Like A Drop Of Water Quotes & Sayings

Love, it's such a night, laced with running water, irreparable, riddled with a million leaks. A night shaped like a shadow thrown by your absence. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. The screech of nighthawks has been replaced by the splash of rain. The rain falls from the height of streetlights. Each drop contains its own shattering blue bulb. — Stuart Dybek

And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the tip of a branch - it is not the moment of bringing your whole life to another - but rather, it is everything you leave behind. At that moment.
Even that night, the night he touched one inch of her in the dark, how simply Avery seemed to accept the facts - that they were on the edge of lifelong happiness and, therefore, inescapable sorrow. It was as if, long ago, a part of him had broken off inside, and now finally, he recognised the dangerous fragment that had been floating in his system, causing him intermittent pain over the years. As if he could now say of that ache: Ah. It was you. — Anne Michaels

The hot sun struck the backs of their close-shaven necks. It was a peaceful, uneventful, glorious Sunday afternoon. Yet Kiyoaki remained convinced that at the bottom of this world, which was like a leather bag filled with water, there was a little hole, and it seemed to him that he could hear time leaking from it, drop by drop. — Yukio Mishima

Even the pearl at her earlobe looked alive, like a drop of water that a touch might destroy. — Patricia Highsmith

Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves ... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.
She felt overwhelmed. It was
she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library
a lot like being in love for the first time. — Robert Jackson Bennett

I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it.
I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I'm so sad and I can't really see a way out of what I'm feeling but I'm leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I'm already hurting. I'm not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America. — Kiese Laymon

Our bounty, like a drop of water, disappears, when diffus'd too widely — Oliver Goldsmith

It was a thing that could not be articulated or explained. It merely was, like the sunrise or a sheer and sudden drop to the giant water that had stolen my breath, where the land ended in the ruins. My love for Fade strengthened me, made me determined never to give up. I would follow him until the world stopped or until I found him. I believed love hadn't weakened me or left me soft; instead it made me powerful, determined beyond all belief. — Ann Aguirre

I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn't go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god's knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery. The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don't share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death. — Marcus Speh

I read lots of local newspapers and particularly the shortest articles in them, and most particularly any articles that are full of words in combinations that are arresting. In the case of the orchid story I was interested to see the words 'swamp' and 'orchids' and 'Seminoles' and 'cloning' and 'criminal' together in one short piece. Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something more, some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can't believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water. — Susan Orlean

Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all. And if that wasn't funny, there were lots of things that weren't even funnier. There was nothing funny about living like a bum in a tent in Pianosa between fat mountains behind him and a placid blue sea in front that could gulp down a person with a cramp in the twinkling of an eye and ship him back to shore three days later, all charges paid, bloated, blue and putrescent, water draining out through both cold nostrils. — Joseph Heller

Think then what it is to live on here eternally and yet be human; to
age in soul and see our beloved die and pass to lands whither we may
not hope to follow; to wait while drop by drop the curse of the long
centuries falls upon our imperishable being, like water slow dripping
on a diamond that it cannot wear, till they be born anew forgetful of
us, and again sink from our helpless arms into the void unknowable. — H. Rider Haggard

A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal ... — Bertrand Russell

Serious as shit right now, Izzy. You keep looking at me like I'm the last drop of water left over after a long-ass drought and I will take you right here in the doorway. Jesus Christ, I'm so fucking hard right now, I think I really could hammer nails. — Harper Sloan

You play beautifully," she told him, although the music was obscurely classical and, because there were no lyrics, unmemorable to her. But the compliment was like a drop of water on the dry wool of his face. His cheeks seemed to soften, color, even swell. "I hope it doesn't disturb you," he said. She held out her hand, the thin string of the bakery box looped around her wrist. "Not at all," she said, although three or four times now she had hung on her husband's arm to keep him from banging the broom handle against the ceiling. "We enjoy it," she said. And then, at a loss for a more substantial compliment, she added, "You must have some beautiful piano. — Alice McDermott

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect. — George R R Martin

So many kinds of people exist
hundreds of plans for profit and fame
hearts intent on glory
always trying to get rich
minds that never rest
rushing about like smoke
dependents gather around
one yell and a hundred heads nod
but less than seventy years from now
ice becomes water and roof tiles break
dead at last all cares cease
who will be their heir
drop a ball of mud in water
and behold the thoughtless mind — Han-shan

I'll never see Ivy alive again.
But she's still everywhere. In every drop of bubbling swamp water. In every leaf hanging from every tree. In every speck of swamp mud. In every blade of grass. In every gift she left behind for me: two sacks of miscellaneous objects, a grass bracelet, her home, her love, and my life.
A swamp angel named Ivy lived in my backyard. And now she doesn't.
But wherever she is, I know she's watching me.
Just like the angel she's always been. — Colleen Boyd

Faith and doubt cannot reside together. An iota of doubt is enough to taint the entire process, it is like a drop of red ink in water. — Malti Bhojwani

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment ... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. — Alfred North Whitehead

It may seem rash indeed to draw conclusions valid for the whole universe from what we can see from the small corner to which we are confined. Who knows that the whole visible universe is not like a drop of water at the surface of the earth? Inhabitants of that drop of water, as small relative to it as we are relative to the Milky Way, could not possibly imagine that beside the drop of water there might be a piece of iron or a living tissue, in which the properties of matter are entirely different. — Emile Borel

Knowing before ever seeing it that her ass was like a stationary drop of water on a flower stem — Brian McGreevy

But when one masters this wretched desire, which is so hard to overcome, then one's sorrows just drop off, like a drop of water off a lotus. — Gautama Buddha

Their fights didn't so much end as dissipate, like a drop of ink in a bowl of water, with a residual taint that lingered. — Khaled Hosseini

For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead
indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can't sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed. — Yoko Ogawa

Speech sounds can be analyzed into fundamental units called phonemes; these move around like protozoa in a drop of water, and, like protozoa, join together and split up. — L. Sprague De Camp

We are like a drop of water in a vast, divine ocean, distinct yet immersed in something much larger than ourselves. It's only when we experience our connection to infinity that we're able to dream powerfully. — Alberto Villoldo

And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water - things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other - forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings. ("The House And The Brain") — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

You're gonna fall now,' I heard Angel say in a normal voice. I swung my head to see gravely watching an Eraser who looked confused, paralyzed. Angel shifted her gaze to the water below. Fear entered the Eraser's eyes, and his wings folded. He dropped like a rock.
You're getting scary, you know that?'I said to Angel, not really kidding. I mean, making an Eraser drop right out of the sky just by telling him to - jeez. — James Patterson

Is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude. And stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks. And nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh unto the other ... And the tall primeval trees rock eternally hither and thither with a crashing and mighty sound. And from their high summits, one by one, drop everlasting dews. And at the roots strange poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed slumber. And overhead, with a rustling loud noise, the gray clouds rush westwardly forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall of the horizon ... — Edgar Allan Poe

Anti-alcoholics are unfortunates in the grip of water, that terrible poison, so corrosive that out of all substances it has been chosen for washing and scouring, and a drop of water added to a clear liquid like Absinthe, muddles it. — Alfred Jarry

I am like a drop of water on a rock. After drip, drip, dripping in the same place, I begin to leave a mark, and I leave my mark in many people's hearts. — Rigoberta Menchu

I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself. — William Shakespeare

I pursed my lips. "Well maybe I didn't," I said. I felt horribly like a hoodwinked schoolgirl. "Understand, I mean." Mirela sighed and stroked her hand and looked down at the cold shaft of the prosthesis. "We had a nice time, didn't we? But now we have to go back to our lives. You know that." I got up and began storming about the room. "But you don't - " I said agitatedly. "I mean to say you don't love him - " She could not have turned cooler if I had poured iced water over her; I could feel the temperature in the room drop. "I never said it had anything to do with love," she said impersonally, like a piano teacher correcting a child who keeps fudging his scales. "Who or what I love is my business. I said I needed him. — Paul Murray

Sally rolled her eyes. "Will there ever be a time that I don't have to send you two to opposite corners?"
"When hell freezes."
"And the people there finally get that glass of ice water they've been waiting on," Jen added.
Jacque reached around Sally, her fist balled. "I like that one."
Jen bumped Jacque's fist and winked. "I know, right? I came up with that one just now."
"Oooh, pretty and quick witted."
"What can I say, wolf princess? I'm the total package. — Quinn Loftis

There's a planet,' said Spike, 'made of water, entirely of water, where every solid thing is its watery equivalent. There are no seas because there is no land. There are no rivers because there are no banks. There is no thirst because there is no dry.
'The planet is like a bowl of water except that there is no bowl. It hangs in space as a drop of water hangs from a leaf, except that there is no leaf. It cannot exist, and yet it does. I tell you this so you know that what is impossible sometimes happens. — Jeanette Winterson

Mountains and oceans have whole worlds of innumerable wondrous features. We should understand that it is not only our distant surroundings that are like this, but even what is right here, even a single drop of water. — Dogen

Sonnet LXXXI
And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping ember.
No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.
Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away;
your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move
after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all. — Pablo Neruda

When one, abandoning greed, feels no greed for what would merit greed, greed gets shed from him - like a drop of water from a lotus leaf. — Gautama Buddha

You sleep with a dream of summer weather,
wake to the thrum of rain - roped down by rain.
Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass
and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace
has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.
The mountains have had the sense to disappear.
It's the Celtic temperament - wind, then torrents, then remorse.
Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.
Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,
docks in a pool of shadow all its own.
That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.
Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on. — Anne Stevenson

Ruffles all the surface of the lake In striving from its crystal face to take Some diamond water drops, and them to treasure In milky nest, and sip them off at leisure. But not a moment can he there insure them, Nor to such downy rest can he allure them; For down they rush as though they would be free, And drop like hours into eternity. — John Keats

It helps to think of a self as being like a drop of water that goes into the ocean and becomes one with the ocean.Each drop still exists but is now part of a much larger entity; yet it still does its small part as an element of the ocean.As significant as a single drop may appear,if it were not for all the drops,there would be no ocean. — David V. Gaggin

Livin' is like pourin' water out of a tumbler into a dang Coca-Cola bottle. If'n you skeered you can't do it, you cain't. If'n you say to yourself, "By dang, I can do it!" then, by dang, you won't slosh a drop. — Olive Ann Burns

Know the world from end to end is a mirror;
in each atom a hundred suns are concealed.
If you pierce the heart of a single drop of water,
from it will flow a hundred clear oceans;
if you look intently at each speck of dust,
in it you will see a thousand beings.
A gnat in its limbs is like an elephant;
in name a drop of water resembles the Nile.
In the heart of a barleycorn is stored a hundred harvests.
Within a millet-seed a world exists.
In an insects wing is an ocean of life.
A heaven is concealed in the pupil of an eye.
The core at the center of the heart is small,
yet the Lord of both worlds will enter there. — Mahmud Shabistari

She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn't something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water. — Roman Payne

As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free. That nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you. You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, in almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions. You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist. Across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive without joy and without sadness. Without a future and without a past. Just like that: simply, self evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing. — Georges Perec

Like a drop of ink in water, the urge rushed to the surface and then slowly spread out and thinned until I was made slightly darker by it. — Brielle A. Marino

In the case of those who are making progress from good to better, the good angel touches the soul gently, lightly, sweetly, as a drop of water enters a sponge, while the evil spirit touches it sharply, with noise and disturbance, like a drop of water falling on a rock. — Ignatius Of Loyola

Crayfish," I said. I dumped out a tin of water. "Really?" I nodded. "Big ones?" "Not these. You can find them, though." "Can I see?" She dropped down off the bank just like a boy would, not sitting first, just putting her left hand to the ground and vaulting the three-foot drop to the first big stone in the line that led zigzag across the water. She studied the line a moment and then crossed to the Rock. I was impressed. She had no hesitation and her balance was perfect. I made room for her. There was suddenly this fine clean smell sitting next to me. Her eyes were green. She looked around. To all of us back then the Rock was something special. It sat smack in the middle of the deepest part of the brook, the water running clear and fast around it. — Jack Ketchum

I know how bad a thing it is to be a slave and I know how terrible it was but I don't believe that there's a free person in the whole world that knows how good a cup full of water can taste. Because you have to be a deprived slave, to be kept waiting for your water like we were to really appreciate how good just one swallow can be. When we finally got a drop on our tongues it was like something straight from the hands of the Almighty. — Walter Mosley

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii. — Ross Macdonald

Chaos theory treats the behavior of a whole system like a drop of water moving on a complicated propeller surface. The drop may spiral down, or slip outward toward the edge. It may do many different things, depending. But it will always move along the surface of the propeller." "Okay." "Malcolm's models tend to have a ledge, or a sharp incline, where the drop of water will speed up greatly. He modestly calls this speeding-up movement the Malcolm Effect. The whole system could suddenly collapse. And that was what he said about Jurassic Park. — Michael Crichton

On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that's my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I'm going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that's the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket's going to have some water in it. — John McPhee

As a little drop of water added to a quantity of wine is completely dispersed and takes on the color and taste of wine, as red-hot iron becomes like molten fire losing its original form, as air when it is inundated with the sun's light is transformed into total splendor and clarity so that it no longer seems illuminated but, rather, seems to be light itself, so I felt myself die of tender liquefaction, and I had only the strength left to murmur the words of the psalm: "Behold my bosom is like new wine, sealed, which bursts new vessels," and suddenly I saw a brilliant light and in it a saffron-colored form which flamed up in a sweet and shining fire, and that splendid light spread through all the shining fire, and this shining fire through that golden form and that brilliant light and that shining fire through the whole form. — Umberto Eco

He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself:
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself. — William Shakespeare

In every drop of water, gust of air, speck of earth, and crackle of lightning, she hears the same thing: This world is alive. And it loves her.
A little while later, the storm notices that Jael has fallen asleep. The rain tapers off. The clouds sneak away like they're trying not to wake her. The wind caresses her cheek one last time, then disperses in all directions. It carries with it the memory of this funny girl with the sad green eyes. And it carries with it a little bit of hope that things might change. That the world might become what it was supposed to be. — Jon Skovron

For me, creative energy is like an old-fashioned ground-water well. When the well is dry, it's dry. I can dig all I like, and all I'll get for my pains is sore hands, some very bad prose, and maybe (if I'm lucky) a few odd droplets of notes I can actually use. Or not. It's usually not worth it. After many years, I've discovered that it's better to wait until some ground water seeps back into the well rather than to try and lick up every drop as it emerges. — Delia Sherman

There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. — Woody Allen

True joy of nature is when every drop of water shines like a pearl. — Anamika Mishra

She poured the water, arranged some bread near enough the embers to scorch but not catch fire, and looked up at Little John. She was so accustomed to his step, to his bulk, that it took a moment to notice his face; and when she did ... It was, she thought, rather like the moment it took to realize one had cut one's finger as one stared dumbly at the first drop of blood on the knife-blade. You know it is going to hurt quite a lot in a minute. — Robin McKinley

Your soul is like a drop of water yearning to return to the ocean. There it will cease to exist as an individual and instead become a greater existence. It becomes an entire ocean. — Douglas James Cottrell

A biologist from Leningrad, Boris Tokin, described them like this back in 1956: if you add a pinch of crushed spruce or pine needles to a drop of water that contains protozoa, in less than a second, the protozoa are dead. In the same paper, Tokin writes that the air in young pine forests is almost germfree, thanks to the phytoncides released by the needles. In essence, then, trees disinfect their surroundings. — Peter Wohlleben

What books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves ... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger. — Robert Jackson Bennett

It had rained, she said, and I imagined the beads of small water on the windshield like a thousand eyes, or each drop a small imperfect reflection of a perfect moment. — Simon Van Booy

The bottom fell out of my stomach. It was like putting a foot wrong on a frozen creek, the crack of ice, and sudden drop, the knowledge that there was nothing beneath but dark water. — Leigh Bardugo

Would this make sense to the TV audience? That a thing like a protest expands and draws everything into it. He wants to tell his audience that the reality they are seeing on television is not Reality. Imagine a single drop of water: that's the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that's the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that's Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For many people, whatever they see tonight will cement in place everything they think about protest and peace and the sixties. And he feels, pressingly, that it's his job to prevent this closure. — Nathan Hill

...shame spreads through his body like a drop of red dye in water. — Zak Ebrahim

If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect — Irvin D. Yalom

The anger came creeping back like the leak from a dripping water tank, the fall of each individual drop passing almost unnoticed until I realized I was soaked with the emotion. — Anthony Loyd

A single drop of water that had escaped Piggy's fingers now flashed on the delicate curve like a star. — William Golding