The Drowning Girl Quotes

Dead people, dead ideas and supposedly dead moments are never really dead and they shape every moment of our lives. We ignore them and this makes them powerful. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

Po swirled upward from where it had been sitting, and floated over to the window. "When you go swimming and you put your head under the water," Po said, "and everything is strange and underwater-sounding, and strange and underwater-looking, you don't miss the air do you? You don't miss the above-water sounds and the above-water look. It's just different."
"True." Liesl was quiet for a moment. Then she added, "But I bet you'd miss it if you were drowning. I bet you'd really miss the air then. ~ Lauren Oliver

You are the sick prince of my cerise innovations and in your drowning caresses I walk the sea ~ Frank O'Hara

My hand was on the door handle when for a split second out of nowhere I was terrified, blue-blazing terrified, fear dropping straight through me like a jagged black stone falling fast. I'd felt this before, in the limbo instants before I moved out of my aunt's house, lost my virginity, took my oath as a police officer: those instants when the irrevocable thing you wanted so much suddenly turns real and solid, inches away and speeding at you, a bottomless river rising and no way back once it's crossed. I had to catch myself back from crying out like a little kid drowning in terror, I don't want to do this any more. ~ Tana French

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me. ~ Brian Eno

It's been three days
still haven't heard from you.
My heart lives underwater
breathing for you.
But you break apart
my tiny heart,
giving me no chance
to start something with you.
I dove into the pool
I dove in
hoping to swim
now I'm drowning. ~ Cecil Castellucci

There is a shipwreck between your ribs and it took eighteen years
for me to understand how to understand your kind of drowning.
There are people who cannot be held quietly. There are screams
that are never externalized. If I looked at the photo albums of your
past twenty years, all I would find are decibel meter graphs of
phone calls and the intensity of your silence as you sat
smoking cigarettes in the garage.
There is a shipwreck between your ribs. You are a box with
fragile written on it, and so many people have not handled you
with care.
And for the first time, I understand that I will never know
how to apologize for being
one of them. ~ Shinji Moon

New York City is finished," he said. "They can't keep order there, and you can't have business without order. It'll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again."
"What do you hear of the U.S. government? I said. "We don't have electricity an hour a month anymore and there's nothing on the air but the preachers anyway."
"Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn't met since twelve twenty-one." Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. "We're still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn't what it used to be, is it?"
"We believe in the future, sir. Only it's not like the world we've left behind," Joseph said.
"How's that?"
"We're building our own New Jerusalem up the river. it's a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. . . ~ James Howard Kunstler

Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning - something different from what he had before, at least a different world. ~ Yukio Mishima

We do not abandon ship. I say, as corny as it may sound, through the strength and spirit and fire and dare and gamble of a few men in a few ways we can save the carcass of humanity from drowning. No light goes out until it goes out. Let's fight as men, not rats. Period. No further addition. ~ Charles Bukowski

His eyesight was possessed by the colours of trauma, cracking and bubbling like an old Super Eight film to remind him of his near-death drowning some two months ago in that very moment when he needed to act. ~ Luke Taylor

There is a major difference between a scuba diver and a drowning man. One is in control of his experiences, the other is in over his head. ~ Laren Grey Umphlett

The only thing worse than drowning in grief is sharing a lifeboat with other drowning people. Besides, if anyone needs a grief group, it's him. ~ Courtney Cole

Ironically, the first time he played it, he experienced his first dream vision with his own 'flame jumelle', Rune – and saved her from drowning. Thereafter he decided that must be the magic the instrument held: the ability to bring two souls together when they needed each other the most. ~ A.G. Howard

The stream of life is black and angry; how so many of us get across without drowning, I often wonder. The best way is not to look too far before-just from one stepping-stone to another; and though you may wet your feet, He won't let you drown-He has not allowed me. ~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Hundreds of experiments into the misinformation effect have been conducted, and people have been convinced of all sorts of things. Screwdrivers become wrenches, white men become black men, and experiences involving other people get traded back and forth. In one study, [Elizabeth] Loftus convinced people they were once lost in a shopping mall as a child. She had subjects read four essays provided by family members, but the one about getting lost as a kid was fake. A quarter of the subjects incorporated the fake story into their memory and even provided details about the fictional event that were not included in the narrative. Loftus even convinced people they shook hands with Bugs Bunny, who isn't a Disney character, when they visited Disney World as a kid, just by showing them a fake advertisement where a child was doing the same. She altered the food preferences of subjects in one experiment where she lied to people, telling them they had reported becoming sick from eating certain things as a child. A few weeks later, when offered those same foods, those people avoided them. In other experiments, she implanted memories of surviving drowning and fending off animal attacks - none of them real, all of them accepted into the autobiography of the subjects without resistance. ~ David McRaney

The truth is, deep ends cause drowning. Baptisms by fire cause third-degree burns. ~ David Mitchell

Since the 1970s, I have asked students if they would first try to save their drowning dog or a drowning stranger. And for 40 years I have received the same results: One third vote for their dog, one third for the stranger, and one third don't know what they would do. ~ Dennis Prager

Well, listen, you know, the Czech saying is, you know, when you are drowning you are grabbing even a little twig. That's what all Czechs were doing, grabbing for ... with the hope for this little twig. ~ Milos Forman

She burst into tears. Not dainty, feminine tears, but a messy, red-faced explosion of sobs. The most terrible, beautiful, stunning feeling she'd ever known had come crashing over her in a huge wave, and she was drowning in it.
Gabriel stared at her with alarm, fumbling in his coat pocket for a handkerchief. "No, no... you weren't supposed to... my God, Pandora, don't do that. What is it?" He mopped at her face until she took the handkerchief from him and blew her nose, her shoulders shaking. Ashe continued to hover and ask worried questions, Phoebe left the piano and came to them.
Keeping Pandora folded deeply in his embrace, Gabriel cast a distracted glance at his sister. "I don't know what's wrong," he muttered.
Phoebe shook her head and reached up to ruffle his hair fondly. "Nothing's wrong, lunkhead. You came into her life like a lightning strike. Anyone would feel a bit scorched. ~ Lisa Kleypas

She wasn't the sort of catch one could take home and show off to people; she was the sort of catch that drags the angler off the end of the pier and pulls him out to sea before tearing him to pieces as he's drowning. He shouldn't have been fishing at all, not when he was so ill-equipped. ~ Nick Hornby

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross a ~ Imperial War Museum

But nobody else understands about the fire. If someone threw you a rope when you were drowning. If a doctor said take this because if you don't take you'll die - you would, wouldn't you? ~ William Golding

So I left my wonderfully intelligent family and soaked myself in the bath and considered drowning myself. Then I remembered I still had chocolate cake left over from yesterday so I came back up for air. Some things are worth living for. ~ Cecelia Ahern

Intuition is a wonderful gift but it can be both a blessing and a curse. If you can easily tune in to the grief of another, it is very easy to lose your way if you have not yet resolved your own present or past trauma and grief. If you have not healed from your own grief and you turn around and give all you have to give, you will find yourself drowning. Soon there will be nothing left of you. ~ Kate McGahan

I wish I could blame the solar storm
that blitzed the earth with electromagnetic rays,
rerouted several commercial airlines,
and caused all the geese to mistakenly fly west,
the secret compass needles in their heads
playing spin the bottle over a rowdy Pacific.
Satellite communications were disrupted,
electric eels in Peru forgot how to sing,
and for a few seconds all the iPhones in the world
flickered to black, during which time
everyone raised their eyes and noticed
moths shivering like tiny chandeliers.
The truth is your glance shortcuts every traffic light
in my heart and now no one's in charge,
I'm accelerating down the expressway
of a tuba's gold dream. With one outburst
from your hair, I sputter like a firefly drowning
in champagne. Just imagining the charged particles
of your lips colliding with mine
and I'm watching the northern lights,
those bodies flaring across midwinter sheets of sky ~ Katherine Rauk

It is high time to declare an end to the breastfeeding dictatorship that is drowning women in guilt and worry just when they most need support: after the birth of a child. ~ Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

He said a fortuneteller had told Mum's fortune once, and after that, she's never gone out on sea again. It was years ago, but she never has. Not once." said Conner
"What did the fortuneteller say?" I asked
"Dad wouldn't tell me. It must have been something really bad though."
"maybe the fortuneteller said that Mum would die by drowning." I suggested.
"Don't be stupid Saph. A fortuneteller wouldn't ever say that to someone. You're going to drown, that'll be ten pounds please ~ Helen Dunmore

Madame Boulle, in spite of her experiences among the highest English families, was amazed at the coolness shown by Lady Emily. A grandchild in danger of drowning, a young man in danger of a pneumonia and a bronchitis, and she was entirely calm, not even impressed by Pierre's bravery. Bravery in the face of danger, Madame Boulle explained, was the characteristic of her family. ~ Angela Thirkell

Well. Well?
What are you going to do? What are you going to say?
What are you going to say when you're drowning in your own dung and they keep booting you back into it, when all the screams in hell wouldn't be as loud as you want to scream, when you're at the bottom of the pit and the whole world's at the top, when it has but one face, a face without eyes or ears, and yet it watches and listens ... .
What are you going to do and say? Why, pardner, that's simple. It's easy as nailing your balls to a stump and falling off backwards. Snow again, pardner, and drift me hard, because that's an easy one.
You're gonna say, they can't keep a good man down. You're gonna say, a winner never quits and a quitter never wins. You're gonna smile, boy, you're gonna show 'em the ol' fightin' smile. And then you're gonna get out there an' hit 'em hard and fast and low, an' - an' Fight! ~ Jim Thompson

It is the phenomenon somethings called "alienation from self." In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. ~ Joan Didion

If I was drowning you would part the sea
And risk your own life to rescue me ... ~ Jamie McGuire

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices. ~ Don DeLillo

I got used to birds: small black birds flying up from behind a building like God had tossed up a handful of currants, birds squalling in the parking lot of the grocery store (drowning the hum of industrial refrigerators), chachalacas -brown robed nuns to the spangled disco dancer peacocks - cackling in the dust of our yard. I got used to the chatters, squeaks, squalls, peeps, calls that sounded like bitter laughter, whistles, flutes, calls that sounded like souls ascending to heaven. I got used to dust and flatness, to sunsets like pink water pouring from the sky, flooding the earth with orange soda. I got used to wind: the hot, cruel wind of afternoon, the merciful magnolia breeze of night. I got used to it. But then I had to go. ~ Kathleen Founds

I felt like the ocean. I felt like my insides were spread out so far and wide and there were so many things inside of me all at once, and thoughts racing and swimming and I felt like I was drowning in tidal waves of grief. ~ Anna Akana

I think I'm just trying to find what's real. Dreamin' of mansions isn't a bad thing. But there's got to be more to life than just enduring or dreaming. And too often, it feels like hope is the only thing most people have. Rich, poor, sick, healthy - we're all just drowning in dreams and hoping someone else will make them come true. ~ Amy Harmon

The entire time they're talking, I can't tear my eyes away from Porter. What I'm feeling for him now is like drowning and floating at the same time. ~ Jenn Bennett

The horses suddenly began to neigh, protesting
Against those who were drowning them in the ocean.
The horses sank to the bottom, neighing, neighing.
Until they had all gone down.
That is all. Nevertheless, I pity them,
Those bay horses, that never saw land again. ~ Boris Slutsky

Unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning ~ William Carlos Williams

She was drowning, pulled under by a froth of limbs and bodies, swept along by currents of voices, music, and car engines. Dark shadows circled her like hungry sharks. She rose up, dragged to the surface by an impatient crowd. Hands and elbows pushed and shoved. Exhaust fumes and food smells clogged her nostrils. This was the old part of the city, where archaic buildings stood side by side, defences pitched against the onslaught of the modern. There were no smooth walls here, no towers made of steel and glass. This was all shadows and sculpture, buttresses and winding alleys; the impenetrable heart of a long ago city, beating to a circadian rhythm. The ~ Malcolm Richards

The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge, and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the grass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the Earth, to grow it again with the roots toward heaven. ~ Michael Shaara

Life is drowning in the ocean sometimes you get killed by the onething you relied on to keep you alive ~ Kwanele Dee Nyembe