Upping Quotes & Sayings

I just feel like bands always need to work harder than the hardest working band. You need to constantly be one-upping yourself and surprising yourself at how hard that you'll work and devote yourself to your craft. — Hayley Williams

Keeping score of old scores and scars, getting even and one-upping, always makes you less than you are. — Malcolm Forbes

I've got to be kind of careful because I've had good advice: "Don't sell yourself too short." I have to not be too available to everything that comes along. I've always been a people pleaser and now I'm upping the ante in terms of price so I can be more selective. I really enjoyed working on three tracks on Sara Groves' [parenthood-focused] album Station Wagon. I love playing on those songs and I love the heart in that album. — Phil Keaggy

I didn't realize upping our relationship to phone buddies would come with a boyfriend title. Does that mean if we ever meet in person, we'll have to get married? — Kelly Oram

The AM were wicked bright and us a bit sick however we scored our wake ups boosting some items at a sidewalk sale in the Harvard Squar where it were warm upping and the snow coming off onnings and then later Poor Tony ran across an old Patty citizen type of his old aquaintance from like the Cape and Poor Tony got over and pretended like he would give a blow job On The House and we got the citizen to get in his ride with us and crewed on him good and we got enough $ off the Patty type to get straightened out for true all day and crewed on him hard and C wanted we should elemonade the Patty's map for keeps and everything like that and take his ride to this — David Foster Wallace

It's terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn't possibly be able to. It's like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story. — Tim Winton

Not unless we got married or did something stupid." Even Maddox had to know what a ludicrous - Wait. Did Maddox want to marry him? Like him, not some faceless dude he dreamed about in his pretty little fantasies? But him? Did Maddox really want that with him? And had Ben stomped all over that in his upset about Maddox not re-upping? Fuck. I really am an ass. He — Annabeth Albert

Women are perfectly aware of any spare-tire, muffin-top bulge they may have. The last thing we need is a stranger reminding us that they're aware of it too. — Olive B. Persimmon

The boar held a VCR reote control and cackled maliciously as he watched a video of U.S. politicians grinning with their one-time budy Saddam
Dick Cheney, Gulf War-era Secretary of State James Baker, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush, to the tune of "Taking Care of Business." And then the viewers saw themselves in a mirror emblazoned with the words "You are a witness. — Wafaa Bilal

My dad's a musician, and he taught me how to play when I was three, I think, so I've been playing ever since. It's something I've always done. And when you're really young, and you play music for people, people get really excited, so you get this inner sense that you are good at it, even though I've always been really not good at it. — Bob Schneider

It's ironic that as scientists that don't believe in god, were the ones that are closest to god. — Hiromu Arakawa

It's a weird thing where, especially in jazz, you have to totally mention cutting sessions and people one-upping each other and people being super, super tough on each other. And out of it emerge these genius musicians. — Damien Chazelle

I think my sweet spot is to make personal films on not-too-big budgets and also make other people's films, bringing productions to Iceland, upping the business here. — Baltasar Kormakur

May your homes be filled with peace, harmony, courtesy, and love. May they be filled with the Spirit of the Lord. — Thomas S. Monson

I think if I lived in New York I would be really stressed out going out to a club and seeing a good DJ who's doing something on a similar level. I'm pretty critical of myself when it comes to the music. Maybe they're not doing as many samples or the samples aren't put together as specifically but it would stress me out to feel like I needed to be one upping someone. In Pittsburgh, I'm in my own world - I know I'm the guy doing this here. — Girl Talk

What is she doing here? I wondered. Hasn't she had enough green-upping? — Lisa Papademetriou

Life kept going no matter what. And I tried to keep up. I really did. I ran and I ran and I ran. Hurdling every obstacle in my way. But I was tired. I was so damn tired of trying to keep up. Of hurdling one obstacle after another, only to find more in my path. And in the end, where did all of that running and jumping get me? Nowhere. My life was a freaking treadmill and it felt like someone kept upping the speed until I was running full sprint just trying not to fall on my face. — Jamie Canosa

The word thing is an interesting word. At first glance it looks like the front half of one word combined with the last half of another. It's a versatile word. It can be good, as in, "what a nice thing," or "she has a thing for you." Or it can be bad, like "the thing under the bed," or "here's the thing, you're fired and you smell bad." Add an "s" to the back end of it and it becomes something that most people in the world can't get enough of.
Things
People love things. They collect things. They store things. They cherish things and then move on and cherish other things. People also buy things. Some buy a lot of things simply because their neighbors have those same things
which is a weird thing if you really think about it.
It's remarkable what we'll do for the sake of things when in reality things couldn't care less about us. — Obert Skye

Where do the words go
when we have said them? — Margaret Atwood

I never thought I would make a living as a pencil-sharpener. The first goal was: I don't want to lose money. And then the goal was: I want to see if 100 people buy my pencils. I just kept upping the benchmarks. — David Rees

It is otherwise with sports and the media. There, too, a shift has occurred, from active participation to the vicarious participation of spectatorship. Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Super Bowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game. It is as if the demotion from participant to spectatorship and from live spectatorship to TV spectatorship has to be compensated by upping the ante in violence. — Walker Percy

The single most efficient change you can make isn't actually upping your daily word count, but eliminating the days where you are not writing. — Rachel Aaron

The first step is to distinguish the loving parts of your personality that are active from the frightened parts of your personality that are active - in other words, to learn to distinguish love from fear in you. The second step is to choose love, no matter what. — Gary Zukav

Let today be the day you love yourself enough to no longer just dream of a better life; let it be the day you act upon it. — Steve Maraboli

To me, it's always what's next and I think that's what drives most very successful people. It's never about the money. I mean that's a way of keeping score. It's about achievement and it's about winning a game and it's about upping the ante. — Donny Deutsch

To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America's story, the high drama that is upping and leaving-and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands. - p. 342 — Philip Roth

I have never held myself back because of poverty or the judgment of man to get a job completed. My ability, my heart, and mind have always gone beyond the boundaries of others' expectations of me. — Patricia H. Graham

One of the scariest things to me was, I really feel like I'm a pretty even-keeled person with a good outlook and respect level, but in that environment, deep within the character, you see how easy it is to go to that place because you're one-upping each other and it's this heavy environment filled with young men trying to make an impression. It's dangerous. It's something that I became very conscious of afterwards. — Nick Jonas

This kind of thing requires secrecy to function, so exposing all the secrets hurts them in the end. It's the only way this really, permanently stops. — James S.A. Corey

Neither imagine that you are false, nor lash yourself, for both may be forms of self-indulgence. — Idries Shah

An ad that pretends to be art is
at absolute best
like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair. — David Foster Wallace

Tennis Australia really led the charge as far as upping the prize money and trying to do the right thing by the players. They also led the way so women have equal prize money in all the grand slams too. — Samantha Stosur

The vanity of intelligence is that the intelligent man is often more committed to 'one-upping' his opponent than being truthful. When the idea of intelligence, rather than intelligence itself, becomes a staple, there is no wisdom in it. — Criss Jami

But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them - if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line - well, you're deluding yourself. For one thing, it's easier to plan derivative work - things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal. — Ed Catmull

The crystal ball has a question mark in its center. There are some fundamental choices to be made. We will either choose to continue to wage a hopeless war to preserve the existing architecture for copyright by upping the stakes and using better weapons to make sure that people respect it. If we do this, public support for copyright will continue to weaken, pushing creativity underground and producing a generation that is alienated from the copyright concept. — Lawrence Lessig

Backup?" Tori said. "You mean he didn't need that?"
"Apparently not," I murmured.
Simon looked from her to me, confused, then understanding. "You guys thought ... "
"That if you didn't get your medicine in the next twenty-four hours, you'd be dead?" I said. "Not exactly, but close. You know, the old 'upping the ante with a fatal disease that needs medication' twist. Apparently, it still works."
"Kind of a letdown, then, huh?"
"No kidding. Here we were, expecting to find you minutes from death. Look at you, not even gasping."
"All right, then. Emergency medical situation, take two."
He leaped to his feet, staggered, keeled over, then lifted his head weakly.
"Chloe? Is that you?" He coughed. "Do you have my insulin?"
I placed it in his outstretched hand.
"You saved my life," he said. "How can I ever repay you?"
"Undying servitude sounds good. I like my eggs scrambled."
He held up a piece of fruit. "Would you settle for a bruised apple? — Kelley Armstrong

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can. — M. John Harrison

Certainty becomes you. — Tessa Dare

Instead of constantly enhancing the norm - forever upping the ante of the 'normal' with new technologies - we should work on enhancing the concept of normal by broadening appreciation of anatomical variation. — Alice Dreger

We hold each other close. He feels so good. So warm. So solid. I want this moment to last forever. — Susan Ee