A friend of mine drowned in a bowl of muesli. A strong currant pulled him in. ~ Tommy Cooper

Such fire was not by water to be drowned, nor he his nature changed by changing ground. ~ Ludovico Ariosto

One voice could be drowned out, but not a dozen. Not a hundred. Not a thousand. ~ Alexandra Bracken

His lips met mine again, this time in a slow, soft caress, conveying everything he had just said in those beautiful words that had reached my very soul. I could have drowned in that kiss. I could have lived there for eternity. It filled me up with everything I needed to survive. He gave me life through his lips and I treasured it. ~ Nicola Claire