High Stakes Quotes

These days, it seems like you can't throw a fish in a bookstore without hitting a high-stakes love triangle
not that I recommend the throwing of fish in bookstores, mind you, as it certainly annoys the booksellers, not to mention the fish ... ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

We're reducing the number of high-stakes tests from fifteen to five. ~ Ken Robinson

Miami drivers have long ago take the simple chore of going from one place to another and turned it into a kind of high-speed, heavily armed game of high-stakes bumper cars. ~ Jeff Lindsay

I see Macbeth as a young, open-faced warrior, who is gradually sucked into a whirpool of events because of his ambition. When he meets the weird sisters and hears their prophecy, he's like the man who hopes to win a million - a gamble for high stakes. ~ Roman Polanski

Xenophobia doesn't benefit anybody unless you're playing high-stakes Scrabble. ~ Dennis Miller

I think if you're in this business, like any high-stakes business, the highs and lows can make you a manic-depressive person, if you weren't that way to start with. 'Cause it's just so crazy on your psyche. A lot of it has to do with people thinking they're greater than someone else. ~ Joan Cusack

I love things where I can be physical and I so love high stakes, and you usually don't get that unless you're doing a play or an action movie. ~ Will Patton

In Debt, the anthropologist David Graeber tells the story of Tei Reinga, a Maori villager and "notorious glutton" who used to wander up and down the New Zealand coast, badgering the local fishermen by asking for the best portions of their catch. Since it's impolite in Maori culture (as in many cultures) to refuse a direct request for food, the fishermen would oblige - but with ever-increasing reluctance. And so as Reinga continued to ask for food, their resentment grew until "one day, people decided enough was enough and killed him."
This story is extreme, to say the least, but it illustrates how norm-following and norm-enforcement can be a very high-stakes game. Reinga flouted an important norm (against freeloading) and eventually paid dearly for it. But just as tellingly, the fishermen who put him to death felt so duty-bound by a different norm (the norm of food-sharing) that they followed it even to the point of building up murderous resentment. "Couldn't you just have said no to Reinga's requests?!" we want to shout at the villagers. ~ Kevin Simler

Of the ready green on a blue felt top. The gentlemen who had assembled around it for an evening of high-stakes Hold 'Em were well dressed, well fed, and well heeled, but now their mouths hung loose and their poolside tans paled. "Hands on the table, guys," Jadick said. "And don't any of you act one-armed." A short man with an air of compact power, Jadick moved with brisk precision and spoke calmly. He pulled back the hammers on his archaic but awesome weapon and said, "Scoop the fuckin' manna, boys." "Check," said Dean Pugh. He and Cecil Byrne, his fellow Wingman, went slowly around the table ~ Daniel Woodrell

Hence [through No Child Left Behind] the state has been given power...to fire all teachers and principles. So here we have an unusual case in which the students are engaged in the performances, but the high stakes have been displaced onto the teachers who are preparing their charges for the exams. ~ James M. Lang

The most volatile current debate among American school administrators, teachers, parents, and students concerns "high-stakes" testing. The stakes are considered high because instead of simply testing students to measure their progress, schools are increasingly held accountable for the results. ~ Anonymous

Nurses have new and expanding roles. They are case managers, helping patients navigate the maze of health care choices and develop plans of care. They are patient educators who focus on preventative care in a multitude of settings outside hospitals. And they are leaders, always identifying ways for their practice to improve. Because nurses have the most direct patient care, they have much influence on serious treatment decisions. It is a very high stakes job. Everyone wants the best nurse for the job, and that equates to the best educated nurse. ~ Judi Evans

No Child Left Behind has diminished [teachers'] sense of control of their own classroom, narrowed the focus of their jobs, and stifled pedagogical innovation. ~ James M. Lang

I don't understand why it's more socially acceptable to say that you are a shallow person than to just say this is not something you want to do. Especially because it's a really hard job. It's a really important job. And why the hell should you do a really hard, important job that you don't want to do? That has extremely high stakes? That just blows my mind. ~ Meghan Daum

I'm urging NASA to foster the development of what I call 'runway landers.' No, that's not the name of a high stakes gambler from Vegas. It's a type of spacecraft that flies to orbit like the retiring Shuttles but then glides to a landing like an airplane on a runway. Just like the Shuttles do. ~ Buzz Aldrin

My workday is non-stop break-neck high stakes and high pressure. Every day. ~ Hank Phillippi Ryan

We live vicariously through stories, because our own lives provide so few opportunities for high-stakes adventure and noble sacrifice. ~ Sarah Cross

We heads of state really prefer to have some sort of an agenda before we sit down at the high-stakes table, you know. All bad novelists notwithstanding, surprise and improvisation are not the best basis for successful diplomacy! ~ David Weber

We don't like checklists. They can be painstaking. They're not much fun. But I don't think the issue here is mere laziness. There's something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us - those we aspire to be - handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating. ~ Atul Gawande

Being loved is a good thing. A grand thing. The best damned thing of all. ~ Lori Wilde

The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically "war stories." ~ Steven Pressfield

That's one of the difficult things of being an actor that I'm still not used to. You have to go, you have to show up at these places where you know nobody, and sometimes with really impressive, high stakes people like Roman Polanski. ~ John C. Reilly

Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only.

Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans.

The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also ~ Jean Donaldson

When you are 15, everything is such high stakes, even tiny things. I think because of that, it is funny but sad at the same time. ~ Sophie Wu

CA-CAW. CA-CAW.
I shrieked and hit the floor.
Okay, maybe I needed a little protecting.
"Use your spear, Ingrid!" I gestured wildly at the ornate weapon. "That bird is not going back out that window without a fight. Hurry, before it pecks us to death!"
Instead of impaling the flying beast with her spear, Ingrid chuckled warmly. "Huggie, it's nice to see you again."
---
"If they get to you before I can get you to the Valkyrie stronghold, you'll either be killed or tossed into one of the Nine Worlds quicker than you can say, 'Odin's my dad. ~ Amanda Carlson

The very dull truth is that writing love scenes is the same as writing other scenes - your job is to be fully engaged in the character's experience. What does this mean to them? How are they changed by it, or not? I remember being a little nervous, as I am when writing any high-stakes, intense scene (death, sex, grief, joy). ~ Madeline Miller

He loved that anxiety, that terrible and oppressive anxiety which he experienced during the game of dice, during the suspense of high stakes. ~ Hermann Hesse

People tend to think astronauts have the courage of a superhero - or maybe the emotional range of a robot. But in order to stay calm in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, all you really need is knowledge. Sure, you might still feel a little nervous or stressed or hyper-alert. But what you won't feel is terrified. ~ Chris Hadfield

If you take real-life circumstances and take out all the pauses then you have a thriller. It has to be non-stop, high stakes and fascinating all the time. Real life is like that from time to time. ~ Hank Phillippi Ryan

What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, "Let's be dragons," and then they're dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kind - the game played for the game's sake.
On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

'High Stakes' was a very bad movie that I was cast in as a lead. ~ Dave Foley

Bon Iver: Way too emotionally high stakes for casual listening in the sense that it makes every single part of your life feel like the part of a TV show where you are in a hospital saying goodbye for the very last time ~ Jesse Andrews

But that's a good match for the way I've always approached life. I've always believed in motion and action, in following connections wherever they take me, and in not getting entrenched. My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps and links than simple steady movement, or worse, stagnation. It's allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I'm supposed to be doing next. Stories have ups and downs and moments of development followed by moments of climax; the storyteller has to keep it all together, which is an incredible skill. But poetry is all climax, every word and line pops with the same energy as the whole; even the spaces between the words can feel charged with potential energy. It fits my style to rhyme with high stakes riding on every word and to fill every pause with pressure and possibility. And maybe I just have ADD, but I also like my rhymes to stay loose enough to follow whatever ideas hijack my train of thought, just like I like my mind to stay loose enough to absorb everything around me. ~ Jay-Z

Your work isn't a high stakes, nail-biting professional challenge. It's a form of play. Lighten up and have fun with it. ~ Sol LeWitt

Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

Love is not a white lie. It doesn't fill the cracks and make bad things beautiful or okay. Love is allowing ourselves to be fooled, not being fooled. Leaving ourselves open to hurt, not the hurt itself. Leaving ourselves open to delusion, not delusion itself. It's not a guarantee, it's the act of promising. The breathtaking act of hope. It's the stupid high-stakes gamble that pays off. It's a whisper of a touch. It's a window flung open and naked to the day. ~ Sung Yim

A giant once lived in that body. But Matt Brady got lost. Because he was looking for God too high up and too far away. ~ Jerome Lawrence

The most intimate community of all knowledge - the republic of learning is the high purpose of scholars. ~ Novalis

High expectations weren't nurtured in my neck of nowhere back then - children weren't fawned over from an early age as 'gifted' and groomed for a prizewinning future; self-esteem was considered something you had to pick from the garden yourself. ~ James Wolcott

I had to get out. Move.
I ran through neighborhoods, other lives, other worlds. Solipsism. A man on his lawn mower. Green and yellow. A high-school kid with earphones, washing his car, suds creeping down the driveway. High in the bright blue sky the moon showed like a fading fingerprint. It seemed so weak, so out of place, as if it stumbled into broad daylight by mistake. Unseen protons dying by the billions. ~ Jerry Spinelli

It doesn't matter how high you fly with the biggest wings you have, but remember that your soul is still trapped in the roots in the ground where you fell and you were so small and so empty. ~ Neymat Khan

Without 'tis autumn, the wind beats on the pane
With heavy drops, the leaves high upwards sweep.
You take old letters from a crumpled heap,
And in one hour have lived your life again.
~ Mihai Eminescu

silver crucifix in a chain high in the air. "NO!" he yelled. "I command you to leave this body! I command you to leave her now! ~ Willow Rose

If God sets your speed limit high, don't be afraid of your life-car being crashed. ~ Munia Khan

This was Stiletto magazine, not Dr. Phil. Stiletto was sex and high heels, not companionship and freaking clogs. ~ Lauren Layne

Utah's mountains are not the Himalayas, but by one standard they are the highest in the country. According to a series of stories in the The Salt Lake Tribune, the average elevation of Utah's tallest peaks in each county is roughly 11,222 feet. Colorado ranks second, with an average county high peak elevation of 10,791 feet, followed by Nevada (10,764) and Wyoming (10,179). Alaska, home to the country's highest peak - the 20,320-foot Denali - ranks only sixth, with an average county high peak elevation of 9,280 feet. ~ Michael Weibel

I am a guy," I say.
"And I hate boys," she says.
"But a guy's different," I say.
"Maybe a little," she says. ~ Ned Vizzini

I haven't been this high-functioning since last century." - Chief Morray, The City Center ~ Simone Pond

A high-mature digital organization is shifting from "pushing" stuff to the digital channel into "pulling" resources up for problem-solving. ~ Pearl Zhu

I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism. ~ Harry Shearer

Brooks too wide for our leaping, hedges far to high. Loads too heavy for our moving, burdens too cumbersome for us to bear. Distances far beyond our journeying. The horse gave us mastery. ~ Pam Brown

Where the Tennessee River, like a silver snake, winds her way through the clay hills of Alabama, sits high on these hills, my home town, Florence. ~ William Christopher Handy

The rich are different. Their wants are very high maintenance. They'll pick eye color and hair color, all the way down to what she does for a living, what school she went to. Their list can be extremely long. But at the end of the day, dating is dating, because they're human beings. ~ Patti Stanger

You don't want to peak in high school. If you do, the rest of your life is a disaster. ~ Candace Bushnell

When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school. ~ Billy Collins

I wanted to be a doctor when I was a kid, but I started doing theater in high school because it was a requirement. At first, I was completely irritated. But I ended up loving it. ~ Sophia Bush

The health of your family or your office or your city directly affects the health of it after. The better you are at handling high-stress situations with little information, those skills lead to resilience and the ability to recover afterward. ~ Amanda Ripley

Romance was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Personality wise, we are all kindred spirits. I've said this before; if we [with Mike Mangini ] ever went to high school together we would have been friends. He is just one of us! We felt that immediate connect. ~ John Petrucci

When the Great Scorer comes to list the main downers of our time, the Nixon Inauguration will have to be ranked Number One. Altamont was a nightmare, Chicago was worse, Kent State so bad that it's still hard to find the right words for it ... but there was at least a brief flash of hope in those scenes, a wild kind of momentary high, before the shroud came down. The ~ Hunter S. Thompson

This girl," I tell Rachel. "That's not what I look like. That's not who I am." I have a feeling Rachel will get this because she pretended to be straight all through high school, even though she figured out she was a lesbian when she was in eighth grade.

I say it again, "That's not me."

Her eyes light up. "Great. Let's see if we can find her. ~ Jennifer Niven

I jumped horses over big dangerous fences in competition. And got very, very good at it, at quite a high level. And I realized long since that, yeah, it's the same thing that appeals to me about it. You can't think about anything else, in either case; jumping horses in competition, show jumping, or flying an airplane, for whatever purpose. ~ James Lipton

We had a level of tariffs of about five per cent. Now a lot of those will go, most of them will go over time, some of them immediately. Now that means that electronic goods and other things, white goods, coming into Australia, will be cheaper for our community. It also means in many cases that the inputs used by our high-end manufacturers to make a final product are also coming in cheaper than they otherwise would - so it makes those manufacturers more competitive. ~ Andrew Robb

When I perform, I like to wear funky flats, leather boots or knee-high Converse with bright laces. Then I can dance and not worry about falling. ~ China Anne McClain

A Consciously Conscious Revolutionary Workplace mindset, is People Firsts, to ensure that it's not a prostitute of our children's future. ~ Tony Dovale

Despite the situation in Cuba, I had a chance to play on the national team; and compared to other baseball players and other people in Cuba, I had the opportunity to live at a level that was not very high class but in the middle. ~ Yoenis Cespedes

Stuck in high school for the rest of my natural life. Talk about hell. ~ Cara Lynn Shultz

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is! ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Every time I get up and sing for people, I get such a high. I just want to do it again and again. ~ Pixie Lott

And did with sighs their fate deplore,
Since I must shelter them no more;
And if before my joys were such,
In having heard, and seen too much,
My grief must be as great and high,
When all abandoned I shall be,
Doomed to a silent destiny. ~ Aphra Behn

The thesis that risk assessment itself is inherently risky is nowhere better borne out than in the area of high-consequence risks. ~ Anthony Giddens

Hail, Son of the Most High, heir of both Worlds, Queller of Satan! On thy glorious work Now enter, and begin to save Mankind. Thus they the Son of God, our Saviour meek, Sung victor, and, from heavenly feast refreshed, Brought on his way with joy. He, unobserved, Home to his mother's house private returned. ~ John Milton

I'm ashamed to admit this, but I didn't read a novel all the way through until after high school. Blasphemy, I know. I'm an author now. Books and words are my world. ~ Matt De La Pena

Now, I did know a certain young lady of the 'romantic' generation of not so long ago who, after being mysteriously in love for several years with a certain gentleman whom she could have married at any time without the least difficulty, suddenly broke off their relationship, inventing for herself all manner of insurmountable obstacles, and one stormy night plunged from a high, precipitous cliff into a fairly deep and fast-flowing river, where she perished from her own caprice solely through her attempt to imitate Shakespeare's Ophelia, for, had the precipice, which she had long before singled out and been compulsively drawn to, been less picturesque, and had there been only a prosaically flat bank in its stead, perhaps there would have been no suicide at all. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I remembered all the Christmases we'd celebrated, always with a huge tree, situated next to the staircase where I now sat. As a child, I'd sat upon that same step, huddled up against the balus- ters, studying the tree, its shape and decorations; enthralled by the magical light and shadows upon the walls around me. Dancing. Over Christmas the only light in the hallway had come from the silver candelabra burning on the hallway table. But on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day night small candles were attached to the branches of the tree, their soft light reflected in the vast chande- lier suspended high above and thrown back across the walls like stars across the universe. I remembered the smell, that mingling of pine and wax and burning logs: the smell of home, the smell of happiness. I'd sat there in my nightgown, listening to the chime of crystal; the laughter, music and voices emanating from another room, an adult world I could only imagine. And always hoping for a glimpse of Mama, as she whooshed across the marble floor, beautiful, resplendent . . . invincible. ~ Judith Kinghorn

Frankie,I noticed as I flipped the mic up to its normal position, was staring at me through narrowed eyes, clapping so slowly that I could actually measure the silence in between beats.
I felt about three inches tall as I stepped off the stage.

~~~

"...and went down like a rock.Bam."
"Oh,man. What did you do?"
"What could I do?" I shrugged. "I hopped up, took a bow, and ran. I was late to meet you."
Alex was gently rubbing my bare knee. I'd rolled up my jeans to show him the bruise already blossoming there. "I would have caught you," he said, fingers sliding to the inside of my leg and making my insides feel like jelly.
"Not likely, O Gallant One.The stage is only a foot high."
"I gotta see this place sometime. ~ Melissa Jensen

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was in vivid life, there were two groups of faces - each seven in number - so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended - not an abolished - expression on them; faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, "THOU DIDST IT!" Seven ~ Charles Dickens

The high point of the act is when he (Uri Durov) puts his head inside the bear's huge jaws. I wouldn't even try that with my agent. ~ Bob Hope

I was coming off of The O.C. and had very little interest in doing another teen drama. And then I got sent theGossip Girl book series, and I was like, 'I might not be ready to leave high school after all.' ~ Josh Schwartz

My number one advice to high school girls is birth control. You want to keep all your options open for as long as possible? Birth control. ~ Elizabeth Banks

I feel fortunate that I've had a lot of songs recorded by other people, because I take my songwriting very seriously. It's only those people that have followed me over the years and really know my work that know how serious I am about all of it - including the way I look. You can't take my high heels from me, you can't have my long fingernails, you can't take all this hair from me, because it's part of this thing that I've become. I wouldn't want to give any of it up. Do I have to be ugly to be a songwriter? This is the way I am, and it's what I choose to be. ~ Dolly Parton

An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground. ~ Thomas Sowell