When Your Drowning Quotes & Sayings

People often compare
depression to drowning.

That is not even close.

Consider sitting in a dark room
scared and confused -
Choking on something you
know nothing about,
For reasons you cannot comprehend.

That is depression.

When you are drowning,
you can still flail your arms,
call for help, and try your best
to keep afloat.

In depression, you do nothing.
Absolutely nothing. — Akif Kichloo

I can't speak. I have no voice. I just stare at his dark blue yes. It feels as though I let the lifeboat sail away. I'm drowning in a sea of pain. He reached out, but I can't take his hand. — H.M. Ward

Last night I had a nightmare. That me and someone I cared a lot about were playing a game in a pool. We'd take turns submerging ourselves under the water while the other person kept time.
At one point it felt like the other person might be drowning, so I jumped in to pull her up. She smiled and laughed and pushed me away. Then she turned blue and died. I could not resuciate her.
I woke up at 3, sweating, in shock and pain. Frightened. But then I realized it was only a dream. But then I realized it was just like real life ...
Sometimes people we care about play risky games and then don't want our help. There is nothing we can do for them, no matter how much we care ... — Jose N. Harris

When she was eighteen years old she had almost drowned in the Kennebec River, not because of the pummeling current, but because she couldn't come up with a casual phrase with which to call for rescue. "Help!" was such a cliche. By the time she was willing to scream, she had no breath left, and it was just blind luck that somebody saw her gasping and floundering and pulled her to shore. "Why didn't you say something?" they wanted to know, and she said, "I'm not a screamer." "Jesus," said one of them, "couldn't you have made an exception this one time?" "Apparently not," she said. — Jincy Willett

I can't breathe," she said. "I feel like I'm drowning in a gray sea, like they're flooding the whole city, washing away our past and people, dashing everything from the face of the earth." Jammed — Diane Ackerman

Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning. — Anais Nin

Promises. I was drowning in promises. — Richelle Mead

They thought they were helping me ...
but I didn't need help.
They thought they were fixing me ...
but I wasn't broken.
They thought they were watering me ...
but they were drowning me. — Steve Maraboli

Believe that you are someone worth saving. — Slade Combs

SINK OR SWIM ALERT
Folks with low self-esteem will push you under to save their drowning egos
Kamil Ali — Kamil Ali

What I like best about underwater photography is giving a visual voice to the invisible. What I like least is the prospect of drowning. — David Doubilet

I've lined my throat
with the river bottom's best
silt,

allowed my fingers to shrivel
and be taken for crawfish.

I've laced my eyelashes with algae.

I blink emerald.
I blink sea glass green.

I am whatever gleams
just under the surface.

Scoop at my sparkle. I'll give you nothing
but disturbed reflection.

Bring your ear to the water
and I'll sing you

down into my arms.

Let me show you how

to make your lungs
a home for minnows, how

to let them flicker

like silver

in and out of your mouth
like last words,

like air. — Saeed Jones

I intend to take your fucking denial. If I have to keep you tied all fucking day and night. I'm going to strip you down. Until you're drowning in pain and betrayal, until there is nothing but the blood in your past, and me. Saving you. — Lucian Bane

I remember a story I once heard about drowning: that when you fall into cold water it's not that you drown right away but that the cold disorients you and makes you think that down is up and up is down, so you may be swimming, swimming, swimming for your life in the wrong direction, all the way toward the bottom until you sink. That's how I feel, as though everything has been turned around. — Lauren Oliver

It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to speak from under the water. And how do you know what it's like to try to speak from under water when you're drowned? — Jean Rhys

We are all hurting and missing people. Everyone is scared, so you can't talk about your worries because worries are everywhere. When everyone you know is on the verge of drowning, you don't stop to tell the person next to you that you don't like swimming.
You just don't. — Veronica Rossi

Figure two-, three-hundred-kilometer-an-hour winds, lightning, torrential rains. You're far enough inland to avoid the three-kilometer-high tsunami." "Basic wrath of God package, minus drowning, — James S.A. Corey

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.
There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.
I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.
You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land. — Pablo Neruda

Race is the great taboo in our society. We are afraid to talk about it. White folks fear their unspoken views will be deemed racist. People of color are filled with sorrow and rage at unrighted wrongs. Drowning in silence, we are brothers and sisters drowning each other. Once we decide to transform ourselves from fearful caterpillars into courageous butterflies, we will be able to bridge the racial gulf and move forward together towards a bright and colorful future. — Eva Paterson

What love is not torment when a man knows not how to love himself? Talk not of drowning, but attaining your heart's desire by action: Put money in thy purse. — Christopher Moore

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. — John Naisbitt

What does it feel like to have them want you so badly? Is it, you know, because of your father?" He dipped his head and didn't answer for a long moment. When he did, it was a mere whisper on the air: "It feels ... It feels like I'm drowning. — Darynda Jones

All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own. — Monique Truong

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

When you're confronted by a really difficult thing in your life, you're faced with a choice: you can runaway from it, or you can face it, confront it, and work through it. But to work through it, sometimes feels like holding your own head below water when you're already drowning. Your natural instinct when drowning is to get back up to the surface and give yourself some relief from that terrible situation ... you just want to breathe again. — Buck 65

Even the laziest person will fight for oxygen when drowning. — J.R. Rim

I realised I really didn't know what I was doing and I felt her trace drowning in the middle of the cars and the people, in the middle of the streets and far away, in the secrets she so jealously kept.
I felt it. We were ever so close, ever so far. — Emiliano Campuzano

One way to overcome a fear of drowning is to become buoyant in the sea of life. — Gia Sola

When she emerged, Keith was watching the tiny round window of the under-the-counter washing machine.
"Put your clothes in for a wash," he said. "They were disgusting."
Ginny always thought that the only way of getting clothes clean was by drowning them in scalding water and then whipping them around in a violent centrifugal motion that caused the entire washing machine to vibrate and the floor to shake. You beat them clean. You made them suffer. This machine used about half a cup of water and was about as violent as a toaster, plus it stopped every few minutes, as if it were exhausted from the effort of turning itself.
Sluff, sluff, sluff sluff. Rest. Rest. Rest.
Click.
Sluff, sluff, sluff, sluff. Rest. Rest. Rest.
"Who thought to put a window on a washing machine?" Keith asked. "Does anyone just sit and watch their wash?"
You mean, besides us?"
"Well," he said, "yeah. Is there any coffee? — Maureen Johnson

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

In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it. — Olivia Sudjic

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

She had a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, like when you're swimming and you want to put your feet down on something solid, but the water's deeper than you think and there's nothing there — Julia Gregson

If you are drowning in a sewer, your first concern might be that you are drowning, not how vile you smell. — Geraldine Brooks

You sit at the edge of the world,
I am in a crater that's no more.
Words without letters
Standing in the shadow of the door.
The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard,
Little fish rain from the sky.
Outside the window there are soldiers,
steeling themselves to die.
(Refrain)
Kafka sits in a chair by the shore,
Thinking for the pendulum that moves the world, it seems.
When your heart is closed,
The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx,
Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.
The drowning girl's fingers
Search for the entrance stone, and more.
Lifting the hem of her azure dress,
She gazes
at Kafka on the shore — Haruki Murakami

When it comes to the crusty behavior of some people, give them the benefit of the doubt. They may be drowning right before your eyes, but you can't see it. And you'd never ask someone to drown with a smile on his face. — Richelle E. Goodrich

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

Distract yourself, that's what Margaret always told him. When you start getting anxious, give your mind something else to think about. He had become an expert at distracting himself. He had distracted himself so much, he found himself drowning in distractions, and all the little details in the world seemed to join up together in his head and make a whole new problem to worry about. — Joanna Cannon

Is there anything courageous or brave about making the only possible choice that will save your life? When you're drowning, you grab any hand that's offered. To me, bravery is a spontaneous decision to save somebody else's life when your own is in danger. — Claire Sylvia

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

The worst thing, is that you'll never know the feeling of falling. Falling so in love with someone, and I don't mean love, I mean Love Love. The Mom and Dad love. The love that's so instant and intense and easy and it feels like all the worlds forces collide and fate gives you a push and you're there, in front of the person who's part of you. Like, the world spins and your heart explodes and you want nothing else at all in the entire universe, as long as you can be with that one person all the time, and when you're not, you just think about that person until your mind is consumed and it's almost like you're suffocating and drowning but in a good way, because it's your love that's all around you. — Jay Maclean

Who Do You Turn To? By Sydney Baker

When you've lost all of your hope,
Who do you turn to?
When your heart turns black because of
The torture that you have been forced to face,
Who do you turn to?
When you find yourself trapped in your mind,
Drowning in a pool of sorrow,
Who do you turn to?
I do not know the answer to these questions,
Seeing that I am still trying to figure them out myself,
But I'm asking you.
So, when you've lost all hope.
And your heart is black because of the pain you've been faced with.
And you're trapped and drowning in your dark, clouded mind.
Who do you turn to? — Deanna Frances

The trouble with drowning in the mess of your own life is that you're not in any shape to save anyone else. You can't be a lighthouse when you're underwater yourself. — Lisa Wingate

Ya got cigarettes?" she asks. "Yes," I say,
"I got cigarettes." "Matches?" she asks.
"Enough to burn Rome." "Whiskey?"
"Enough whiskey for a Mississippi River
of pain." "You drunk?" "Not yet. — Charles Bukowski

But it does not really matter how you got here or why; and it doesn't really matter if it was God or the devil or yourself or some ancient chaos that spilled up from the bottom of the sea. What matters now is that you are drowning, and the world you loved before is not your world any longer. The questions of why and how are less pressing than the reality that is your lungs filling with water now. Philosophy and theology won't help you much here, because what you believe existentially about storms or oceans or drowning won't make you stop drowning. Religion won't do you much good down here, because beliefs can't keep you warm when you're twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea. — Jonathan Martin

Wanna know what a bullet feels like, Warren? A real one? It's not like in the comics ... I think you need to. Feel it ... It's not going to make a neat little hole. First - it'll obliterate your internal organs. Your lung will collapse, feels like drowning ... When it finally hits your spine, it'll blow your central nervous system- ... I'm talking. The pain will be unbearable, but you won't be able to move ... A bullet usually travels faster than this, of course. But the dying? It seems like it takes forever. Something, isn't it? One tiny piece of metal destroys everything. It ripped her insides out ... It took her light away. From me. From the world ... And now the one person who should be here is gone - and a waste like you gets to live. A tiny piece of metal. Can you feel it now? — Joss Whedon

There are moments when your heart breaks and melts at the same time. When there's so much love flooding your soul that you're drowning in the tide. This is that moment with Noah. — Katie McGarry

When you hang on to your past, you are gripping an anchor that is swiftly moving to the bottom of the ocean. Sure, you have something to hang on to, but you are drowning, too. — Brooks Palmer

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

I feel like my blood a giant river swell up inside me and I'm drowning. My head all dark inside. Feel like giant river I never cross in front me now. Ms Rain say, You not writing Precious. I say I drownin' in river. She don't look me like I'm crazy but say, If you just sit there the river gonna rise up drown you! Writing could be the boat to carry you to the other side. — Sapphire.

I had spent the day
friendless, lonely and sad,
a stranger to myself.



After drowning the day
on the sea shore,
I walked back
to my empty house
on the deserted street.



The moment
I opened the door,
the book on my table
flipped its pages
and said:

"Friend,
Where were you
for so long? — Gulzar

And like a drowning woman who chooses the black sea instead of rescue, she did not take it. — Tess Gerritsen

Rose was drowning in pleasure like she'd never known, just from a kiss. Jack wasn't touching her any place but on the lips and yet she could feel it on every inch of her body. Long, sure strokes of his tongue made her ache for him to explore the rest of her with equal thoroughness. She needed to touch him, why wasn't she touching him? — Mary J. Williams

That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children - fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not understand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body in his small hands. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Although when there were too many people around- which there certainly were today- it was hard even to remember to say thank you: all those people were like drowning. — Robin McKinley

I am the love.
I am drowning in your love.
I am drunk with your love.
I am a dumb for your love.
I am crazy about your love.
I dream at night about love.
I know that you're my love,
but I forgot how to love
because I become the love. — Debasish Mridha

She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey. — Chris Cleave

I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on a shelf. — Erri De Luca

Yet instead of drowning in the darkness that had threatened to suck her under, Brenna had said "fuck you" to the monster who'd hurt her, and she'd chosen to live. She'd not only wrenched back control of her own life, she'd taken on an Arrow and claimed him as her mate. — Nalini Singh

I leaned toward him and whispered, "I'm drowning. Save me." But when I tried to grasp his shoulder my hand passed through him.
"I'm over here," he said.
I said, "No wonder I can't touch you. You're dead too." Or perhaps I didn't say it. — Sarah Micklem

Sophie: "For the Create-A-Tale Competition, your story ended with Snow White eaten by vultures and Cinderella drowning her-self in a tub."
Agatha: "I thought it was a better ending. — Soman Chainani

I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut - this indescribably emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do.
Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner. — Hugh Howey

She was floating in the midst of a black sea, in the darkest of nights, with no hope or care to see light again. She was a mere wave away from drowning in blackness. — Anam Iqbal

The poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man — Franz Kafka

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other. — Anatole Broyard

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

Safety was one thing, but what he really wanted was to be electrified, to be wounded, to be cast into the wilderness, to be released, to be exalted, and most especially to be surrounded by the drowning noise and ebullience and casual presence of friends calling out his name, demanding his presence. — Carol Shields

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

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

You ain't no Hepburn and I ain't no Fonda, but if you were drowning in Golden Ponda, mouth to mouth I'd resuscitate you. — Alice Cooper

You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who's saved? Who's not? — Amy Tan

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

He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud. — Victor Hugo

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

It's only water," she said.
"Tell that to a drowning man," Giddon said. — Kristin Cashore

The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies ; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, for ever. Pause, my soul , On these strange words for ever whose large sound Breaks flood-like, drowning all the petty noise Our human moans make on the shores of Time . O Thou that openest, and no man shuts; That shut'st, and no man opens Thee we wait! — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

Thinking about averting plane crashes in 1935, or stopping infections of central lines in 2003, or rescuing drowning victims today, I realized that the key problem in each instance was essentially a simple one, despite the number of contributing factors. — Atul Gawande

Oil is drowning our oceans and drowning our boreal forests. — Winona LaDuke

I believe a Christian muffler shop owner should have the same right to refuse service to a gay couple, as a gay lifeguard has to refuse service to a drowning Christian. — Quentin R. Bufogle

L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning. — Dennis Lehane