Fish Swimming Upstream Quotes

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

Some fish love to swim upstream. Some people love to overcome challenges.

Synchronicities are not flukes or random events—they’re intentional reflections of our intuition working with the perfect order of all things in the unseen world. It’s why fish swim upstream, birds fly south, and bears hibernate. Everything in nature intuitively gravitates toward what best serves its growth, and that includes the human race. The only difference is that we have the choice to follow our intuition or not. So if you want your sixth sense to work, stop resisting your vibes, and change the rules you live by instead.

Could you imagine what a salmon would say if you asked it about its life? We think our lives are miserable? If only a salmon could speak. This fish spends half of its life swimming upstream, only to reach a body of water where either a bear catches it or it lays eggs only to die right afterward. What are we complaining about then? A salmon does what a salmon does. It doesn’t complain.

You're like a salmon swimming upstream," Lev offers. “It's inside you to do it. And it's inside me to help you get there.” “Salmon.” Cy looks thoughtful. “I once saw this poster about a salmon. It was jumping up this waterfall, see? But there was a bear at the top, and the fish, it was jumping right into the bear's mouth. The caption beneath— it was supposed to be funny—said, The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.

It is not so much what people suffer that makes the world mysterious; it is rather how much they miss when they suffer. They seem to forget that even as children they made obstacles in their games in order to have something to overcome. Why, then, when they grow into man’s estate, should there not be prizes won by effort and struggle? Cannot the spirit of man rise with adversity as the bird rises against the resistance of the wind? Do not the game fish swim upstream? Must not the chisel cut away the marble to bring out the form? Must not the seed falling to the ground die before it can spring forth into life? Must not grapes be crushed that there may be wine to drink, and wheat ground that there may be bread to eat? Why then cannot pain be made redemption? Why under the alchemy of Divine Love cannot crosses be turned into crucifixes? Why cannot chastisements be regarded as penances? Why cannot we use a cross to become God-like? We cannot become like Him in His Power; we cannot become like Him in His Knowledge. There is only one way we can become like Him, and that is in the way He bore His sorrows and His Cross. And that way was with love. It is love that makes pain bearable.

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.

She stood on the willow bank. It was bright as mid-afternoon in the openness of the water, quiet and peaceful. She took off her clothes and let herself into the river. She saw her waist disappear into reflection less water; it was like walking into sky, some impurity of skies. All seemed one weight, one matter -- until she put down her head and closed her eyes and the light slipped under her lids, she felt this matter a translucent one, the river, herself, the sky all vessels which the sun filled. She began to swim in the river, forcing it gently, as she would wish for gentleness to her body. Her breasts around which she felt the water curving were as sensitive at that moment as the tips of wings must feel to birds, or antennae to insects. She felt the sand, grains intricate as little cogged wheels, minute shells of old seas, and the many dark ribbons of grass and mud touch her and leave her, like suggestions and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering and losing itself. She moved but like a cloud in skies, aware but only of the nebulous edges of her feeling and the vanishing opacity of her will, the carelessness for the water of the river through which her body had already passed as well as for what was ahead. The bank was all one, where out of the faded September world the little ripening plums started. Memory dappled her like no more than a paler light, which in slight agitations came through leaves, not darkening her for more than an instant. the iron taste of the old river was sweet to her, though. If she opened her eyes she looked at blue bottles, the skating waterbugs. If she trembled, it was at the smoothness of a fish or a snake that crossed her knees. In the middle of the river, whose downstream or upstream could not be told by a current, she lay on her stretched arm, not breathing, floating. Virgie had reached the point where in the next moment she might turn into something without feeling it shock her. She hung suspended in the Big Black River as she would know how to hang suspended in felicity. Far to the west, a cloud running fingerlike over the sun made her splash the water. She stood, walked along the soft mud of the bottom, and pulled herself out of the water by a willow branch, which like a warm rain brushed her back with its leaves. The moon, while she looked into the high sky, took its own light between one moment and the next. A wood thrush, which had begun to sing, hushed its long moment and began again. Virgie put her clothes back on. She would have given much for a cigarette, always wishing for a little more of what had just been. (from the short story The Wanderers)

A blur of movement, Hunter threw the fur onto the riverbank and waded toward her. She couldn’t touch bottom and, despite the desperate pumping of her arms and legs, went under again, taking another draft of water. Grabbing her by the hair, he dragged her to the surface and nearer to shore so her feet touched. Bringing his face close to hers, he tightened his grip on her braid. “You will obey me.” He enunciated each word with venomous clarity. “Always. You are mine--Hunter’s woman, forever with no horizon. The next time you shake your head at me, I will beat you.” A measure of the water she had inhaled surged up her throat. Unable to stop herself, she choked and then coughed. The ejected spray hit him square in the eyes. He blinked and drew back, an incredulous look on his face. Loretta clamped her palms over her mouth, angling her arms to hide her breasts, her shoulders heaving. As angry as he appeared, she fully expected him to lay her flat with his fist. Instead he released her braid and caught hold of her arms. When she finally got her breath, he let go of her and returned to shore, his leather-clad legs cutting sparkling swaths through the water. After wiping his face dry with the buffalo robe, he turned to glower at her. He sat on his haunches and rested his corded forearms on his knees. Glancing upstream and down, he said, “Your wooden walls are far away, Yellow Hair. If you try to slip away, this Comanche will find you.” Until that moment, the thought of swimming off hadn’t occurred to her. She shot a glance over her shoulder at the swift current. If only she had clothes… “You do not make like a fish so good. Save this Comanche much trouble, eh?” She thought she detected laughter in his voice, but when she looked back at him, his gaze, blue-black and piercing, was as unreadable as ever. He studied her for several endless seconds. She wondered what he was thinking and decided, from the gleam in his eye, that she didn’t want to find out.

The only fish that can swim upstream.

you have to keep shooting those fish in barrels.” I shrug. “And I have to swim upstream.

Because you have to keep shooting those fish in barrels.” I shrug. “And I have to swim upstream.

So, you stand in the river, facing upstream with the water rushing down upon you as if it could somehow fill the hollow emptiness—and somehow, it always does. So it was one morning. I stood there, without even casting and with no trout rising, and as the water rushed past me, I knew it was washing my burdens behind me, swirling them downstream like the autumn leaves. There is a great deal about living that trout can teach us. They teach us how to keep swimming even in a steady current. Trout know that if they stop swimming, they cease to be trout and begin to become debris, floating without purpose wherever the current may take them. Trout know that if they keep swimming, facing into the current, perhaps in the eddy of a rock, all that they need to truly live will eventually come to them. I learn a great deal from trout.

Even a dead fish can swim upstream.

Some flows, like sunlight or wind, cannot be affected by human action. No matter how many solar panels I put on my roof to absorb sunlight, they will have no effect on what the sun does tomorrow. But other flows—“critical-zone resources,” in the jargon—can be exploited to exhaustion. Consider an archetypical critical-zone flow: the run of salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Drop a net across the watercourse and the fish will swim right into it. As long as the number of fish taken from the river every year doesn’t exceed the number of survivors from that year’s crop of newborns, fishing can continue indefinitely—the supply won’t go down, no matter how many years people put in nets. But leave the net in too long one year and it will take every single salmon and there will be no more fishing after that. Catching the last fish is just as easy as catching the first—laying the net across the stream doesn’t get more costly as the supply diminishes. With critical-zone flows, things typically go fine until they suddenly don’t.