Racking Up Quotes

Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery. ~ Jonah Goldberg

One thoughtful Evangelical pastor said he approved of using the massacre for recruitment, as long as it was truly done for God. He bristled at "spiritual headhunters, just racking up another scalp. The Bible was never meant to be a club," he said. "If I'm using it as a weapon, that's really sad. ~ Dave Cullen

When I look at you, I still see the son I love more than my own life. But I also see a man who has become so far removed from what matters that his perception is skewed. Family is real, son. A home to settle into - that's real. People who love you and care about you. You've had a phenomenal career, and I'm proud of you. But it's time to stop basing your worth on championships and endorsement deals. You can't buy happiness. You can't earn it. God isn't counting all the deals you're racking up - and neither is your family." He lifted his brow. "And neither is Lucy. For the first time someone's looking at the person inside - and you have to decide if you're going to let her in and be the man she needs you to be." His father turned his head toward a family picture on the mantel. "It's a risk. But one I've never regretted. ~ Jenny B. Jones

I was racking up prescription slips like Boy Scout badges. What didn't I have? ~ Jason Diamond

While I'm always up for a good scrap, and don't even mind racking up a few bumps and bruises along the way, I'm not really the martyr type. I have sensitive skin and there's nothing that irritates more than nails being driven through it. ~ Tim Marquitz

LEADING LESSONS
It's the failures that make us winners.

When you win a competition, you celebrate. You are on cloud nine. But when you lose, you learn. In my case, losing Blackpool that first time was the best thing that ever happened to me. I dug deep down and asked myself what it was that was holding me back from achieving what I knew I was capable of. Failure shows you what's possible. It makes your desire burn hotter. It builds courage, and in the end, it makes the win that much sweeter. I would rather fail at something than regret never trying. Leaders think of failures as experiments, showing them what works and what doesn't and how to fix things. We live in a world where failure is thought of as something negative: no one likes the idea of screwing up. But what if you could change that? What if you could see failure as a positive? What if you could embrace failure as part of the process necessary to get what you want? Suddenly, the fear of it disappears. I never went into any competition wanting to fail (just the opposite), but after racking up my share of disappointments, I learned that I could deal with it. It hurt and pissed me off at the time, but now I see the value in it. I wouldn't be where I am today without those failures notched on my belt. ~ Derek Hough

As the titanic losses were racking up, Fannie Mae's operators, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, disguised the catastrophe by orchestrating a $5 billion accounting fraud - all the while continuing to pressure banks to make absurd, politically correct loans and denouncing Republicans as enemies of the poor. ~ Ann Coulter

walked down the hill and stuck out my thumb, standing in the same spot where I had stood when I hitchhiked to high school. My clothes and gear were in my official Boy Scout backpack, a big old thing on an aluminum rack, with my sleeping bag and pup tent lashed to it. I'd been a serious Boy Scout - I joined at 12, after my failed Little League career, and took to it immediately, racking up merit badges and making it all the way to Eagle Scout. I knew first aid, how to start a fire in the rain, how to make a mean camp stew, and lots of other useful stuff. And I didn't mind sleeping outside, which was a good thing, since there was no way I could afford motels. My official Boy Scout sheath knife, a serious piece of business with a leather-wrapped handle and a five-inch blade, was also in the pack; I'd move it into my boot by the end of the first day. ~ David Noonan

Watch your back, wolf. There's a pall over this place and the bears are racking up enemies faster than Wal-Mart rakes in sales. When the time comes, it's going to get bloody. (Thorn)
I wouldn't have it any other way. (Fang)
Don't be so arrogant. Long before I was the debonair sophisticate standing in front of you, I was a warlord. I put more blood on my blade than Madame la Guillotine. The one thing all that battle taught me is that no one walks away without scars. No one. (Thorn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I felt I was makin' progress until yesterday morning. Now, you got some fucked up idea in your head about what happened and you gotta get this Sadie, so listen. It's important. Because I want that girl. That's who I'm doin' all this for 'cause that girl is the real you. The one who loses control and takes what she wants and gives back without racking up the debt. And she doesn't give a fuck about what her actions say and what people will think. ~ Kristen Ashley

Publishing a book is great. Dropping a lame pitch on a potential customer and STILL racking up a book sale? Priceless. Or 8 bucks--whichever works best. ~ Tevin Hansen

I just do my thing and try each show to be more honest about why I am and who I am. It's quite tricky and actually nerve-racking to do that. It's kind of a happy train wreck. ~ Craig Ferguson

If you try to convert someone, it will never be to
effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself,
to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals and
endures them with the same impatience. You keep
watch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too,
sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that are
racking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged souls
whose faith comes down to a more or less deliberate
torment they would like to see generalized, instituted.
The happiness of others never having been a motive
or principle of action, it is invoked only to appease
conscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever we
determine upon an action, the impulse leading to it
and forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible.
No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves,
and do so all the better if we disguise as
convictions the misery we want to share, to lavish on
others. However glamorous its appearances, proselytism
nonetheless derives from a suspect generosity,
worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No one
is willing to endure alone the discipline he may even
have assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered.
Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary's
bonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberate
but to enchain.
Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he envies
your vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas ~ Emil M. Cioran

It's a surreal experience. During the first show, I was like, "Wow, I'm onstage with Ms. Tyson!" Everybody has been amazing, and the energy is really beautiful. I'm replacing my friend Condola, so everyone making sure that I'm OK has turned what could've been a very scary, nerve-racking and lonely experience into a supportive environment. ~ Adepero Oduye

It is not known why motorists, who sing the joys of the open road, spend so much petrol every week-end grinding their way to Southend and Brighton and Margate, in the stench of each other's exhausts, one hand on the horn and one foot on the brake, their eyes starting from their orbits in the nerve-racking search for cops, corners, blind turnings, and cross-road suicides. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

It's definitely nerve-racking to be the center of attention. I'm not the kind of an actor that just craves attention 24-7 - but it's part of the deal. You're the leader on the set. ~ Jon Hamm

I promised I'd save him, take him home! I promised him!
... Thomas hugged Chuck to his chest, squeezed him as tightly as possible, as if that could somehow bring him back, or show thanks for saving his life, for being his friend when no one else would.
Thomas cried, wept like he'd never wept before. His great, racking sobs echoed through the chamber like the sounds of tortured pain. (pg 358 hardback) ~ James Dashner

I know how nerve-racking it is to send someone a piece of yourself and then have to sit back and wait for it to
be judged. ~ Colleen Hoover

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I am racking my brains to find out why he left without saying goodby to me. ~ Eva Braun

The first time I was flown to L.A. for a screen test was an incredibly nerve-racking experience. ~ Luke Evans

Despite what those on the happily coupled sidelines might think, 99 percent of online dates weren't exciting enough to be fun or nerve-racking enough to be adventurous. They were just...awkward. Boring. An hour of small talk with someone you'd think twice about saving from a burning building. Online dating was like Russian roulette. Mostly misses. But sometimes, people Evie knew had met that all-too-rare bullet: a smart, aesthetically pleasing New Yorker who was still single. Maybe tonight, Evie thought, is the night I blow my brains out. ~ Georgia Clark

Look. This has been ... fun." Lie. This had been nerve-racking and I needed to go masturbate. "But I have to go. I've got stuff to do before I head out again." Masturbate. "Wizard stuff. Like ... secret wizard stuff." Masturbate. ~ T.J. Klune

I find acting slightly nerve racking, but I like the challenge. ~ Jane Wiedlin

Flying while Muslim is nerve-racking in itself. Every time I prepare to fly, I have to make sure the anxiety I feel from all the stares I get from the moment I walk into the airport doesn't show on my face. This is what every woman in a hijab or bearded Muslim man experiences. But we are not alone: Sikh men who wear a turban experience the same anxiety because they encounter Islamophobia by dint of being perceived as Muslim. ~ Debbie Almontaser

What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported-and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores-these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun. ~ John Brunner

There have been some brilliant and very successful standalone books that work in themselves and also seem to refresh a series. Anyone who writes a series lives in fear of it becoming stale, so you do whatever you can to keep it fresh - although it does feel a bit nerve-racking to write outside of your comfort zone. ~ Mark Billingham

I definitely feel much more comfortable in front of the cameras after 'The Hills.' Before, it was much more nerve-racking. ~ Audrina Patridge

What is more nerve-racking: live comedy or the World Series. SNL ~ Amy Poehler

There is nothing more nerve-racking than waiting as someone reads your writing. The reader becomes the videographer, zooming far, far into your heart and soul, unveiling every inch and corner. The writer remains a wary observer at the mercy of the reader, clueless as to how he might react. The writer is exposed, laid bare; her innermost thoughts and feelings are revealed in a potentially scathing moment of vulnerability. I trusted Peter so fully ... in a way that I could not explain. For that very reason, it mattered so immensely. To actually tell him what I knew he had already often seen in my eyes was to allow him to enter a new dimension in that world. And it mattered. It really, truly mattered. ~ Gina Marinello-Sweeney

Three blind hummingbirds hang in the air like jewels of iridescent scarlet and cobalt; then, one by one, they fade, all color leeched from them, and fall lifeless into the mists, to be eaten by rats.

Despair feels uncomfortable.

In her world there are so many windows. Each opening shows her an existence that's fallen to her - some only for moments, others for lifetimes. Able at this moment neither to savor them, nor to understand her own disquiet, she stares away from all the windows as she walks. Silent rats run unmindfully over her feet, invisible in the mist.

She misses him.

It is over three hundred years since last she and her brother were alone together. Like a flood, the memories come, and she is drowning in them. Against her will her chest heaves, and she begins to weep: deep, helpless, racking sobs...

No.

Despair places the cold metal barb of her hook onto the surface of her eye. And then she pushes, piercing cornea and lens, and ripping free the aqueous humor and vitreous humor to run like tears down her cheek, into her hand...

The pain distracts her, a little. But still, she remembers... ~ Neil Gaiman

There are a lot of signs. One of the things that makes me most nervous is the disappearance of the frogs. They're going downhill all over the planet. Frogs are susceptible to all kinds of problems, because they require water to breed and their skin is very porous. Their condition is nerve racking. ~ Paul R. Ehrlich

Claire. The name knifed across his heart with a pain that was more racking than anything his body had ever been called on to withstand. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Actually, I think business women are better women at home, if you want to know the truth because you do understand what goes into a day's work out in the world, a very nerve-racking affair. ~ Bette Davis

Incredible, Geralt. After so many years? How's it possible?'
'There's a grain of truth in every fairy tale,' said the Witcher quietly. 'Love and blood. They both possess a mighty power. Wizards and learned men have been racking their brains over this for years, but they haven't arrived at anything except that - '
'That what, Geralt?'
'It has to be true love. ~ Andrzej Sapkowski

I usually have a drink before a carpet because I find them really nerve-racking. Usually a tequila. An upper! ~ Bella Heathcote

I did my first Broadway play, 'The Vertical Hour,' in 2006, with Julianne Moore, who's always been one of my favorite actresses. My scene was with her, so it was nerve-racking. ~ Rutina Wesley

And then . . . we're going to get in my car."
I waited for him to elaborate on a destination. "And?"
He gently kissed the nape of my neck. "What do you think?"
I couldn't help a small gasp of delight. "Oh, wow."
"I know, right? I was racking my brain for the best present ever, and then I realized that nothing was going to rock your world more than you and me in your favorite place in the entire world."
I swallowed. "I'm kind of embarrassed at how excited I am about that." Never had I guessed my love of cars would play a role in my sex life. Eddie was right. Something had happened to me.
"It's okay, Sage. We've all got our turn-ons."
"You kind of ruined the surprise, though."
"Nah. It's part of the gift: you getting to think about it for the next three days. ~ Richelle Mead

The red-carpet spotlight is a little bit more nerve-racking when you haven't been doing it all the time. ~ Shania Twain

Making new friends as an adult is as nerve-racking as asking someone on a date. ~ Rachel Winters

A 3-foot putt can be more nerve-racking than a 9-foot putt because a 3-foot putt you should be getting in. A 9-footer, there's a chance it won't go in. ~ Lydia Ko

What's nice is that she's obviously just graduated from some boarding school or institute, that as yet there's nothing femalish, as they say, about her, nothing, that is, of what's most unpleasant about these creatures. Now she's like a child, everything about her is simple: she'll say whatever comes into her head, she'll laugh whenever she feels like laughing. Anything can be made of her, she can be a wonder, yet she can turn out to be worthless too, and worthless is what she will turn out to be! Just let the doting mothers and aunts get their hands on her. In one year they'll fill her with such female stuff of every sort that her own father won't recognize her. From that will come haughtiness and primness. She'll start acting according to the precepts that have been drilled into her, she'll begin racking her brains and trying to figure out with whom, and in what way, and for how long she sould talk, and how she should look at this person or that; and she'll live in constant fear of saying more than she should. ~ Nikolai Gogol

I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes. ~ Dan Simmons

Presenting the Oscars was the most nerve-racking job I have ever done in show business. It's very much a live show: they have comedy writers waiting in the wings, and as you come off between presentations, they hand you an appropriate gag to tell. ~ Michael Caine

Three months later, on September 5, 2001, at a pro-am event preceding the Canadian Open at the Royal Montreal Golf Club, I was invited to play a round with Tiger Woods. Nothing in the game of politics had ever been as nerve-racking as that game of golf. ~ Jean Chretien

To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. ~ E.F. Schumacher

My brain was fine, but I did not feel like myself. My body was frail and weak - the person who could run half marathons was a distant memory - and that, too, shapes your identity. Racking back pain can mold an identity; fatigue and nausea can, as well. ~ Paul Kalanithi

When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, 'Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.' Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels 'the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech' in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts. ~ Ernest Shackleton

Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night she kept her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven's threshold, and, guiding her weeping down, have bound her, once more, all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of whose companionship she was grown more than weary.
I know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a moan and a long shiver. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle. ~ Charlotte Bronte

The numbness of his loss had passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling me over, racking my body with sobs. Where are you? I would cry out in my mind. Where have you gone? Of course, there was never any answer. ~ Suzanne Collins

Watching first nights, though I've seen quite a few by now, is never any better. It's a nerve-racking experience. It's not a question of whether the play goes well or badly. It's not the audience reaction, it's my reaction. I'm rather hostile toward audiences-I don't much care for large bodies of people collected together. Everyone knows that audiences vary enormously; it's a mistake to care too much about them. The thing one should be concerned with is whether the performance has expressed what one set out to express in writing the play. It sometimes does. ~ Harold Pinter

When I was going on auditions, it was nerve-racking. I'd always say to my mom that it would be awesome if I could get a series. When Modern Family came along, I said, 'You know what, Mom? I believe I'm going to get this role.' ~ Rico Rodriguez

When I was four, we had to choose a musical instrument to play at school, and I chose the cello. I played until I was 18, and although I found it nerve-racking to play solo, I loved playing in an orchestra. When I left school I didn't carry on with it, which I regret. ~ Emilia Fox

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly? ~ William Law

I've been racking my brain. I've been trying to figure out how Bob Dole's luggage got on my airplane ... I told the doctor, I said, 'Look, I'm worried about the next election.' ... A misunderstanding. ~ Rush Limbaugh