Quotes

The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. –Marge Piercy

“We come into temporary harmony with the water, and are fortunate to sometimes be allowed to pass through.” Evan Morrison, open-water marathon swimmer, who notes that it echoes: “The best one can hope for is to come to an agreement with a body of water on any given day.” David Barra

“Swimming cultivates imagination; the man with the most is he who can swim his solitary course night or day and forget a black earth full of people that push.” –Annette Kellermann

“We are lent into each other’s keeping.” Our time with each other is borrowed, its duration is unknown, and that uncertainty makes it precious.

A gentleman never dances so well as the dancing master, and an ordinary fiddler makes better musique for a shilling than a gentleman will do after spending forty, and so in all the delights of the world almost. –The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Weds. 27 January 1663/64

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be […

“Everything worth doing takes time. You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one. And you have to sacrifice a lot of things that you might not be prepared for. Like it or not, you are in this alone and have to follow your own star.” Bob Dylan

“I have to say, I get a lot of inspiration from just going out and pretending I’ve never been to this planet before. It’s a great way to remember just how absurd, strange, beautiful, and unlikely everything is around you.” Brendan Constantine

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. —Muriel Rukeyser

As a horse when he has run, a dog when he has tracked the game, a bee when it has made the honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on […]

Few men have souls so dead that they will not bother to look up when they hear the barking of wild Geese. –Roger Tory Peterson (for “men,” modern readers may wish to substitute “people”)