Upstream Quotes & Sayings

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

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

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care 'summit,' thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. — Mark Steyn

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

Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street. — Gary Snyder

Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.
- Chinese proverb — Alvin Toffler

Unkar Delta at Mile 73
The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke's description of "raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet." Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified. — Ann Zwinger

What i need is traveling minds talktouch kisses spittouch you swimming upstream. — Sonia Sanchez

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

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

It wasn't the lower classes that preached the religion of sexual liberation. That came from the upper classes, with their comfortable cushions against the resulting disorder. What did it matter to them that they were polluting the waters? Their houses were upstream. The biological absurdism of same-sex pseudogamy (mock-marriage) is just the latest effort of the same irresponsible destroyers. Let those who are in favor of the world that the sexual revolution has produced defend it on its "merits," and not decree all discussion out of bounds from the beginning. We are not talking about privacy here, but about the air we all must breathe and the water we all must drink. — Anthony M. Esolen

Only the gamefish swims upstream, But the sensible fish swims down. — Ogden Nash

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

To Hegel, history was like a running river. Every tiny movement in the water at a given spot in the river is determined by the falls and eddies in the water higher upstream. But these movements are determined, too, by the rocks and bends in the river at the point where you are observing it.
the history of thought
or of reason
is like this river. The thoughts that are washed along with the current of past tradition, as well as the material conditions prevailing at the time, help to determine how you think. You can therefore never claim that any particular thought is correct for ever and ever. But the thought can be correct from where you stand — Jostein Gaarder

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

Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics. — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

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

Trying to control the emotional self willfully by manipulative attempts is like trying to choose a number on a thrown die or to push back the water of the Kamo River upstream. Certainly, they end up aggravating their agony and feeling unbearable pain because of their failure in manipulating the emotions. — Shoma Morita

We should follow every supply that runs into the particular lake below, going upstream in terms of we can. When we do not find Drakes' path, or even an additional, we should come back straight along,look yourself upward an additional way to obtain foods,and then do a similar for the next water for the south. — Chayada Welljaipet

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

Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength. — Michel De Montaigne

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

( ... ) the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too. — Robert Penn Warren

I stood knee deep in the cold water, eyes closed, and listened to the end of the day over the river. Then I opened my eyes and pulled the line and began making long casts upstream just off the bank. The new rod was light and alive in my hand, it was beautiful, and the line sang out fast and smooth with a whisper like scratching a guitar string. I didn't mind the sound at all. — Peter Heller

You never stand beside the same river twice; you have to keep looking upstream. — Donald Keough

Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral. — Iain Sinclair

I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

And I did long for it, to say one true sentence of my own, to leap into the subject, that sturdy vessel travelling upstream through the axonal predicate into what is possible; into the object, which is all possibility; into what little we know of the future, of eternity--the light of which, incidentally, was streaming in on us just then through the high windows. Above Stasselova's head the storm clouds were dispersing, as if frightened by some impending goodwill, and I could see tht the birds were out again, forming into that familiar pointy hieroglyph, as they're told to do from deep within. — Rebecca Lee

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

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

the First Salmon Ceremony, in all its beauty, reverberates through all the domes of the world. The feasts of love and gratitude were not just internal emotional expressions but actually aided the upstream passage of the fish by releasing them from predation for a critical time. Laying salmon bones back in the streams returned nutrients to the system. These are ceremonies of practical reverence. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards? — Ray Bradbury

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

Watersheds come in families; nested levels of intimacy ... As you work upstream toward home, you're more closely related. The big river is like your nation, a little out of hand. The lake is your cousin. The creek is your sister. The pond is her child. And, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, you're married to your sink. — Michael Parfit

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them. — Garrison Keillor

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

I grew up in a family in which no male upstream from me had ever finished high school, much less gone to college. But I was taught that even though there was nothing I could do about what was behind me, I could change everything about what was in front of me. My working poor parents told me that I could do better. — Mike Huckabee

The fish who keeps on swimming is the first to chill upstream. — Nick Hexum

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

Mount Fuji was mostly invisible n the summer, but on clear days she could see its grand and graceful silhouette dominating the northern sky. White herons gathered in the river upstream from laundry suds pouring out of a city grate, and hydrangeas bloomed on the banks, dropping blue and lavender petals over soda cans and bento cartons littered beside the asphalt. — Sara Backer

I have seen salmon swimming upstream to spawn even with their eyes pecked out. Even as they are dying, as their flesh is falling away from their spines, I have seen salmon fighting to protect their nests. I have seen them push up creeks so small that they rammed themselves across the gravel. I have seen them swim upstream with huge chunks bitten out of their bodies by bears. Salmon are incredibly driven to spawn. They will not give up. This gives me hope. — Kathleen Moore

It was Fidelma's favourite walk, a winding path by the river in the Castle grounds. The Castle with its turrets and ivied walls was a five-star hotel which attracted celebrities and regulars who came for the fishing and shooting. She could do that walk in her sleep, over the bridge, down three steps, by a sign that read 'Please Close the Gate' and all of a sudden the sound of the river, squeezing its way under the bridge and then bursting out as it opened into a wide sweep, making its way upstream, girdling the small islands that it passed. The sound was like water bursting in childbirth, or so a woman who had had many children once told her, and she remembered it. — Edna O'Brien

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

'Upstream Color' in particular, it's got to infect culture at some level in order to have a life of its own. Then it'll be judged, and it'll either live or it won't by its own merit, and history will decide whether it's relevant however long into the future. I think that's more than enough to hope for. — Shane Carruth

I know that life is busy and hard and that there's crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don't. Please don't. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader because of the art that you make. Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul. Please keep making your art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable. — Shauna Niequist

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

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

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

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

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

I have just drunk the waters of Changsha
And come to eat the fish of Wuchang.
Now I am swimming across the great Yangtze,
Looking afar to the open sky of Chu.
Let the wind blow and waves beat,
Better far than idly strolling in a courtyard.
Today I am at ease.
"It was by a stream that the Master said--
'Thus do things flow away!' "
Sails move with the wind.
Tortoise and Snake are still.
Great plans are afoot:
A bridge will fly to span the north and south,
Turning a deep chasm into a thoroughfare;
Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west
To hold back Wushan's clouds and rain
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.
The mountain goddess if she is still there
Will marvel at a world so changed. — Mao Zedong

Look upstream. Just simply turn around; have you no will? — Annie Dillard

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization ... In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system ... It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.
This is no defeatism ... The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too ...
All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of ... the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but ... with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it. — Norbert Wiener

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

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

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. — Sam Walton

I'm swimming upstream. Fighting the tide while the happy dead drift past me to the pools of ignorance. — Katie Waitman

Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed. — Harlan Ellison

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

Who is it? Who walks under the trees of the quay? Who is quite lost? Who is past saving? Over whose grave does the grass grow? Dreams have arrived, upstream they came. They came, they climb up the walls of the quay on a ladder. One stops makes conversation with them, they know a number of things, but what they don't know is where they come from. It is quite warm this autumn evening. They turn toward the river and raise their arms. Why do you raise your amrs instead of clasping us in them? — Franz Kafka

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

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

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

While I was swimming in the pool the other day, I was thinking about all kinds of things. About you, about Helsinki. I'm not sure how to put it, maybe like swimming upstream, back to my gut feelings." "While you were swimming?" "I can think well when I'm swimming." Sara paused for a time, as if impressed. "Like a salmon." "I don't know much about salmon." "Salmon travel a long way. Driven by something," Sara said. "Did you ever see Star Wars?" "When I was a kid." "May the force be with you," she said. "So you don't lose out to the salmon. — Haruki Murakami

{W}hy did she go into the field? A twinge of pleasure, of knowledge. Her dad would pull over to the side of a bridge, and they would watch from above, before he slipped down the bank to catch them. She was charmed by the motions of trout. How they take their forms from the pressures of another world, the cold forge of water. Their drift, their mystery, the way they turn and let the current take them, take them, with passive grace. They turn again, tumbling like leaves, then straighten with mouths pointing upstream, to better sip a mayfly, to root up nymphs, to watch for the flash of a heron's bill. The current always trues them, like compass needles. When she watches them, she feels wise. — Matthew Neill Null

When we really keep in the forefront of our thoughts that our intention in this life is to recover and be free, then being of service, practicing meditation, and doing what we need to do to get free becomes the only rational decision. This takes discipline, effort, and a deep commitment. It takes a form of rebellion, both inwardly and outwardly, because we not only subvert our own conditioning, we also walk a path that is totally countercultural. The status quo in our world is to be attached to pleasure and to avoid all unpleasant experiences. Our path leads upstream, against the normal human confusions and sufferings. — Noah Levine

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

Obama does not believe in individual upward mobility. He would penalize it, tax it, regulate it, inveigh against it and disincentivize it. We will be like salmon swimming upstream to mate. We will overcome the currents, the waterfall, the rocks and the predators, and will grapple our way up the stream. Then, at the top of the waterfall will stand Obama the Bear, waiting to scoop us up and have us for dinner. The taxman cometh. — Dick Morris

This green place in which I stood with James turned slowly around us like a music box. All my memories returning, and all his. I could see and feel each of his days and he mine. Childhood songs, books read, hearts broken, arguments forgiven.The sweetness of these imperfections far outshining the regrets. Our lives overlapped as naturally as two blades of grass brushing together.
My pain forgotten, my clothes dry and clean, I pulled James close to me. As he lifted my chin, I felt no sensation of falling as when I had been Light touching one who is Quick. It wasn't the mere heat of a stolen moment in borrowed flesh. We touched now soul to soul, both of us Light. And when we kissed, the garden rocked, floating upstream. — Laura Whitcomb

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

Always drink upstream from the herd. — Will Rogers

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

Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of those paired molecules are absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person's heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure.
Again, science marvels at the way molecules adapt over millions of years, but isn't there a deeper intent? In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn't that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight? The prolactin that generates milk in a mother's breast is unchanged from the prolactin that sends salmon upstream to breed, enabling them to cross from saltwater to fresh. — Deepak Chopra

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

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency. — Arthur Golden

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

Swimming upstream in the music business is a hard thing to do. — John Oates

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

My life is what a salmon must feel like. They are always going upstream, against the current. — Laura Schlessinger

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

The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream. — Barbara Kingsolver

The great festival of Lughnasa was held at Carmun once every three years. The site of Carmun was eerie. In a land of wild forest and bog, it was an open grassy space that stretched, green and empty, halfway to the horizon. Lying some distance west of the point where, if you were following it upstream, the Liffey's course began to retreat eastwards on the way to its source in the Wicklow Mountains, the place was absolutely flat, except for some mounds in which ancestral chiefs were buried. The festival lasted a week. There were areas reserved for food and livestock markets, and another where fine clothes were sold; but the most important quarter was where a large racetrack was laid out on the bare turf. — Edward Rutherfurd

high.
With the same fiber plant loss budget as in APON, to support the high bit rates, higher power transmitters are used in G-PON to meet the power budget requirements. This also implies that G-PON receivers need to handle higher receiver overload powers and therefore larger dynamic ranges. To ease the requirements and implementation of the upstream OLT burst mode receiver, G-PON has specified a power-leveling mechanism for "dynamic" power control (Sect. 8.3, [15]).
In the power-leveling mechanism, the OLT tries to balance the power it received from different ONUs by instructing ONUs to increase or decrease the launched power. Consequently, an ONU which is closer to the OLT and seeing less loss, will launch at a smaller power than an ONU which is further apart and experiencing more loss. Such concepts of power-leveling or power control have long existed in cellular networks to deal with the near-far cross talk effect and save cellular device battery power. — Cedric F. Lam

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

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

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

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

He was my teacher, and he had wrapped himself, his elaborate historical self, into this package, and stood in front of the high windows, to teach me my little lesson, which turned out to be not about Poland or fascism or war, borderlines or passion or loyalty, but just about the sentence: the importance of, the sweetness of. And I did long for it, to say one true sentence of my own, to leap into the subject, that sturdy vessel traveling upstream through the axonal predicate possibility; into what little we know of the future, of eternity. — Rebecca Lee

One can never swim upstream to a prosper future if they continue to drown in their past. — Timothy Pina

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

You're trying to swim upstream against the current. What is there about the natural flow of the river of life that has shocked you so strongly that you should want to swim against the current, even against time? You ought to know you're lost even before you begin. I don't understand you but I love you and I suppose you are obeying the law of your being. — Francoise Gilot

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