Poolside Quotes

But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.

Death decayed into history decayed into poolside anecdote.

and Amora, but this time poolside with Amora’s

Death decayed into history decayed into poolside anecdote. Francium wishes it had a half-life as short as tragedy’s.

He could smoke through the water as though an aquamarine submarine, he could sever the festoonery of the poolside ebb and eddy into fiery fluttering swathes of hot-cut flax, he could treble beneath the meniscus of the pool, sharp as synthesiser music and with a trajectory of theological impermanence, a crucifixion affected underwater, a kingfisher with the velocity and capriciousness of a shooting star, a knife in the arm of a masochist, a cleft hatchet of rock through the porous orb of a sea urchin, a dick through butter, a tyrannical nutter, Shunt through water, watch Shunt corrupt your daughter. He could move in wet like a lion through wildebeest.

As if auditioning for widowhood, Sloane Wolfmann strolled in from poolside wearing black spiked-heeled sandals, a headband with a sheer black veil, and a black bikini of negligible size and made of the same material as the veil.

Still, he thought, it's an adult's body we got here, no question about that. There's the pot belly that comes with a few too many good steaks, a few too many bottles of Kirin beer, a few too many poolside lunches where you had the Reuben or the French dip instead of the diet plate.

I'll be pool-side, if you're look'n for me.

Could this underwear pass as a swimming costume? Perhaps. Is there such a thing as a Y-front swimming costume? Probably.

People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals—discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds. It was a complex, dynamic process which she never ceased to find fascinating. And which she knew most people simply didn’t understand. But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.

George liked it so, that this island was uncompromising and hard for tourists to negotiate. Not all welcome smiles and black men in Hawaiian shirts, playing pan by the poolside. No flat, crystal beaches, no boutique hotels. Trinidad was oil-rich, didn't need tourism. Trinidadians openly sniggered at the sunburnt American women who wandered down the pavement in shorts and bikini top. Trinidad was itself; take it or leave it.

Home is where I take up such a tiny portion of the memory foam; home is a splintered word. His pillow is a sweat-stained map of an escape plot, also a map of love’s dear abandon. (When did he give way, at which breath?) Forgiveness may mean retrospectively abandoning the pillow and abandoning the photograph of someone with curious eyes, kissing my toes, poolside. I paint my toes Big Apple Red. I don’t know what to do about the shock of red nails on clean, white tiles except get used to it. (And when he gave way, was there room for feelings or the words for feeling?) While I brush my teeth, I can see him in my periphery at the other sink. The outline of him lulls and stings. (And when he gave way, was it the end of the beginning of suffering?) I draw his profile near, I make him brush his teeth with me, he spits and makes a mess. I could love another face, but why?

of the ready green on a blue felt top. The gentlemen who had assembled around it for an evening of high-stakes Hold ’Em were well dressed, well fed, and well heeled, but now their mouths hung loose and their poolside tans paled. “Hands on the table, guys,” Jadick said. “And don’t any of you act one-armed.” A short man with an air of compact power, Jadick moved with brisk precision and spoke calmly. He pulled back the hammers on his archaic but awesome weapon and said, “Scoop the fuckin’ manna, boys.” “Check,” said Dean Pugh. He and Cecil Byrne, his fellow Wingman, went slowly around the table

His bald head gleamed in the light which fell through the window and cast his shadow along the floor and up the wall. His chest was hairless, his thighs and shanks skinny but overlaid with ropes of muscle. Still, he thought, it’s an adult’s body we got here, no question about that. There’s the pot belly that comes with a few too many good steaks, a few too many bottles of Kirin beer, a few too many poolside lunches where you had the Reuben or the French dip instead of the diet plate. Your seat’s dropped, too, Bill old buddy. You can still serve an ace if you’re not too hung over and if your eye’s in, but you can’t hustle after the old Dunlop the way you could when you were seventeen. You got lovehandles and your balls are starting to get that middle-aged dangly look. There’s lines on your face that weren’t there when you were seventeen.

Beyond a fence, they came to the swimming pool, which spilled over into a series of waterfalls and smaller rocky pools. The area was planted with huge ferns. “Isn’t this extraordinary?” Ed Regis said. “Especially on a misty day, these plants really contribute to the prehistoric atmosphere. These are authentic Jurassic ferns, of course.” Ellie paused to look more closely at the ferns. Yes, it was just as he said: Serenna veriformans, a plant found abundantly in fossils more than two hundred million years old, now common only in the wetlands of Brazil and Colombia. But whoever had decided to place this particular fern at poolside obviously didn’t know that the spores of veriformans contained a deadly beta-carboline alkaloid. Even touching the attractive green fronds could make you sick, and if a child were to take a mouthful, he would almost certainly die—the toxin was fifty times more poisonous than oleander. People were so naïve about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction—and defense. But Ellie knew that, in the earth’s history, plants had evolved as competitively as animals, and in some ways more fiercely. The poison in Serenna veriformans was a minor example of the elaborate chemical arsenal of weapons that plants had evolved. There were terpenes, which plants spread to poison the soil around them and inhibit competitors; alkaloids, which made them unpalatable to insects and predators (and children); and pheromones, used for communication. When a Douglas fir tree was attacked by beetles, it produced an anti-feedant chemical—and so did other Douglas firs in distant parts of the forest. It happened in response to a warning alleochemical secreted by the trees that were under attack. People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals—discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds. It was a complex, dynamic process which she never ceased to find fascinating. And which she knew most people simply didn’t understand. But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.

Today Judith was dealing with the problem of grief. Her longtime editor at Harvard University Press who had published all her seminal texts and others not so seminal had died in a freak accident. He had gone out for a walk on the Cape (his second home) at the height of the afternoon, when the glare off the water was most intense. His foot had lost contact with the rocky footpath, sending his body over the edge. He was discovered the next day by a group of high school students who had gone to a cove to smoke angel dust, a fact that had come out when the parents took a closer look at why their children were on the shore in the middle of the day instead of in school. “Some people have been saying he did it on purpose, but that’s because they can’t accept the real tragedy: the accidental nature of the world,” Judith said, motioning to the waiter for another round of piña coladas. “It’s all very sordid.” Objectively that had to be so, although it was hard, while reclining in her luxuriously sturdy plastic chaise, poolside with a second piña colada on the way, for Dorothy to feel the impact of the story, to be there on the New England coastline with the angel-dust-smoking teenagers, the bloated editorial body, the cold gray ocean, the tragic inexorability of mischance. It wasn’t that the pool seemed real and the dead body seemed false; it was that nothing seemed real.

California, land of my dreams and my longing. You've seen me in New York and you know what I'm like there but in L.A., man, I tell you, I'm even more of a high-achiever - all fizz and push, a fixer, a bustler, a real new-dealer. Last December for a whole week my thirty-minute short Dean Street was being shown daily at the Pantheon of Celestial Arts. In squeaky-clean restaurants, round smoggy poolsides, in jungly jacuzzis I made my deals. Business went well and it all looked possible. It was in the pleasure area, as usual, that I found I had a problem. In L.A., you can't do anything unless you drive. Now I can't do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn't possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there's a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug. So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God's green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE-NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON'T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don't walk. Stay inside. Don't walk. Drive. Don't walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren't even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.

I rubbed my temples, feeling the headache slink out of hiding and steal the best seat in my brain like an early-bird sunbather covering a poolside lounger with his towel. ‘OK, OK, I admit it, m’lord, yes I did forget to take my shoes off last week. I’d forgotten my handbag and I was late for work.

When learning to swim, an hour in the pool is more useful than a year poolside.

February 20: Marilyn is crowned California Artichoke Queen in Salinas, California. Holiday features Marilyn poolside in swimsuits.

Lily’s head fell back with her broken keen filling the air. “Holy shit!” Hal came running flat out, Lily’s cry still reverberating. He skidded to a halt on the slippery deck, his panicked rescue unfortunately bringing him quite near to where Sean and Lily were fused together. As comprehension dawned, embarrassment colored his face a flaming pink blush. Instinctively, Sean shoved Lily behind him, shielding her with his body. He could feel her tremble against him. Were her tremors the aftermath of blazing passion, or were they from horrified mortification? he wondered. He wished he could see her face. “Sorry we gave you a scare, Hal. I, uh, fell into the water. Then somehow, Lily and I got caught up in a water fight to the death. Guess I forgot how ticklish she is.” He coughed. It was a pathetic story, but the best he could do right now. At his words, Hal looked up from his seemingly rapt examination of the deck’s tiles. Although his face was still as pink as Evelyn Roemer’s dyed hair, his lips parted in a smile of relief. “Oh, yeah,” he nodded, more than willing to play along. “Everyone needs a good tickle now and again.” He cleared his throat and loudly said, “Sorry to break up the fun, but you two have probably had enough water sports for one night.” Hal’s gaze moved past Sean. “You okay there, Lily?” Behind Sean, Lily froze. What to say? That she’d been nanoseconds away from a soul-shattering orgasm when Hal came barreling poolside. Bereft of Sean’s intoxicating kisses to drug her senseless, Lily hardly recognized herself. Had she gone mad? Probably. She wondered whether she would ever recover from what was undoubtedly the most intensely erotic experience of her life. Oh, God! Of all the people to have interrupted her and Sean in the pool! Hal Storey was as close to a father as Lily would ever have. He’d always supported her, believed in her. . . “Lily?” “I’m fine, Hal. Just a bit achy.” She cringed, sure Hal would guess that the parts of her that ached and throbbed had nothing to do with swimming.

Is this the first time you see her swim?” Shla’s mum asked me quietly. She was sitting right next to me, it was impossible for her to miss my tears. “Yes.” “Ah,” she said, she kept watching the pool for a few beats. “Do you need to go?” “What?” I said, confused besides upset. She turned to me, her blue eyes hard as flint. “Do you need to go?” I was trembling slightly, but I was angry, too. What right did she have to tell me not to be upset when the person I loved had lost so much? “No.” “Then you need to look back,” she said, and turned away from me. I followed her gaze to the pool and felt my heart stutter when I caught Shla pushing off the opposite wall once again. I had missed her going up to the poolside on her clutches because her mum had been practically gushing about the race and her daughter’s recovery and how she was going to win despite all odds -- everybody else in the pool was able-bodied. I could see her right leg for a moment, but it wasn’t like the other leg couldn’t have been underwater or something. I forced myself not to look away this time: She was incredibly beautiful, and after a few strokes, as captivating as any animal in its element, body blending with the water that surrounded her like it didn’t recognize it as a separate substance. And then she reached our side and turned, upside down for a few endless seconds to switch directions. Her left leg ended below the round bone of her knee like someone had photoshopped reality to erase the rest of it. I blinked and she was back in the water, more competent in it than I had ever felt on solid ground with full use of all my limbs.

Working late one night in 1940, poolside at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Irving Berlin, Munn Lodge 190, New York City, told his secretary, "I just wrote the best song I've ever written — heck, I just wrote the best song anybody's ever written!"  Brother Berlin was right on the mark.  He had just finished composing "White Christmas."  Having sold 50 million copies - and counting - it is the best selling single of all time.

I’m bored with the routine of a late breakfast of mangos and toast, a long day lying hot and sweaty under a palm tree, and an evening of ‘African cultural dance’ staged for the tourists by disenchanted locals, followed by a nightly poolside barbecue of big hunks of dead zebra and antelope. This is the Hotel Intercontinental’s idea of the African coastal experience. I have to get into town.

The club—really a poolside lounge at one of Dallas’s fanciest hotels—is full of blondes dripping with diamonds, their faces glowing with the flawless, glossy finish that can only be achieved by an hour-long sit-down with a professional makeup artist, their breasts sculpted into tanned teardrops by the best surgeons oil money can buy. One particularly stunning specimen—standing at least six feet tall, her perfectly proportioned legs, hips, and breasts accentuating the tailor cut of her red blazer and skirt suit—strides across the open courtyard in sling-back stilettos, puffing on a cigar with bee-stung red lips.

Then, if you’re lucky, you corner him for a couple more minutes in a poolside cabana before another lady steals him for a second.

Several years of living in the Netherlands had reduced my innate English prudishness somewhat, but I still suffered from a typical Englishman's angst at public nudity. Cowering between the changing rooms and the pool, I spent ten anguished minutes trying to decide whether to keep my swimming trunks on or risk taking them off. Would the other patrons run screaming if I stripped off? Or would they run screaming if I didn't? I eventually decided to assimilate as best as I could, and marched to the poolside dressed as God made me, flinging my towel aside with carefree abandon. No one ran screaming, although I did get a big smile and a wink from a bearish, Russian-looking man twice my age, and wondered briefly if I'd strayed into the wrong kind of bathhouse. The biggest surprise was that men and women were mixing freely not just in the pools but in the showers and changing rooms too, all as happily naked as the day they first drew breath. A group of older men sat talking about football in the hot tub, and a pair of middle-aged women were busily planning someone else's wedding while swimming lengths in the icy main pool. Yet despite the mixing of the sexes, the atmosphere was reassuringly chaste. I was almost certainly the only person who wasn't retired, and there were (to put it politely) more raisins on display than grapes. I didn't quite know where to look, and spent a lot of time feigning interest in the ceiling.

ON OCTOBER 28, 2003, a jury of the state supreme court in Manhattan watched a homemade video of the fortieth birthday party that L. Dennis Kozlowski threw for his second wife, Karen. The party, held on the island of Sardinia off the Italian coast, cost more than $2.1 million—or $28,000 per guest. Assistant District Attorney Ken Chalifoux introduced the video into evidence as part of one of the biggest corporate scandal cases ever. Kozlowski, the former CEO of the conglomerate Tyco International, and Mark Swartz, Tyco’s former CFO, were accused of grand larceny and enterprise corruption for allegedly stealing some $600 million from Tyco.1 The birthday celebration included nearly a week’s worth of activities, highlighted by the final poolside bash at the Cala di Volpe hotel.

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