From age eleven to age sixteen I lived a spartan life without the usual adolescent uncertainty. I wanted to be the best swimmer in... the world, and there was nothing else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaite...d him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A better swimmer you could scarce see ever, He could, perhaps, have pass'd the Hellespont,... As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided) Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a l...eg or a finger, they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischief of their vices, but not from their vices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout histo...ry, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most people can swim a narrow river. Water is an alien element, but with labor we can force ourselves through it. A good swimmer c...an cross a wide river, a lake, even the English Channel; no one, as far as we know, has ever swum the Atlantic Ocean, or is likely to do so. Even a champion swimmer, if he had business which required to spend alternate weeks in Paris and London, would not make the trip regularly by swimming the English Channel. Although we can force ourselves through water by skill and main strength, for all practical purposes our ability to traverse water is only as good as our ships or our airplanes. And so with the activities of our brains. Thinking is probably as foreign to human nature as is water; it is an unnatural element into which we throw ourselves with hesitation, and in which we flounder once we are there. We have learned, during the millenniums, to do rather well with thinking, but only if we buoy ourselves up with words. Some thinking of a simple sort we can do without words, but difficult and sustained thinking, presumably, is completely impossible without their aid, as traversing the Atlantic Ocean is presumably impossible without instruments or supramarine transportation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficul...ty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the swimmer depends on water, so the writer depends on language. To swim well, we must let ourselves be enveloped by the water,... sink into it, become a part of it. To write well, we must similarly let ourselves be enveloped by the language, sink into it, become a part of it. In short, as swimmers, instead of fight ing the water to avoid drowning, we must learn to use our body-in-the-water so it will float effortlessly: then, we can start to swim. Similarly, as writers, instead of fighting the language to make it express our ideas, we must learn to use our mind-in-the-language so that our ideas-in-words will float effortlessly; then, we can start to write.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Swimmer of noonday, lean for the perfect dive To the dead Mother's face, whose subtile down... You had not seen take amber light alive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To me, the sea is like a person--like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I t...alk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »