I was taught by my father that when someone is drowning you don't ask if they can swim, you just jump in and help.

You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?

You see a man drowning, you must try to save him even if you cannot swim.

When someone was willing to drown with me, I really didn't want to drown anymore.

If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.

You don't drown by falling in water; you only drown if you stay there.

Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.

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.

You have tossed me a lifeline. If you only knew how I'd been drowning, how I'd considered that I'd gone down for the third time long ago, how I kept thrashing around in the water simply because I still felt the impulse to fight back and the tug of a distant shore….

She drank like a drowning man helplessly swallowing sea water, in accordance with some law of nature. To ask for nothing means that one has lost one’s freedom to choose or reject. Once having decided that, one has no choice but to drink anything — even sea water….

Afterwards, however, Etsuko felt none of the nausea of a drowning person. Until the moment of her death, it seemed, no one would know she was drowning. She did not call out — she was a woman bound and gagged by her own hand.

Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.

It isn't falling in that causes you to drown, it's staying in.

If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do all the rest have to drown too?

A lifeguard doesn’t have to spend much time pitching to the drowning person. When you show up with a life buoy, if the drowning person understands what’s at stake, you don’t have to run ads to get them to hold on to it.