The Bath Quotes

“Hello?"
"You should check the curtains before you take a bath, princess,"a deep, mocking voice says.
"Wha-" I half scream, half yelp as I sit bolt upright in the bath ...
... "Priceless,"he howls, still laughing. You never fail to amuse, princess.”

— Tera Lynn Childs

“Everyone gets killed in the shower. Don't you go to the movies? Psycho. Dead in shower. The MExican in No country for Old Men. Dead in shower. Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath. Almost dead in shower, or in the bath, anyway. But she did that thing with her toe and got out OD. Still the shower, though ... Glen Close in Fatal Attraction. Dead in shower. John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Very dead in shower. But never closets. I can't think of anyone shot in a closet. This is why I hide in closets.”

— Derek B. Miller

“Tears trickle down her cheeks, falling into the bath water as though they are the most inconsequential thing in the world”

— Shelly Pratt

“Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.”

— Germaine Greer

“I can't help suspecting, that there is, or may be some regurgitation from the bath into the cistern of the pump. In that case, what a felicate beveridge is quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat and the dirt, and dandriff; and the abominable of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies, parboiling in the kettle below.”

— Tobias Smollett

“There are few ways in which good people do more harm to those who take them seriously than to defend the gospel with arguments that won't hold water. Many of the difficulties encountered by young people going to college would be avoided if parents and teachers were more careful to distinguish between what they know to be true and what they think may be true. Impetuous youth, upon finding the authority it trusts crumbling, even on unimportant details, is apt to lump everything together and throw the baby out with the bath.”

— Henry B. Eyring

“Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilisation, when it was but a part of their servitude.”

— Tacitus

“The bath wasn't the best thing. Lying with him spooned up against her, listening to the rain rattle against the glass and his voice like a rolling wave ... that was the best thing.”

— Charlotte Stein

“On Thursday, I woke to find a perfect September morning, summer with the first gentle hint of autumn, exactly the wrong day to be away from the country. I would have gone for an enormous walk
except that, while in the bath, I saw exactly how to finish the book I was writing, after being stuck for weeks; though as things turned out, I doubt if I should have walked or written, because during breakfast I suddenly knew how to paint the view framed by my open window. I had been threatening to paint for months, sometimes seeing myself as a primitive, sometimes as an abstractionist. Today the primitive mood was in the ascendent.”

— Dodie Smith

“Will you tell me about Genghis Khan's whores while I'm in the bath?" "Hordes, not whores. He had both, though, now that you mention it." "Sounds like he was a busy guy." You have no idea.”

— Kevin Hearne

“All of them at length succeeded in getting up the ship's side, where they clung dripping with the brine and glowing from the bath, their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half enveloping their otherwise naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage vivacity, laughing gaily at one another, and chattering away with infinite glee.”

— Herman Melville

“I invented that little rhyme about 'One Ring to rule them all', I remember, in the bath one day.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

“Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane
int he cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap i the bath
she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger.”

— Amor Towles

“How often did he feel it now, this gorgeous, furtive seclusion? In the bath sometimes, maybe. Though Jean failed to understand his need for periodic isolation and regularly dragged him back to earth mid-soak by hammering on the locked door in search of bleach or dental floss.”

— Mark Haddon

“Well, no. I was getting into trouble messing around with it for roles. So one night I went home, cut it down with a pair of scissors and then got in the bath and shaved it all off. I've never looked back.”

— Richard O'Brien

“When you're in the editing room, the dangerous thing is that it becomes like telling a joke again and again and again. Eventually, the joke starts to not be funny. So you have to be careful that you're not throwing the baby out with the bath water.”

— Ridley Scott

“You go to a show, and there's no food at all, so if you're doing shows back to back, you can forget eating. I remember standing up in the bath one day, and there was a mirror in front of me, and I was so thin! I hated it. I never liked being that skinny.”

— Kate Moss

“Gloire de Dijon
When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.
She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses.”

— D.H. Lawrence

“But he, Siddhartha, was not a source of joy for himself, he found no delight in himself. Walking the rosy paths of the fig tree garden, sitting in the bluish shade of the grove of contemplation, washing his limbs daily in the bath of repentance, sacrificing in the dim shade of the mango forest, his gestures of perfect decency, everyone's love and joy, he still lacked all joy in his heart. Dreams and restless thoughts came into his mind, flowing from the water of the river, sparkling from the stars of the night, melting from the beams of the sun, dreams came to him and a restlessness of the soul, fuming from the sacrifices, breathing forth from the verses of the Rig-Veda, being infused into him, drop by drop, from the teachings of the old Brahmans.”

— Hermann Hesse

“There were thermal springs, and at the end of the preceding century the town had been laid out modestly as a spa. Hot water still ran in the bath house. Two old gardeners still kept some order in the ornamental grounds. The graded paths, each with a "view-point," the ruins of a seat and of a kiosk, where once invalids had taken their”

— Evelyn Waugh

“I usually get up around 6 A.M. It takes me a while to get going. In our household, I am the first one up. I usually make coffee for myself, draw a bath and have a big soak. I read in the bath.”

— Rick Bayless

“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

“I can stay in the bath for, well, the longest has been seven or eight hours. I get completely set up with my laptop so I can watch 'The Sopranos,' put out some scented candles, music. I have a towel nearby so I can dry my hand to change the music or the TV. I make a little heaven for myself. And then I just refill and refill.”

— Suki Waterhouse

“I eat pots of honey everywhere I go. I like anything sugary. And baths. I spend five hours in the bath. I eat in the bath.”

— Suki Waterhouse

“A cockroach appeared just as I was about to get into the bath. It was just the right time for a cockroach to make an appearance in my life; couldn't have been better. It scuttled quickly across the porcelain, the little bugger; I looked around for a slipper, but actually I knew my chances of squashing him were small. What was the point in trying? And what good was Oon, in spite of her marvellously elastic vagina? We were already doomed. Cockroaches copulate gracelessly, with no apparent pleasure; but they also do it repeatedly and their genetic mutations are rapid and efficient. There is absolutely nothing we can do about cockroaches.”

— Michel Houellebecq

“Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn't lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X's without Y's. Y's without X's. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn't go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome - yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.”

— Tom Robbins

“When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

“I'll take a bath and then I'll return. No, God is the bath.”

— James MacDonald

“Things are going up in fire and never been there." When she looked no wiser he said, "There was a warehouse in Finchley. Round between the bath shop and the Pizza Hut. I know there was because I used to go there and because I've seen it." He tap-tapped his eyepiece again. "But 'seen it' butters no bleeding parsnips these days. That warehouse burnt down, and now it didn't ever was there. The bath shop and the Pizza Hut are joined up now, and the only ash blowing around there's a charred bit of never.”

— China Miéville

“Jesse motioned to my hair. "Looks like you've been in the bath yourself." He settled into a chair on the front porch.
"I had just washed my hair, but then I had to go shoot someone. Do you want a cold drink?”

— Ruta Sepetys

“He lifted the lavender soap to his hair, and she squeaked.
"You don't use that in your hair," she hissed, jolting from her perch to reach for one of the many
hair tonics lining the little shelf above the bath. "Rose, lemon verbena, or ... " She sniffed the glass
bottle. "Jasmine." She squinted down at him.
He was staring up at her, his green eyes full of the words he knew he didn't have to say. Do I look
like I care what you pick?”

— Sarah J. Maas

“How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total hold, ease and alleviate, before he put on clothes and entered the complex boxes where people do their living.
Nothing fits the body so well as water.”

— Don DeLillo

“She kept a stack of books near the tub so she could read in the bath, even though the edges of the pages turned moldy. She read on trains and on buses, which often made her late as she was forever missing her stop.”

— Alice Hoffman

“I was in the bath at the time, and my dad came running in and said, 'Guess who they want to play Harry Potter!?' and I started to cry. It was probably the best moment of my life.”

— Daniel Radcliffe

“On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet - everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed - no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”

— George Orwell

“Mujo is a refugee in Germany, has no job, but has a lot of time, so he goes to a Turkish bath. The bath is full of German businessmen with towels around their waists, huffing and puffing, but every once in a while a cell phone rings and they pull their phone out from under the towel and say, Bitte? Mujo seems to be the only one without a cell phone, so he goes to the bathroom and stuffs toilet paper up his butt. He walks back out, a long trail of toilet paper behind him. So a German says, you have some paper, Herr, sticking out behind you. Oh, Mujo says, it looks like I have received a fax.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

“This may sound funny, but I feel my most beautiful when I'm clean, fresh out of the bath. I don't have to be dressed up. I could be in comfy clothes at home hanging out with my family.”

— Faith Hill

“There is a black-and-white picture in my hallway, of me, Nancy, and Lizzie in the bath, when Nancy was eight months old and Lizzie two-and-a-half. I am gently biting Lizzie. Nancy, in turn, is gumming my face. All eyes are on the person taking the picture - Pete, who was, as the slight camera-wobble shows, laughing. There we are-a tangle of half-shared DNA, all interlocking with each other; all being watched over by the one who loves us best. If I had to explain to someone what happiness is, I would show them this picture.”

— Caitlin Moran

“Archimedes said Eureka, Cos in English he weren't too aversed in, when he discovered that the volume of a body in the bath, is equal to the stuff it is immersed in, That is the law of displacement, Thats why ships don't sink, Its a shame he weren't around in 1912, The Titanic would have made him think.”

— Richard Digance

“Shh!" said Ford. "It's conical. So what you do is, you see, you fill it with fine white sand, alright? Or sugar. Fine white sand, and/or sugar. Anything. Doesn't matter. Sugar's fine. And when it's full, you pull the plug out ... are you listening?" "I'm listening." "You pull the plug out, and it all just twirls away, twirls away you see, out of the plughole. "Clever." "That's not the clever bit. This is the clever bit, I remember now that this is the clever bit. The clever bit is that you then thread the film in the projector ... backwards!" "Backwards?" "Yes. Threading it backwards is definitely the clever bit. So then, you just sit and watch it, and everything just appears to spiral upwards out of the plughole and fill the bath. See?" "And that's how the Universe began is it?" said Arthur. "No," said Ford, "but it's a marvelous way to relax.”

— Douglas Adams

“When I was young, I would sit in the bath and ideas would come to me. But I'm not young any more, so now I just sit in the bath.”

— Aki Kaurismaki

“I boast of being the only man in London who has been bombed off a lavatory seat while reading Jane Austen. She went into the bath; I went through the door.”

— Kingsley Martin

“I had to do things to myself on the page that had been done to me in real life. I had to try and drown myself in the bath. You have to do that. And the impulse is to rescue yourself and to spare the reader, but I can't rescue myself. And why should I spare the reader when nobody spared me? It's telling people what happened.”

— Damian Barr

“It never fails - you get in the bath and there's a rub at the lamp”

— Robin Williams

“Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.”

— Rose Macaulay

“The creative act always requires a stepping back. It's called the incubation period. The incubation period - one of the four phases of creativity - is when you're not consciously thinking of a problem, and you're letting it marinate. So this is why you hear time and again, people saying they had that "Eureka" moment in the bath, like Archimedes, or in the shower, or while going for a walk or in a coffeehouse.”

— Eric Weiner

“THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920. He died learning to walk. He died standing at the blackboard. And once, also, carrying a heavy tray. He died practicing a new way to sign his name. Opening a window. Washing his genitals in the bath. He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. Or he died thinking about Alma. Or when he chose not to.”

— Nicole Krauss

“A-well-a, splish, splash, I forgot about the bath, I went and put my dancing shoes on.”

— Bobby Darin

“The pest, in a sense, is a very superior being to us: he knows where to find us and how
usually in the bath or in sexual intercourse or asleep.”

— Charles Bukowski

“I am thinking particularly of a shower I took where the lower half of my body was under the running water and the upper half was laid out on the bath mat, eating a loaf of bread.”

— Lena Dunham