Quotes from Bonnie Tsui

You don't have to be a great swimmer to appreciate the benefits of sensory solitude and the equilibrium the water can bring.

Buoyancy, floating, weightlessness. Freedom. These are the words we use to talk about swimming. Is it a coincidence that this is also the language we use to talk about the lightness of being, the wellness of being, that we strive for in this corporeal world?

Franz Kafka observed that "the truth is always an abyss. One must—as in a swimming pool—dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order later to rise again—laughing and fighting for breath—to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

I begin to realize that the physical repetition can be a kind of meditation that transcends the simple goal of winning a race.

How nice it would be to die swimming toward the sun. —Le Corbusier

I will tell you the one thing that distinguishes swimming from all other forms of exercise." I listen carefully. "People enjoy it a lot more.

Over time, swimming has shifted from mere mechanics and survival—a military skill, practiced by men—to achieve a more intangible significance: a form of recreation, a pleasure, something that can sharpen your spiritual as well as physical health. This idea of swimming for wellness, emotional resonance, whole personhood, rings true to me. The physical is intertwined with the psychological.

We dare to jump so we can see something new. And sometimes we do it to recover a sense of what we once had.

Seawater is so similar in mineral content to human blood plasma that our white blood cells can survive and function in it for some time. I delight in my mental picture of this, the not-so-fanciful notion that we have seawater circulating in our veins.

Three decades of swimming, of chasing equilibrium, have kept my head firmly above water. Swimming can enable survival in ways beyond the physical.

Athletes who can perform on demand—Torres, Phelps, Ledecky—are enough like SEALs that this was Bauman's mantra for the American swimmers in Rio, in 2016: Swim like a dolphin, think like a SEAL.

Important, too, is the pride we feel in the well-exercised body. "The fuller sense of self we have," Young once told an interviewer, "the more responsibility we take for it.

Some of the benefits of swimming derive, ironically, from daring to come as close as we can to this very fight for survival. That's the sublime: the awe and the terror, together. Those moments of panic, the electric flashes of fear, are elucidating, exhilarating. The act of getting in is a small defiance of death itself.

Swimming is the second most popular recreational activity in America, outranked only by walking. But swimming is the one that quite literally takes us out of our element.

There's a giddiness to being in that water," Kim observes. "It connects with a playfulness that we forget about as adults.

Swimming is a way for us to remember how to play.

Dave Rastovich: "We forget our bodies as we know them and we just . . . swim.

If a film needed an exotic backdrop… Chinatown could be made to represent itself or any other Chinatown in the world. Even today, it stands in for the ambiguous Asian anywhere.

In America, the pool is a privilege. People have historically had complicated feelings about water. Mixing in it deliberately—as men and women, as rich and poor, as black and brown and white—can stir up all kinds of fears. As a society, we've kept different groups apart based on those fears.

Though class lines had been erased at the pool, race lines hardened even further, resulting in riots and racial segregation.

This was a fight not just for the right of access but for the right of recreation, of leisure, no matter what your skin color. Many activists saw pools and beaches as the ultimate symbols of that freedom. In the mingling of bodies, in the act of sharing the same water with others, you can read volumes.

Black children drown at a rate five times that of white children. And as with so many other things, money also has a heavy hand in the way swimmers are made: in the United States, nearly 80 percent of children in families with a household income of less than fifty thousand dollars have no or low swimming ability.

The original prohibitions at public pools were put in place in fear of this very thing: people of different races, genders, and backgrounds mixing together.

When I ask one swimmer, a middle-aged woman named Kate, how she'd characterize the two clubs, she confides that the Dolphin Club is "like living with your parents—we're more conservative. The South End is like the frat house. They're more risky." Standing next to Kate is her friend, a South Ender, who laughs appreciatively at this.)