Upstream Quotes

#1. What i need is traveling minds talktouch kisses spittouch you swimming upstream.

Sonia Sanchez

#2. Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.

Jorge Luis Borges

#3. In college, a group of guys labelled me a "righteous little beaver." Again, I was slightly pissed because it seemed offensive and misdirected, but when I learned that beavers swim upstream, I realized that maybe it was fitting after all.

Amy Richards

#4. They put their animals to the ford and crossed, the water up under the horses' bellies and the horses picking their way over the rocks and glancing wildly upstream where a cataract thundered out of the darkening forest into the flecked and seething pool below.

Cormac McCarthy

#5. Most people spend less than 20 hrs a year learning about freedom, yet many wonder why it's in decline. Don't fight upstream. Instead, turn it around.

Oliver DeMille

#6. It is well known that "problem avoidance" is an important part of problem solving. Instead of solving the problem you go upstream and alter the system so that the problem does not occur in the first place.

Edward De Bono

#7. Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.

W.C. Fields

#8. Let's not muddy the brook ; Perhaps a pigeon is drinking water at a distance, Or a pitcher is being filled in a village, Or a dervish may be dipping dry bread in the brook.
The folk upstream understand the water.
They did not muddy the brook. We also must not muddy the brook...

Sohrab Sepehri

#9. I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It's by the nature of his deep inner soul ... we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

Neil Armstrong

#10. I fished upstream coming ever closer and closer to the narrow staircase of the canyon. Then I went up into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department.

Richard Brautigan

#11. If life is a river, then pursuing Christ requires swimming upstream. When we stop swimming, or actively following Him, we automatically begin to be swept downstream.

Francis Chan

#12. I'm swimming upstream. Fighting the tide while the happy dead drift past me to the pools of ignorance.

Katie Waitman

#13. To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.

Warren Ellis

#14. A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and thrill of being seen with Masomma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream.

Khaled Hosseini

#15. Marketers have to move upstream now. We have to stop being the last step in the process and start being the first step.

Seth Godin

#16. It's a strange kind of irony. The things that affect us most are the things we can't remember (from Swimming Upstream).

Ruth Mancini

#17. The style of music that we're playing, this progressive metal style, has always been an upstream battle for us. We don't usually get a lot of commercial exposure.

John Petrucci

#18. Not satisfied with endlessly pulling drowning men from the torrents rushing past, Day went upstream to see who was throwing the poor bastards into the water in the first place - and

James Carroll

#19. You ain't supposed to get salmon when they're swimming upstream to spawn. But if you're hungry, you do.

Loretta Lynn

#20. My life is what a salmon must feel like. They are always going upstream, against the current.

Laura Schlessinger

#21. I needed to explain that Louisiana's coast accepts the drainage from two-thirds of the United States and, while the necessary levees constructed upstream have prevented floods, they have also contributed to problems downstream.

John Breaux

#22. Some people will just go with the flow of things and sway in life, while others will fight against the currents and go upstream to reach their destiny.

Anthony Liccione

#23. Always drink upstream from the herd.

Will Rogers

#24. I can honestly say, there was a moment when I was writing 'Upstream Color' where I fell so hard for what it was becoming that I couldn't think of anything else. I was absolutely secure in this story in the way I'm rarely secure about anything else in my life.

Shane Carruth

#25. Our calling is not only to pull people out of the river, but to go upstream to find out what or who is pushing them in.

Jim Wallis

#26. Being an actor, you always feel like you're swimming upstream. People are going, "No, they don't like you. They don't like the way you look. They don't like how old you are."

Bradley Whitford

#27. Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

Wendell Berry

#28. After a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-mart's phenomenal success has been that very tendency.

Sam Walton

#29. When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

Arthur Golden

#30. The fish who keeps on swimming is the first to chill upstream.

Nick Hexum

#31. Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

Sam Walton

#32. Look upstream. Just simply turn around; have you no will?

Annie Dillard

#33. When you come from your heart in the midst of your self and in your life, you'll be like a salmon turning and going upstream. You'll be going against the stream. You'll be going against what your self is like. In that way, you are training your self, your conditioning and the streams of your self.

John De Ruiter

#34. There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.
We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.

Desmond Tutu

#35. At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the windwaves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.

Wendell Berry

#36. Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance.

Stephen R. Covey

#37. With God, all things are possible- including, dominating adulthood, swimming upstream for life, and living in light of eternity in a world that tells you all you can do is live for the moment.

Katie Kiesler

#38. We don't have to wait until we move or change jobs to change our lives. Nor do we have to wait for large-scale, upstream change. We can initiate change right now. There are endless starting points.

Arianna Huffington

#39. Swimming upstream in the music business is a hard thing to do.

John Oates

#40. Fear represents our need to hang on to the riverbank, to control outcomes, results, our lives; it swims upstream. Truth is about releasing that hold, letting go of results, and trusting the direction of Life's current.

Tom Shadyac

#41. My own life would make a pretty dull story, I think, and I envy him as I drive to work on a cold Minnesota morning across the Mississippi River with its coal barges still struggling upstream like so many of us nowadays.

Garrison Keillor

#42. If the bonus army conquered Washington the lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River, and he was going to row upstream for a few months and then come back because they always needed lawyers after a revolution to straighten out all the legal side.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#43. Salmon. Salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon. I eat so much salmon at these weddings, twice a year I get this urge to swim upstream.

David Nicholls

#44. The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don't let them banalize you. Keep fighting.

Brian Christian

#45. For two hundred years Haiti has been swimming upstream. We were the first country in which independence was won by a group of slaves - black slaves. Across the water, the country that had just achieved independence - the U.S. - still practiced slavery.

Michele Montas

#46. Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street.

Gary Snyder

#47. Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.
- Chinese proverb

Alvin Toffler

#48. Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

#49. Only the gamefish swims upstream, But the sensible fish swims down.

Ogden Nash

#50. You never stand beside the same river twice; you have to keep looking upstream.

Donald Keough

#51. And I thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams criss-crossed in the dark. There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.

Julian Barnes

#52. Plenty of folks are so contrary that if they should fall into the river, they would insist upon floating upstream.

Josh Billings

#53. He whose longing has been aroused for the indescribable, whose mind has been quickened by it, and whose thought is not attached to sensuality is truly called one who is bound upstream.

Gautama Buddha

#54. He pointed upstream and led us through the foggy morning, with spotty snow flurries and a forty percent chance of death.

Rick Riordan

#55. When I'm writing my own stuff, it's like swimming upstream. Or ... falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.

Rainbow Rowell

#56. Government support is not only investing in upstream areas like basic research, but also in downstream areas like applied research and early-stage financing for the companies themselves. This means there are great risks.

Mariana Mazzucato

#57. We were made to live slower than our fast-paced Western culture deems normal. But it means paddling upstream through strong currents.

Tsh Oxenreider

#58. One can never swim upstream to a prosper future if they continue to drown in their past.

Timothy Pina