"People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim"
About this Quote
Landers lands the punchline like a friendly slap: you think you are choosing oblivion, but your pain is a better survivor than you are. The wit is deceptively gentle, the kind that can run in a family newspaper column without sounding cruel, yet it still carries a sting. By giving sorrow a physical skill - it "knows how to swim" - she turns an abstract feeling into a persistent creature that keeps bobbing up no matter how much you pour on top of it. The metaphor does two jobs at once: it mocks the fantasy of self-medicating while refusing to moralize in a churchy way.
The intent is harm reduction before the term existed. Landers isn't policing pleasure; she's targeting the specific bargain people make with alcohol: I'll trade tomorrow for tonight. Her line exposes how lopsided that trade is. Drowning implies control, finality, a clean ending. Swimming implies endurance, adaptation, even a perverse kind of vitality. Sorrow isn't fragile; it's aquatic.
Context matters: Landers built an empire on practical empathy, answering messy, middle-class problems in public. In that setting, a short, memorable aphorism functions like a portable intervention - something a reader can hear in their head at 1 a.m. when the bottle looks like a plan. The subtext is also social: drinking isn't just personal escape, it's an approved ritual for not talking about what's wrong. Landers offers an alternative script: name the sorrow, don't try to out-drink it, because it will outlast the performance.
The intent is harm reduction before the term existed. Landers isn't policing pleasure; she's targeting the specific bargain people make with alcohol: I'll trade tomorrow for tonight. Her line exposes how lopsided that trade is. Drowning implies control, finality, a clean ending. Swimming implies endurance, adaptation, even a perverse kind of vitality. Sorrow isn't fragile; it's aquatic.
Context matters: Landers built an empire on practical empathy, answering messy, middle-class problems in public. In that setting, a short, memorable aphorism functions like a portable intervention - something a reader can hear in their head at 1 a.m. when the bottle looks like a plan. The subtext is also social: drinking isn't just personal escape, it's an approved ritual for not talking about what's wrong. Landers offers an alternative script: name the sorrow, don't try to out-drink it, because it will outlast the performance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Widely attributed to Ann Landers (Eppie Lederer); listed on Wikiquote's 'Ann Landers' page (no definitive primary-source citation given). |
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