Hi quotes on ocean / sea / drowning?
I combined this with your previous ask about sea / sirens x
'Siren Song' & 'This Is a Photograph of Me' by Margaret Atwood
"The sea is incommensurable."
â Nick Lantz, We Donât Know We Donât Know; from âWhat We Know of Death by Drowningâ
"One day I would drown, radiant with joy."
â Roberto BolaĂąo, from â2666â, tr. Natasha Wimmer
"I thought of the sirens in their bloody meadow surrounded by the clean white bones of the men they had seduced and devouredâthe heaps of shinbones, the pelvises like bows, the femurs like arrows."
â Erica Jong, from 'Sappho's Leap'
"Like a deep woman, it hid a good deal; it had many faces, many delicate, terrible veils. It spoke of miracles and distances; if it could court, it could also kill."
â Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams; from âOcean 1212-Wâ
"I held my drowning / in my palm like a giant pearl."
â Nick Lantz, We Donât Know We Donât Know; from âWhat We Know of Death by Drowningâ
"The sea, silver â dreadful, like death."
â Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova: Uncollected Poems and Fragments 1957-1966, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer
"This August I began to dream of drowning."
âAnne Sexton, Live or Die; from âImitations of Drowningâ
"How to explain the irresistible compulsion to join the sea, to be part of it, to sink into the solace of its company?"
â Brian Masters, from âKilling for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsenâ
"Now the Sirens have a still more terrible weapon than their song, namely their silence. Though it has never happened, it is perhaps conceivable that someone might have escaped from their singing, but from their silence certainly not."
"But they â lovelier than ever â craned and twisted, let their gruesome hair float free in the wind, stretched their claws wide on the rocks; they wanted to allure no more, all they wanted was to catch for as long as possible the reflected radiance from the great eyes of Odysseus."
â Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works; from 'The Silence of the Sirens', tr. Malcolm Pasley
"I'll adore you, as a drowned person does the sea."
"Come, I'll draw you the bitter water, / To love your death there in the sea's night"
â RenĂŠe Vivien, The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry; from 'Ransom', tr. Mary Ann Caws
"Each wave-tip glitters like a knife."
â Sylvia Plath, The Colossus & Other Poems; from âA Winter Shipâ
"His drowning never seemed to have affected him as much as I thought it should, he couldnât even remember it. If it had happened to me I would have felt there was something special about me, to be raised from the dead like that; I would have returned with secrets, I would have known things most people didnât."
â Margaret Atwood, from âSurfacingâ
"I am happiest / near the ocean, / where the changing light / reminds me of my death"
â Erica Jong, from At the Edge of the Body; from 'I Live in New York'
"You ask the sea, what can you promise me / and it speaks the truth; it says erasure."
â Louise GlĂźck, A Village Life; from âMarchâ
â Anne Sexton, from âA Self-Portrait in Lettersâ: Alfred Sexton, 7th September 1963
"The waves pulse and pulse like hearts."
â Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems; from 'Whitsun'
"The sea gets into your head [...] once you let it in, it doesnât leave you alone."
â Hannah Kent, from 'Burial Rites'