Against The Tide Quotes & Sayings

Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide ... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting. — Ernest Hemingway,

Outside, with Labor Day having come and gone, summer is fighting a dying battle against the fall air. The leaves are hanging perilously on the trees, knowing full well they're going to make the plunge, clinging on as if they stand a chance not to. The garbage smell that has wafted around us for the better part of August is dissipating, ushered out with the humidity, and in its place a briskness is filtering in, like something you'd smell from a bottle of Tide. — Allison Winn Scotch

It takes strong, sound leadership, that correspondingly rare commodity, which is afflicted with neither an excess of pity nor callousness, to stand against the insipid tide of superficiality that is sweeping the world. — Tim Macartney-Snape

Cosca smiled up at the dragon, hands on hips. 'It certainly is a remarkable curiosity. A magnificent relic. But against what is already boiling across the plains? The legion of the dumb? The merchants and farmers and makers of trifles and filers of papers? The infinite tide of greedy little people?' He waved his hat towards the dragon. 'Such things as this are worthless as a cow against a swarm of ants. There will be no place in the world to come for the magical, the mysterious, the strange. They will come to your sacred places and build . . . tailors' shops. And dry-goods emporia. And lawyers' offices. They will make of them bland copies of everywhere else.' The old mercenary scratched thoughtfully at his rashy neck. 'You can wish it were not so. I wish it were not so. But it is so. I tire of lost causes. The time of men like me is passing. The time of men like you?' He wiped a little blood from under his fingernails. 'So long passed it might as well have never been. — Joe Abercrombie

What Jessica said - hair much shorter, wearing a darker mouth of different outline, harder lipstick, her typewriter banking in a phalanx of letters between them - was: "We're going to be married. We're trying very hard to have a baby."
All at once there is nothing but his asshole between Gravity and Roger. "I don't care. Have his baby. I'll love you both - just come with me Jess, please ... I need you ... "
She flips a red lever on her intercom. Far away a buzzer goes off. "Security." Her voice is perfectly hard, the word still clap-echoing in the air as in through the screen door of the Quonset office wth a smell of tide flats come the coppers, looking grim. Security. Her magic word, her spell against demons. — Thomas Pynchon

After Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor, the war tide slowly turned against the Axis. — Alexander Dubcek

The work of many of the greatest men, inspired by duty, has been done amidst suffering and trial and difficulty. They have struggled against the tide, and reached the shore exhausted. — Samuel Smiles

When you are gambling, though you probably do not know it, your mind is on the tide, the ebb and flow of the Universe, and there is no way to fight it. Going with the flow is the only option, so there is no point in struggling against it, but, it will tell you how you sit with God, or the Universe, at that particular time in your life. — Robert Black

I saw thousands of pumpkins last night
come floating in on the tide,
bumping up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Halloween in the sea — Richard Brautigan

From the beginning, I wanted to live my own life, and patiently I shored up that desire against wind and tide. — Ella Maillart

Two free days like an open mouth. They drank beer all day in the sun and passed out, and when she woke, she was burnt all over, and it was sunset, and Lotto had started building something enormous with sand, already four feet high and ten feet long and pointing toward the sea. Woozy, standing, she asked what it was.
He said, 'spiral jetty.'
She said, 'In sand?'
He smiled and said, 'That's its beauty.'
A moment in her bursting open, expanding. She looked at him. She hand't seen it before, but there was something special here. She wanted to tunnel inside him to understand what it was. There was a light under the shyness and youth, a sweetness, a sudden surge of the old hunger in her to take a part of him into her and make him briefly hers.
Instead, she bent and helped, they all did. And deep into the morning, when it was done, they sat in silence, huddled against the cold wind and watched the tide swallow it whole. Everything had changed somehow — Lauren Groff

she had fought hotly against injustice, vanity, and blind, towering stupidity. Occasionally, on the battlefield where death was a reality, she had won. But once back in England, making such arguments was like trying to write in the sand; the weight and complexities of the hierarchy of power erased her efforts like an incoming tide. For — Anne Perry

Astronomers who do not draw theistic or deistic conclusions are becoming rare, and even the few dissenters hint that the tide is against them. Geoffrey Burbidge, of the University of California at San Diego, complains that his fellow astronomers are rushing off to join 'the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang.' — Hugh Ross

Democrats are so spineless, so afraid to go against the tide ... but dissension is the greatest form of patriotism. — Jesse Ventura

Ezra felt his heart cry out, as though it were branded by the stone he now held. Then he roared against the tide of regret and anguish that suddenly filled him, a piercing grief for he knew not what. Ezra cast the first stone. Stephen was struck hard. But he straightened, lifted his eyes and his voice to heaven, and cried, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." The stones rained down upon him even as his face was lifted to the heavens, shining with that same light as in the Council chamber. The last words Ezra heard him speak were, "Lord, do not charge them with this sin. — Janette Oke

It is just all the difference between happiness and misery," said Challenger with an abstracted face, still patting his wife's hand. "You can swim with the tide and have peace in mind and soul, or you can thrust against it and be bruised and weary. This business is beyond us, so let us accept it as it stands and say no more. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Learn to trust your instincts. Only something dead goes with the tide. Only something living can go against it. — Tony Parsons

Rowing against the tide is hard and uncertain. To go with the tide and thus take advantage of the workings of the great natural force is safe and easy. — Ralph Waldo Trine

The wave came again and carried them out onto the sea of pain, where he wondered again why life ever came into the world...The tide that drew them out into the troubled waters once again spent itself, and they floated slowly back, resting for a minute or so, only to be dragged out again. He held her up while she contracted and pushed inside herself, trying to open the petals of her flowering body...He lifted her, trying to free the load she was struggling with, but she was straining against the traces, getting nowhere, her eyes like those of a draft horse...Who would choose this, thought Laski, this work, this woe? Life enslaves us, makes us want children, gives us a thousand illusions about love, and all so that it can go forward. — William Kotzwinkle

All my life I've been rowing against the tide. What can I do? It seems I was born that way. — Jose Mujica

Her virtues, graced with external gifts, Do breed love's settled passions in my heart; And like as rigour of tempestuous gusts Provokes the mightiest hulk against the tide, So am I driven by breath of her renown Either to suffer shipwreck or arrive Where I may have fruition of her love. — William Shakespeare

I was merely making more perceptible that binary rhythm which love adopts in all those who have too little confidence in themselves to believe that a woman can ever fall in love with them, and also that they themselves can genuinely fall in love with her. They know themselves well enough to have observed that in the presence of the most divergent types of woman they felt the same hopes, the same agonies, invented the same romances, uttered the same words, and to have realised therefore that their feelings, their actions, bear no close and necessary relation to the woman they love, but pass to one side of her, splash her, encircle her, like the incoming tide breaking against the rocks, and their sense of their own instability increases still further their misgivings that this woman, by whom they so long to be loved, does not love them. — Marcel Proust

And yet she continues to skip rope in my mind and on my canvases, raising her dark, hopeful face to the sky, innocent of the depth of people's cruelty toward "the other" - those who, for whatever reason, must swim against the tide instead of letting it carry them. . . — Wally Lamb

He sighed. 'Your life is your own,Miss Kingston. We have only one. Don't allow anyone else to dictate to you what you should do with yours.'
She blinked and frowned as if she didn't understand what he meant.
'It's yours,' he advised softly. 'Don't waste it on petty conventions or conformity. Swim against the tide if you want to. — Val Wood

Her gaze met his, her green eyes glazed and filled with shadows. "I-Iain?"
Iain understood those shadows only too well. She was in shock. She had witnessed the full horror of war. Worse, she had killed a man. Like a young soldier after his first battle, she was struggling to cope. 'Twas an anguish no woman should have to bear.
His rage broke like the tide against the shore, and before he could think, he pulled her hard against him, held her, stroked her hair. "You foolish, brave woman! Why do you no' obey me?"
"What the bloody hell is he doin'?" Connor asked from somewhere behind them.
Morgan answered, "I think he's punishin' her."
"If he tries this on the men, they'll mutiny. — Pamela Clare

The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don't think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now. — Ray Bradbury

You have to admire it,' said Laurent, in a detached voice. 'It's the perfect time to attack Akielos. Kastor is dealing with factional problems from the kyroi. Damianos, who turned the tide at Marlas, is dead. And the whole of Vere would rise up against a bastard, especially one who had cut down a Veretian prince. If only my murder weren't the catalyst, it's a scheme I would wholeheartedly support. — C.S. Pacat

We are a conspiracy of hope and we are pressing back against the strong tide of oppression which for centuries has been the legacy of those of us who are labelled with mental illness. We are refusing to reduce human beings to illnesses. — Patricia Deegan

In ticking off the things that weren't done, it was easy to forget the big thing that was done. Against overwhelming odds, with the most meager resources, and often at fearful self-sacrifice, a few determined men reversed the course of the war in the Pacific. Japan would never again take the offensive. Yet the margin was thin - so narrow that almost any man there could say with pride that he personally helped turn the tide at Midway. It was indeed, as General Marshall said in Washington, "the closest squeak and the greatest victory. — Walter Lord

It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history ... [It is] the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. — Ronald Reagan

Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain. — Mark Doty

To the Harbormaster"

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you. — Frank O'Hara

I believe
in love at first sight
but I will always believe
that the people
we love
we have loved before.
Many, many, many times before
and when we stumble
through grace and circumstance
and that brilliant illusion of choice
to finally meet them again,
we feel it faster
each time through.
The one glance
that set life alight
is two sets of two eyes
staring through the layers
of lifetimes and stolen glances
and first kisses and hands held;
the brace against the weight
and unrelenting tide
of waiting.
I believe
in love at first sight
but am not burdened with the misconception
that it's a first sight
at all. — Tyler Knott Gregson

Certainly, if money could have been raised upon the book, Robert Herrick would long ago have sacrificed that last possession: but the demand for literature, which is so marked a feature in some parts of the South Seas, extends not so far as the dead tongues; and the Virgil, which he could not exchange against a meal had often consoled him in his hunger. He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt on the floor of the old calaboose, seeking favourite passages and finding new ones only less beautiful because they lacked the consecration of remembrance. The Ebb-Tide — Robert Louis Stevenson

Have the courage to go against the tide of this culture of efficiency, this culture of waste. Encountering and welcoming everyone, [building] solidarity - a word that is being hidden by this culture, as if it were a bad word - solidarity and fraternity: these are what make our society truly human. — Pope Francis

He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife. — Jeanette Winterson

You need to figure out what you want, Josh. If that means you need to swim against the tide to get it, at least youre aiming for something that could make you very happy. — Jay Asher

If your lost you might need to swim against the tide — Holly Goldberg Sloan

Ashes

The tide comes in; the tide goes out again
washing the beach clear of what the storm
dumped. Where there were rocks, today there is sand;
where sand yesterday, now uncovered rocks.

So I think on where her mortal remains
might reach landfall in their transmuted forms,
a year now since I cast them from my hand
- wanting to stop the inexorable clock.

She who died by her own hand cannot know
the simple love I have for what she left
behind. I could not save her. I could not
even try. I watch the way the wind blows
life into slack sail: the stress of warp against weft
lifts the stalling craft, pushes it on out. — Paula Meehan

We can all help turn the tide against bullying ... If we stand up and speak out strongly against it! — Timothy Pina

Tony Fernandes is in that goldfish bowl and he's swimming against the tide. — Niall Quinn

About 95% of people can be compared to ships without rudders. Subject to every shift of wind and tide, they're helplessly adrift. And while they fondly hope that they'll one day drift into a rich and successful port, you and I know that for every narrow harbor entrance, there are a 1,000 miles of rocky coastline. The chances against their drifting into port are 1,000 to one. — Earl Nightingale

The tide was still on the ebb in that complex swell and fall of water against land, as though a great heart in the centre of the earth beat but twice a day. — Annie Proulx

I've also been reminded recently that while as a society we are moving toward greater inclusion and equality for all people, the tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible. There continue to be far too many incidences of bullying of young people, as well as discrimination and violence against people of all ages, based on their sexual orientation, and I believe there is value in making clear where I stand. — Anderson Cooper

In the street, he turned west and walked against a tide of blank-eyed, gum-chewing faces. A taxi went over a manhole cover, clink-clank. Steam was rising from an excavation at the corner. The world was like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. What was the pont of all these drab buildings, this dirty sky? — Damon Knight

It saddened Cressen to remember that letter. No one had ever taught Stannis how to laugh, least of all the boy Patchface. The storm came up suddenly, howling, and Shipbreaker Bay proved the truth of its name. The lord's two-masted galley Windproud broke up within sight of his castle. From its parapets his two eldest sons had watched as their father's ship was smashed against the rocks and swallowed by the waters. A hundred oarsmen and sailors went down with Lord Steffon Baratheon and his lady wife, and for days thereafter every tide left a fresh crop of swollen corpses on the strand below Storm's End. — George R R Martin

Once a changemaker, always a changemaker but only a few swim against the tide. — Richard Branson

the most
beautiful tide

is the sweep
of your heart
against mine. — Sanober Khan

ROBERT ROTH: Going against the tide, no matter how gracefully, will beat you up after a while - all artists know this. — Greg Prato

America must realize, there are conditions she must accept in Asia. The first is a diversity of Asian cultures, governments, economic and political systems; the second, that to run against the tide of Asian nationalism is worse than impractical - it is also highly dangerous. — Ferdinand Marcos

As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there's something below it, I won't know it. But that's part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn't the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I'm perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me. — Maggie Stiefvater

Muad'dib's Jihad was less than an eye-blink in this larger movement. The Bene Gesserit swimming in this tide, that corporate entity trading in genes, was trapped in the torrent as he was. Visions of a falling moon must be measured against other legends, other visions in a universe where even the seemingly eternal stars waned, flickered, died ... What mattered a single moon in such a universe? Far — Frank Herbert

That the zeal for God's honor is also a dangerous passion, that the Christian must bring with him the courage to swim against the tide instead of with it ... accept a good deal of loneliness, will perhaps be nowhere so clear and palpable as in the church, where he would so much like things to be different. Yet he cannot and he will not refuse to take this risk and pay this price ... he belongs where the reformation of the church is underway or will again be underway. — Karl Barth

Monarchy is like a splendid ship, with all sails set it moves majestically on, but then it hits a rock and sinks for ever. Democracy is like a raft. It never sinks but, damn it, your feet are always in the water. That is a good metaphor, for raft, he implies, is simply swept along by the tide or the current; one can with a paddle or a plank steer a little to stay afloat, trim forward direction slightly to left or right, perhaps even slow down or speed up a little, but there is no turning back against the current of democracy. — Bernard Crick

Nina glanced from Inej to Kaz and saw they both wore the same expression. Nina knew that look. It came after the shipwreck, when the tide moved against you and the sky had gone dark. It was the first sight of land, the hope of shelter and even salvation that might await you on a distant shore. — Leigh Bardugo

Early in my career I was divided because I had the real self underneath: the lawbreaker, the anarchist, the person who swims against the tide, the outsider, the loner, all of that guy. He was my private self, and I had this other side that wanted to be liked in order to do all those things I dreamed of as a little boy. I didn't realize that those things didn't go together until later. And I'm quite sure that my use of acid and peyote helped me accept what was really going on inside of me instead of what I had imposed on myself. — George Carlin

I would tell young journalists to be brave and go against the tide. When everyone else is relying on the internet, you should not; when nobody's walking, you should walk; when few people are reading profound books, you should read ... rather than seeking a plusher life you should pursue some hardship. Eat simple food. When everyone's going for quick results, pursue things of lasting value. Don't follow the crowd; go in the opposite direction. If others are fast, be slow.
Jin Yongquan — Judy Polumbaum

I seek you like the waves seek the shore. I cannot stay, and too, I cannot stay away from you. When I push against the drift, I choke! I gasp for air! I drown within my love for you. So I will ebb and I will flow and let the tide direct my course and see where it will go. — Kate McGahan

I say this because as an older man I am prone to ponder matters in the light of death in a way that you are not. I am like a traveler from Mars who looks down in astonishment at what passes here. And what I see is the same human frailty passed from generation to generation. What I see is again and again the same sad human frailty. We hate one another; we are the victims of irrational fears. And there is nothing in the stream of human history to suggest we are going to change this. But
I digress, confess that. I merely wish to point out that in the face of such a world you have only yourselves to rely on. You have only the decision you must make, each of you, alone. And will you contribute to the indifferent forces that ceaselessly conspire toward injustice? Or will you stand up against this endless tide and in the face of it be truly human? — David Guterson

The turquoise tide shimmered in shades of mermaid tails against the alabaster shore. The — Karen Marie Moning

Remember, Montag, we're the happiness boys. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. — Ray Bradbury

No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the choice of his profession, and every man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind and tide before he allows himself to cry out, 'I am baffled!' and submits to be floated passively back to land. — Charlotte Bronte

The sooner you decide that it is alright to believe the opposite of what the masses do, and that it is alright to trust the universe, and you choose to be happy rather than be right, the sooner you will be happy. — Malti Bhojwani

Let's swim to the moon
Let's climb through the tide
Surrender to the waiting worlds
That lap against our side. — Jim Morrison

We excel in cut-and-paste solutions. We make promises and provide quick fixes to tide over the crisis at hand, thereby abandoning long-term objectives. We also seem to keep widening the threshold of our tolerance. We see enormous wrong, abysmally high levels of corruption, but accept these as necessary evils and refuse to raise a voice against them. We need to ask ourselves not only why we choose to live with mediocrity, but also when we plan to stand up and say, enough is enough. I daresay - and I am relieved to see this in my lifetime - such change is on its way; we see welcome signs, particularly from GenNext. — Vinod Rai

I lie awake in my bed, clinging to the brightness I have known, fighting back the tide of darkness, the memories of blood and branding and horror, and the legacy of cruelty that runs in my own veins, shaping my own secret vow and wielding it like a brand against the darkness, whispering it to myself, over and over.
I will try to be good. — Jacqueline Carey

Ideas are 10 a penny. It's the execution that's the hard thing to do. House is standing up against a tide of sentiment and emotionalism over reason that threatens to engulf this world. When you think about it, a rationalist, a man of science and reason, is in a pretty lonely position. — Hugh Laurie

God, the universe, life, whatever name you give to the bigger picture, is experiencing itself through you as a human being. A journey from effortlessness, playfulness, freedom, to human doing, suffering and beyond. You can all return to the effortlessness, playfulness, freedom and being, by allowing your moment-by-moment experience, allowing your feelings of pain, suffering, rage, anger and envy to be felt, observed and tenderly allowed. No more self-beating, no more rushing against the tide, no more trying to steer that canoe, for life knows the way, always has and always will. — Kelly Martin

I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, "My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark" ... In some astonishment I asked him, "A bulwark-against what?" To which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud"-and here he hesitated for a moment, then added of occultism. — Carl Jung

Going against the tide has never been difficult for me. It wasn't even a conscious decision but the natural consequence of following my own instinct. — Lewis Gordon

Maybe someone will know I didn't weave crowns to draw blood; that I faught against mockery;
that I did fill the high tide of my soul with truth.
I repaid vileness with doves. — Pablo Neruda

Like a tide-race, the waves of human mediocrity are rising to the heavens and will engulf this refuge, for I am opening the flood-gates myself, against my will. Ah! but my courage fails me and my heart is sick within me!
Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!
(A Rebours, final words) — Joris-Karl Huysmans

A person has three choices in life. You can swim against the tide and get exhausted, or you can tread water and let the tide sweep you away, or you can swim with the tide, and let it take you where it wants you to go. — Andrew Schneider

Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon. — Margaret Mahy

Imagine all the people you meet in your life. There are so many. They come in like waves, trickling in and out with the tide. Some waves are much bigger and make more of an impact than others. Sometimes the waves bring with them things from deep in the bottom of the sea and they leave those things tossed onto the shore. Imprints against the grains of sand that prove the waves had once been there, long after the tide recedes. That was what Atlas was telling me when he said "I love you." He was letting me know that I was the biggest wave he'd ever come across. And I brought so much with me that my impressions would always be there, even when the tide rolled out. — Colleen Hoover

You have to have passion, go with your gut, go against the tide — Donald Trump

Earth and air, fire and water, the stars in their courses, the high tide of destiny and the Will of divine Providence are all arrayed against the forces of oppression. -- Louis Gregory — Janet Ruhe-Schoen

There is no such thing as low-cost Christianity. Following Jesus means swimming against the tide, renouncing evil and selfishness — Pope Francis

Changing things in education involves hard work, determination and an ability to swim against the tide. — Adele Devine

He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy's breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood. — Flannery O'Connor

There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die. Time devours all. Yet every species has its unique way of passing on its wisdom through the ages, its way of making thoughts visible, tangible, frozen for a moment like a bulwark against the irresistible tide of time. Everyone makes books. — Ken Liu

Failure cannot be erased. It is built in to a life and helps us grow. Failure cannot be erased, but it can be understood.
Most people carry around a load of feeling that they bury or pretend is not there because it is too painful and alarming to cope with or because it involved unbearable guilt. Anger against a parent, for example.
I knew the tide of woe was rising, that woe that seizes me like anger, and is a form of anger, and I didn't know what to do to stop it, so I got up and picked flowers, cooked my dinner, looked at the news, all the same usual routine that can ward off the devils or suddenly clear the air as when a thunderstorm seems to be coming and then dissipates ... .it always happens when there is a galaxy of problems that get knit together into one huge outcry against the sense of being abandoned or orphanhood ... — May Sarton

In spite of Mr. Poe's fame, the pair made me feel out of sorts, and sad. In one of the busiest cities in the world, they seemed to exist on a bleak island of their own making, their backs turned against the social tide lapping at the battered door. — Lynn Cullen

Then the anger washed over her again, a tide crashing against the rocks and nothing mattered but revenge, and winning this contest, this duel of breaking each other," ~Fallenwood 2: Forgetting Fallenwood — Leslie D. Soule

In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the ... West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. — Ronald Reagan

These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, "How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up." He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.

But as a professor who was popular with his students - and who advocated general education - Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory. — Michael Crichton

She had been lying there, facedown in the water long before the tide had turned at 3.04 that morning. Her eyes were staring into the river, her blonde hair first fanning out, then drawing back under her head with the wash of the water, like a pulsating jellyfish. The belt of her raincoat was caught on the branches of an overhanging tree and she'd been hooked, destined to forever flap against the corner of the broken pier with outstretched arms. She wasn't going anywhere now; she was simply bobbing up and down with the rhythm of the water - and she hadn't blinked in a long while. — A.J. Waines

Have the courage "to swim against the tide". Have the courage to be happy. — Pope Francis

Just make sure the unknown is a place you the writer understand. If you're going to write, you have to love. ... You have to fall on your face, swim against the tide, make terrible mistakes, and pay the price; you have to tune in, turn on, drop out, drop back in, fight, cry, lose, win. ... Above all, don't get too comfortable. Go out there and get your heart broken. You won't be able to write until you do. — Holly Peterson

When you're up against adversity, when your shots aren't falling, when guys are hanging on you, pushing you, fouling you, and you're not getting calls, that's when discipline matters. Instead of flying off the handle or blaming your teammates, the officials, or the opposition, players have to keep calm and act decisively to change the tide. Playing the blame game is a sure sign that a team has not jelled and is taking the wrong path — Walt Frazier

For me, it was a mission on the hill to sensitize people, because they don't know Muslim immigrants. And for the most part, a lot of us just keep our heads down. But if I can engage someone in conversation, someone who maybe does support Donald Trump, or at least isn't speaking out against him, and I can show him the fear that I have, then maybe I can turn that tide. — Andrew Aydin

What shall I say of the gallantry with which these Marines have fought! Of the slopes of Hill 142; of the Mares Farm; of the Bois de Belleau and the Village of Bouresches stained with their blood, and not only taken away from the Germans in the full tide of their advance against the French, but held by my boys against counter attacks day after day and night after night. I cannot write of their splendid gallantry without tears coming to my eyes. — James Harbord

I swim against the tide because I like to annoy. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

What the world needs today is a definite, spiritual mobilization of the nations who believe in God against this tide of Red agnosticism ... And in rejecting an atheistic other world, I am confident that the Almighty God will be with us. — Herbert Hoover

Pay attention, my young friends: to go against the current; this is good for the heart, but we need courage to swim against the tide ... We Christians were not chosen by the Lord for little things; push onwards toward the highest principles. Stake your lives on noble ideals, my dear young people! — Pope Francis

Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare - changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time - the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman. — Alan Alda

Today, I declare your rule to be at its end. Your cities are not your cities. Your vessels are not your vessels. Your planets are not your planets. They were built by us. And they belong to us, the common trust of man. Now we take them back. Never mind the darkness you spread, never mind the night you summon, we will rage against it. We will howl and fight till our last breath, not just in the mines of Mars, but on the shores of Venus, on the dunes of Io's sulfur seas, in the glacial valleys of Pluto. We will fight in the towers of Ganymede and the ghettos of Luna and the storm-stricken oceans of Europa. And if we fall, others will take our place, because we are the tide. And we are rising." Then — Pierce Brown

Jason lifted me up, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. His forehead rested against mine. "I've never liked dancing." He started to sway with the music and the tide, turning us slowly. "But maybe I just never had the right partner. — Lisa Kessler

I am indeed a kind of alien," siad Momo. "Your legends do not entirely miss the mark. We do have ray guns and flying saucers. But my homeland is not one of your space's planets. I'm from the All, Joe Cube. A world of four dimensions. I climbed down through a tunnel to get to Spaceland- to your world. Spaceland lies in an endless cavern like a strange, subterranean sea. Spaceland very nearly lacks a fourth dimension; it extends less than a nanometer in the direction of your vinn and vout- which actually point in the direction of our up and down. Spaceland appears to us as something like a rug- but unlike a rug, Spsaceland is cunningly filled with motion and life. It seems the Creator put Spaceland in place to separate the All in two. My people the Kluppers, live up above it, and another fold called the Dronners live down below. They are our enemies, hidden below Spaceland." Momo paused, as if agitated by the thought of the Dronners. "You'll turn the tide against them Joe. — Rudy Rucker

These people looked Japanese, were originally Japanese, were numerous. We had no way of knowing to what extent they had been infiltrated. To their great credit, it seems not to have been very much at all. But I can understand why. And I rather respect Eleanor for standing out against the tide at that point. But it certainly was a tide. And I'm not going to say it was unjustified. — William A. Rusher