The Drowning Man Quotes

#1. The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one's gloves.

O. Henry

#2. You must cry out if you want help. It is no use whatsoever to suffer in silence. Who will succour the drowning man if he does not clamour for his life?

Kamala Markandaya

#3. Only the wise know just where predestination ends and free will begins. Meanwhile, you must keep on doing your best, according to your own clearest understanding. you must long for freedom as the drowning man longs for air. Without sincere longing, you will never find God.

Paramahansa Yogananda

#4. The drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable - except when you see it happen in the drawing room.

Frank Herbert

#5. The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

C.S. Lewis

#6. Shame isn't a quiet grey cloud, shame is a drowning man who claws his way on top of you, scratching and tearing your skin, pushing you under the surface.

Kirsty Eagar

#7. I love you the way a drowning man loves air. And it would destroy me to have you just a little.

Rae Carson

#8. The man in ecstasy and the man drowning - both throw up their arms.

Franz Kafka

#9. Everything is valuable under the right conditions. To a man dying of thirst, water be more precious than gold. To a drowning man, water be of little worth and great trouble.

Terry Goodkind

#10. For God's sake, man," Ovid nearly shouted, "the damn globe is catching fire, and the islands are drowning. The evidence is staring them in the face.

Barbara Kingsolver

#11. Adrift and unmoored, she had tried again and again to throw him a rope to save him from the raging waters. And now he no longer felt like a drowning man at sea. Nora ... the siren and the goddess, the ship and the wine-dark sea. She would either save him or end him.

Tiffany Reisz

#12. Part of me wants to ignore the wrongness and just believe him, but then I'd be pretending as much as he is. No matter how much I want to deny the truth, it gets more obvious every day that he's a drowning man clinging to a sinking raft.

Anonymous

#13. It was as helpful as throwing a drowning man both ends of the rope.

Arthur Baer

#14. If a boat is shattered by a storm, the desperate passengers cling to the floating pieces of the hull. In that moment, it's not a broken boat. To a drowning man, it's a floating miracle.

Elmer Seward

#15. One never dives into the water to save a drowning man more eagerly than when there are others present who dare not take the risk.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#16. The black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.

Steven Biko

#17. At times he swears that he's going to go straight, but mostly he feels like a drowning man in love with the surf.

A.S.A Harrison

#18. For the first time in his life, he was receiving the priceless gift of a woman's unconditional love and acceptance. It contradicted all that he knew about love, all that he had taught others. And he found himself needing it like a drowning man needs air to breathe and solid ground under his feet.

Barbara Branden

#19. I never had a lot of drive, but because I had family responsibilities, I had a lot of tenacity - the tenacity of a drowning man.

Dick Van Dyke

#20. 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

#21. They say that when a man is going to drown, when he finally gives up the struggle - it's sort of blissful, for a moment. And then he drowns.

John Hodge

#22. Moments later, I too came up from a lake of sleep, like a drowning man rising to air, and for several moments I lay in the darkness, bewildered.

Jonathan Aycliffe

#23. Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning. I was much further out than you thought, and not waving but drowning. I was much too far out all my life, And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith

#24. Now here was Saeed Saeed, and Biju's admiration for the man confounded him. Fate worked this way. Biju was overcome by the desire to be his friend, because Saeed Saeed wasn't drowning, he was bobbing in the tides.

Kiran Desai

#25. A drowning man cannot be saved until he is utterly exhausted and ceases to make the slightest effort to save himself.

Watchman Nee

#26. Or perhaps it is because it is so NECESSARY for you to win. It is like a drowning man catching at a straw. You yourself will agree that, unless he were drowning he would not mistake a straw for the trunk of a tree.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#27. I turned on the pillow with a little moan, and at this juncture Jeeves entered with the vital oolong. I clutched at it like a drowning man at a straw hat.

P.G. Wodehouse

#28. The poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man

Franz Kafka

#29. The man of method may channel all his spiritual currents towards productive ends, be relentless in his suppression of predilection and propensity, but when accident upsets the flow of his life, he finds himself drowning in a sea of tedium, hatred, and rage.

Juan Filloy

#30. So often we have a kind of vague, wistful longing that the promises of Jesus should be true. The only way really to enter into them is to believe them with the clutching intensity of a drowning man.

William Barclay

#31. It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know Im drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can't breathe

Ray Bradbury

#32. Here and there, plumes of dark smoke reach into the sky like the fingers of a drowning man reaching up for the last time.

Susan Ee

#33. It's like saying to a drowning man: What a pity, what a pity! If you had only let me teach you how to swim! Everybody wants to right the world, nobody wants help his neighbor. They want to make a man of you without taking your body into consideration. It's all cockeyed.

Henry Miller

#34. If I'm walking down the riverbank, and a man is drowning, even if I don't know how to swim very well, I feel this urge that the right thing to do is to try to save that person. Evolution would tell me exactly the opposite: preserve your DNA. Who cares about the guy who's drowning?

Francis Collins

#35. I love you with the passion of a drowning man for breathing air. I can't just have enough of you and having you a little would be disastrous.

Sandra Thomas

#36. It is very difficult to appreciate from the outside what a person in severe anxiety is experiencing. Brown rightly remarked about his friends 'imploring a drowning man [me] to swim when they don't know that under the water his hands and feet are tied.

Rollo May

#37. Who wants to do good in this world must deny oneself. A man does not live on this Earth to be happy or to be honest only - he has to do great things for humanity, achieve the generosity of the spirit and rise above the banality where most of the people are drowning and wasting their days.

Irving Stone

#38. He kissed him like a man starved, thrusting his tongue past his parted lips and drowning himself in the taste and feel of Paul after three weeks without him.

Kele Moon

#39. The power of a woman is in the tears she sheds, and the power of a man is wiping those tears while shedding his own.

Michael Jones

#40. Each person bears a fear which is special to him. One man fears a close space and another man fears drowning; each laughs at the other and calls him stupid. Thus fear is only a preference, to be counted the same as the preference for one woman or another, or mutton for pig, or cabbage for onion.

Michael Crichton

#41. Do not be angry with the audacity of a desperate and drowning man for making a last effort to save himself from perdition.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#42. Tell her this
And more,
That the king of the seas
Weeps too, old, helpless man.
The bustling fates
Heap his hands with corpses
Until he stands like a child
With surplus of toys.

Stephen Crane

#43. Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.

Anais Nin

#44. What are you, the boogey man?"

Strike three- her joke sucked. His eyes darkened, and he moved so close his shaggy bangs tickled her brow. She swallowed hard, staring up into his dangerously arctic eyes, drowning in the darkness reflected behind them.

"Yeah. Somethin' like that.

Amy Cook

#45. The king greeted the document (the Collectanea) not so much as a drowning man greets a straw but as he might a rescue party from outer space.

Eric Ives