Downstream Quotes & Sayings

Let's get going. I don't like being alone out here. The sooner we can blend in with the Imperial population the safer we'll be. It's not hard to cross here," Mari added as they waded through the stream.
"We are fortunate," Alain told her. "It is more difficult downstream."
She felt a shadow cross her mind. "Where that bridge was? Where you almost died?"
"Yes."
"I'm really proud of you for that, but don't do it again. I'm being selfish. I need you." Mari waved one finger at Alain. "Don't be a hero?"
He regarded her impassively. "Even if you need a hero? — Jack Campbell

We are considering various ways of making use of our oil and gas downstream industries. This is to be complemented with the import of oil and gas from other sources as raw materials. — Hassanal Bolkiah

What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. — Robert M. Pirsig

Led through lined and grimy streets down to the river and eastward, as he had expected, towards the Isle of Dogs. A raw wind blew up from the water, carrying the smell of salt, stale fish, the overspill of sewage and the cold dampness of the outgoing tide sweeping down from the Pool of London towards the estuary and the sea. Across the gray water endless strings of barges made their heavy way downstream, laden with merchandise for half the earth. Ships passed them outward bound, down towards the docks of Greenwich and beyond. — Anne Perry

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

The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in Southeast Asia or southern Africa - from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against aids - can affect Americans. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream now. — Shashi Tharoor

Don't worry, little brother," he whispered, leaning back into the current's welcoming arms. "It's all downstream from here. — Michael Punke

Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations.
To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs.
It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention. — Karen Hitchcock

Rats! Sometimes it's very difficult being a dog ... Especially when it's raining. You're looking forward to a great breakfast ... When it arrives, you're full of joyful anticipation ... Then you see the water rise in your dog dish ... And you watch your pancakes float downstream! — Charles M. Schulz

As I wade into the still-freezing stream, the wind raises goose bumps on my body. A cloud of swallows skates across the sky; the water carries a slight taste of grit; my mother hums downstream. This is not any kind of happiness that I imagined. It is not what I chose.

But it's enough. It is more than enough. — Lauren Oliver

Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream. — Timothy Leary

Goethe's Faust risks all if he should cry to the moment, the 'augenblick', "Verweile doch!" "Last forever!" Who hasn't prayed that prayer? But the 'augenblick' isn't going to 'verweile'. You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. — Annie Dillard

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you. — Wendell Berry

Songwriting is like fishing in a stream; you put in your line and hope to catch something. And I don't think anyone downstream from Bob Dylan ever caught anything. — Arlo Guthrie

In planetary terms, we're all downstream. — William McDonough

The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain - the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in the man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? — Hilary Mantel

The way I saw it, people are like leaves that have fallen into a swift-moving stream. As the leaves get carried downstream, some are caught in rocks and never get any farther. Some are swept to shore. Others - the lucky ones - keep going, missing the stones, staying clear of the shore, staying afloat until they reach the river delta and break free into open water. — Tony Curtis

Whoever the kid had been, whoever had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: "You just change your attitude now please, young man." This transformation in kids - from flashing dragonflies, so to say, to sticky water-surface worms slowly slipping downstream - is noticed with pride by society and with mortification by God, which is a fantastic way of saying I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market. — William, Saroyan

The problem with romance is the occlusion. The tunnel vision, drawing your every gaze downstream, into those other eyes, the flotsam of your better self, your clearer self, along for the ride. It doesn't matter what secrets swirl and bob in the waters beneath you, as you float toward that lady at Delphi, who, you imagined, reading Mythology, must have been beautiful. It doesn't matter that Charybdis, with no body, with no form, with only a mouth-as-being, couldn't have been evil, because she lacked the brain for it. It doesn't matter that following the logical course of events, the natural course, always disadvantages someone else, because love, after all, is simply a competition for resources, made infinitely complex and unknowable when squared and cubed and raised to every other emotional exponent - and then layered with sex and society and a bad memory for what those resources were in the first place. — Darin Bradley

In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn't hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. — Rick Bragg

An awful, heartbroken cackling from the reeds behind. A vortex formed. A hole in the water. Into this, tufts of feathers disappeared. Turning, Henry saw the fish inhale two ducklings. The others broke into the main river and were swept downstream, their mother with them. The thrashing fish threw water like a canoe blade. Gills flared as it wolfed them down. Henry looked about, frantic, but no one else was there to see, no one to assure him it was true. — Matthew Neill Null

Songs are like fish. You just gotta have your line in the water. And it's a bad idea to fish downstream from Bob Dylan. — Arlo Guthrie

A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery. — Ray Bradbury

The survey of more than 100 waterways downstream from treatment plants and animal feedlots in 30 states found minute amounts of dozens of antibiotics, hormones, pain relievers, cough suppressants, disinfectants and other products. It is not known whether they are harmful to plants, animals or people. The findings were released yesterday on the Web site of the United States Geological Survey, which conducted the research, and in an online journal, Environmental Science and Technology. — Andrew Revkin

When we cast our bread upon the waters we can presume that someone downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our action, as we who are downstream from another will profit from the grantor's gift. — Maya Angelou

The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in - as if he'd been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream. — Denis Johnson

The irony is that it was tougher to rent a car from Cerberus when it owned Alamo than to buy a semi-automatic. To rent a car, one had to provide ID, a drivers' license, and get insurance coverage. To buy a gun? Cash and carry, from the back of a station wagon at a gun show. No concerns about downstream liability or risk. — Eliot Spitzer

Been in the river, haven't you?"
Aedan nodded.
"A sad day for everyone downstream," she said — Jonathan Renshaw

Hoover Dam," Thalia said. "It's huge."
We stood at the river's edge, looking up at a curve of concrete that loomed between the cliffs. People were walking along the top of the dam. They were so tiny they looked like fleas.
The naiads had left with a lot of grumbling - not in words I could understand, but it was obvious they hated this dam blocking up their nice river. Our canoes floated back downstream, swirling in the wake from the dam's discharge vents.
"Seven hundred feet tall," I said. "Built in the 1930s."
"Five million cubic acres of water," Thalia said.
Graver sighed. "Largest construction project in the United States."
Zoe stared at us. "How do you know all that?"
"Annabeth," I said. "She liked architecture."
"She was nuts about monuments," Thalia said.
"Spouted facts all the time." Grover sniffled. "So annoying."
"I wish she were here," I said. — Rick Riordan

We all live downstream — David Suzuki

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream. — W.C. Fields

An ecosystem, you can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another. — Richard Lewontin

The Buddha described his teaching as "going against the stream." The unflinching light of mindful awareness reveals the extent to which we are tossed along in the stream of past conditioning and habit. The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on (like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents we had never even suspected - precisely because until that moment we were largely living at their command. — Stephen Batchelor

It's time to be the leader of your own journey. There are far too many capable people who don't pursue their dreams and goals because they let their fears and others talk them out of it. They give up before they even try, and simply let life's river flow them downstream. Choose to be stronger than that and swim upstream when you have to. Choose to do the things in life that move you and make you happy. Let others lead small lives and argue over small things. Let others cry over small wounds and leave their future in someone else's hands. If you don't take the initiative to make your own dreams a reality, you will end up working for someone else, making their dreams reality. — Anonymous

The downstream effects are unknown. Do your best and hope for the best. If you're improving the world-however you define that-consider your job well done. — Tim Ferriss

Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns. — Marge Piercy

Another howl broke from the tent downstream, this one sounding more like pieces of metal being violined against each other than an issue from any organic throat. — Tim Powers

Even through you and I are in different boats, you in your boat and we our canoe, we share the same river of life. What befalls me befalls you. And downstream, downstream in this river of life, our children will pay for our selfishness, for our greed, and for our lack of vision. — Oren Lyons

Sometimes things change irrevocably. You turn a corner, hear a new song, read a book, fall in or out of love, or look at a painting in a different light.
Or you get shot several times.
Then no matter how you try, you can't unsee or unexperience something to make life what it used to be. The river always flowed downstream. — Thea Harrison

I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched ... Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.
Even the anatomy of a river was laid bare. Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory. — Norman Maclean

Politics is downstream from culture and not the other way around. — Timothy S. Goeglein

Downstream is always someone else's up. — Barbara Kingsolver

He leaned in even closer until she could count the bristles on his poorly shaven chin. "But you're pretty. You can stay. Turn around and spread your legs so I can fuck you up against the wire. I'll get my cock in you so deep it'll need a directory to find its way out."
"That sounds ... dangerous."
"I am," he rumbled sexily, like a waterfall that's had a dam collapse upstream and is about to flood and destroy the village of peasants further downstream ... many of whom are poor and in desperate need of medical attention. — Cari Silverwood

Why kick the man downstream who can't put the parts together because the parts really weren't designed properly? — Philip Caldwell

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

Underwater, another fourteen stories of liquid driven down and out of sight. You could toss anything you wanted in there - thick logs, buoys, rowboats - and it would disappear and die, reappearing as something less downstream. Death, taxes, and Niagara Falls, his father once told him, were the only three things in this world that were absolutely certain. These — Michael Clarkson

Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying. — Annie Dillard

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics. — Michael Pollan

Real hard work and satisfaction will bring a detachment from time and worries. Do what you love and life will flow downstream. — Phil Wohl

So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office. — Reed Hastings

The history of the Bible is one of perpetual revolution. In that light, we might begin to think about the Bible not so much as a fixed thing but as a dynamic, vital tradition. In light of its history, the Bible looks less like a rock than a river, continually flowing and changing, widening and narrowing, as it moves downstream.

For some, thinking about the Bible as a river and not a rock is liberating. That rock has been a millstone around the neck and a tombstone that won't be rolled away. But for others, seeing it this way can be disorienting. That rock has promised solid foundation in a stormy world. Cling to it or be swept away. — Timothy Beal

The river rises, flows over its banks
and carries us all away, like mayflies
floating downstream: they stare at the sun,
then all at once there is nothing. — Stephen Mitchell

Law is downstream from culture. By the time you make a law about something, you're reacting, not acting. I'd rather shape the culture. — Rick Warren

River burial had a certain rustic poetry, but Ophion cared not at all about preserving the decency of the dead. The river deposited Psaltery on a mud flat three kilometers downstream. When they passed her ruined body, the Titanides did not even glance at it. Chris could not look away. The corpse crawling with scavengers haunted his sleep for a long time. 28. — John Varley

Everything that we want is downstream ... And you don't have even have to turn the boat and paddle downstream, just let go of the oars, the current will carry you. — Esther Hicks

Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe. — Donella H. Meadows

There is a preliminary belief that Tuolumne River water could be captured by other reservoirs that are downstream from Hetch Hetchy, the Cherry and Don Pedro reservoirs for instance. Furthermore, any shortfalls could be supplied via greater conservation efforts, newly discovered groundwater supplies, and water purchases when necessary. — Matt Gonzalez

Let go of the oars ... Everything you want is downstream. — Esther Hicks

People always find it so frustrating that there's no structure they can see, that they just have to follow the river downstream and see what they find. They want to know the plot so they can guess the end, because they're afraid of what it might be. I can understand that, even though I know it's not the way things work. I never know what the hell's going to happen next, but I can live with that. — Michael Marshall Smith

Just across from Bismarck stood Fort Lincoln where friends and relatives of Custer's dead cavalrymen still lived, and these emigrating Sioux could perceive such bitterness in the air that one Indian on the leading boat displayed a white flag. Yet, in accordance with the laws of human behavior, the farther downstream they traveled the less hostility they encountered, and when the tiny armada reached Standing Rock near the present border of South Dakota these Indians were welcomed as celebrities. Men, women and children crowded aboard the General Sherman to shake hands with Sitting Bull. Judson Elliot Walker, who was just then finishing a book on Custer's campaigns, had to stand on a chair to catch a glimpse of the medicine man and reports that he was wearing "green wire goggles." No details are provided, so green wire goggles must have been a familiar sight in those days. Sitting Bull mobbed by fans while wearing green wire goggles. It sounds like Hollywood. — Evan S. Connell

It's hard to see a river all at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn't a point where you stand. In the beginnings of the river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is always tipping the balance from one stream to another. History changes with each tiny event, shaping an outcome that we can only fully grasp in hindsight. And that view changes as we move farther downstream. — Lynn Culbreath Noel

Flowers floating down the river; yellow and scarlet cannas, roses, jasmine, hibiscus. They are placed in boats made of broad leaves, then consigned to the waters with a prayer. The strong current carries them swiftly downstream, and they bob about on the water for fifty, sometimes a hundred yards, before being submerged in the river. Do the pursued prayers sink too, or do they reach the hearts of the many gods who have favoured Hardwar - 'door of Hari,or Vishnu'- these several hundred years? — Ruskin Bond

In the beginning we are all floating downstream. At some point we become aware that the currents are dragging us down and that we are no longer satisfied with the status quo of human — Noah Levine

When you pollute a river, it's a supreme injustice to those who are downstream and those who live in the river who are not human beings. — Paul Hawken

Drifting downstream in a row boat doesn't count against your life span. — James Patterson

There is a unique bond between the land and the people in the Crescent City. Everyone here came from somewhere else, the muddy brown current of life prying them loose from their homeland and sweeping them downstream, bumping and scraping, until they got caught by the horseshoe bend that is New Orleans. Not so much as a single pebble 'came' from New Orleans, any more than any of the people did. Every grain of sand, every rock, every drip of brown mud, and every single person walking, living and loving in the city is a refugee from somewhere else. But they made something unique, the people and the land, when they came together in that cohesive, magnetic, magical spot; this sediment of society made something that is not French, not Spanish, and incontrovertibly not American. — James Caskey

She knew she was a purveyor of costume, of disguise, a fabricator of persona, one who touched only the protective surface, never the skin, the heart. She was beginning, as a consequence, to envy almost everyone she met, to envy their small preoccupations, their carefully kept account books, the way they stood on streetcorners talking about farm machinery, the weather, the price of a bag of oats, fully connected for the moment to these ordinary things. Her connection continually slipped downstream, against the current, toward the swiftly disappearing past. What beyond the most cursory, practical knowledge of fashion, had the present to do with her? — Jane Urquhart

Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It's agriculture. It's golf courses. It's domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf. — Sylvia Earle

Where possible use Value Objects to model concepts in the downstream Context when objects from the upstream Context flow in. By doing so you can integrate with a priority on minimalism, that is, minimizing the number of properties that you assume responsibility for managing in your downstream model. Using immutable Values results in assuming less responsibility. — Anonymous

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

Your life will contribute to a grand and wonderful story no matter what you do. You have been spoken. You are here, existing, choosing, living, shaping the future and carving the past. Your physical matter and your soul exist, not out of necessity, not voluntarily, and not under their own strength. There is absolutely nothing that you or I can do to guarantee that we will continue to exist. You aren't doing anything that makes you be. We aren't the Author. You and I are spoken. We have been called into this art as characters, born into this thread of occurrence tumbling downstream in the long Niagara of loss set in motion by the trouble that faced our first father and first mother. We will contribute to this narrative. But how? — N.D. Wilson

All communities have a right to clean water. The taxpayers of Pueblo should not have to carry the burden of the clean up cost simply because they live downstream. — John Salazar

I'm saying that mushrooms are very clever at surveying a landscape and taking a long-term view of the health of the population of the descendent organisms that give rise to the forest, that create the debris fields, that feed the fungi, that help the fungi's own progeny live downstream. They take a very advanced view of ecosystem health and management, trying to increase soil depth, and, by increasing soil depth and the richness of the soil, to increase the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. Higher carrying capacity leads to more biodiversity, more sustainability, more resiliency. — Derrick Jensen

Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. — John Lennon

There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again, and on brighter days, he could even see himself going on this way for some time. A small but passable life.
And then, of course, the end of the world happened. — Justin Cronin

Nadia now lies back as her body perks up at me like the white lotus that reaches for the sun's love. I now come into Nadia with all of my love, my lips running over her silk skin like water drifting downstream. Her kisses are filled with an incredible ability to give as her body merges into mine. The sounds of relief escaping her lips commend my escape, transcending me into the absolute pureness of love's unseen realm. — Luccini Shurod

That's what life is, a continual state of journey. You are a river passing downstream. — Jon Foreman

The entire time we playing, the current had gently moved us downstream with the tide. We were drifting the whole time and never realized it until we couldn't find our way back. — Craig Groeschel

What if we had walked a different path one day, would some small incident have nudged us elsewhere the way a pebble tossed into a brook might change the course a hundred miles downstream? — Dana Gioia

Without a quest, life is quickly reduced to bleak black and wimpy white, a diet too bland to get anybody out of bed in the morning. A quest fuels our fire. It refuses to let us drift downstream gathering debris. — Charles R. Swindoll

Okay, let me try to lay this out straight for you," Dan said. "I'm not saying any of this is your fault or even that your grandparents did any of it. I'm saying it happened, and it happened on your people's watch. You're the one who benefited from it. It doesn't matter that you're way downstream from the actual events. You're still drinking the water. "I don't care if you feel guilty. I just care that you take some responsibility. Responsibility's about what you do now, not about feeling bad about what happened in the past. You can't erase the footprints that have already been made. What you've got to do is take a close look at those footprints and make sure you're more careful where you walk in the future. — Kent Nerburn

As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream. We are all interconnected, and we can no longer afford the luxury of not thinking about the rest of the planet in anything we do. — Shashi Tharoor

Ollie-O was in a semicatatonic state, uttering nonsensical phrases like "This is not biodegradable - the downstream implications are enormous - the optics make for rough sledding - going forward -" before getting stuck on the words "epic fail," which he kept repeating. — Maria Semple

When the valley surrounding St. Cloud's was cleared and the second growth (scrub pine and random, unmanaged softwoods) sprang up everywhere, like swamp weed, and when there were no more logs to send downriver, from Three Mile Falls to St. Cloud's
because there were no more trees
that was when the Ramses Paper Company introduced Maine to the twentieth century by closing down the saw mill and the lumberyard along the river at St. Cloud's and moving camp downstream ... There were no Ramses Paper Company people left behind, but there were people ...
Not one of the neglected officers of the Catholic Church of St. Cloud's stayed; there were more souls to save by following the Ramses Paper Company downstream. — John Irving