Tantalizing Quotes

• Woman - for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: "Blind yourself, for I am blind."

  Luigi Pirandello

  Women, Eye, Example

  Luigi Pirandello (2016). “Six Characters In Search of an Author”, p.19, Jester House Publishing via PublishDrive

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• The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.

  Brian Greene

  Creativity, Men, Inspire

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• Other acting opportunities had come along, but nothing that was tantalizing enough to me to step away from what I found most interesting.

  Fred Savage

  Opportunity, Interesting, Acting

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• All of us need to be in touch with a mysterious, tantalizing source of inspiration that teases our sense of wonder and goads us on to life’s next adventure.

  Rob Brezsny

  Inspiration, Adventure, Needs

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• All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it, tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.'

  C. S. Lewis

  Echoes, Soul, Doubt

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• The greatest sex toy ever invented may be the telephone. Sometimes there's nothing more erotic than a disembodied voice, no question more tantalizing than a whispered 'What are you wearing?' Especially when you can make up the answer. On the phone your hair always looks great, your legs are always shaved, your worst pair of underwear becomes a silk negligee.

  Meghan Daum

  Sex, Voice, Phones

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• The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal in fiction because it's not a story.

  Christine Jennings

  Vision, Fiction, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• [Golf]is deceptively simple, endlessly complicated. A child can play it well, and a grown man can never master it. Any single round of it is full of unexpected triumphs and perfect shots that end in disaster. It is almost a science, yet it is a puzzle without an answer. It is gratifying and tantalizing, precise and unpredictable. It requires complete concentration and total relaxation. It satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect. It is at the same time, rewarding and maddening. And it is without doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented.

  Arnold Palmer

  Children, Golf, Simple

  Source: kellysgolfhistory.blogspot.com

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• We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

  Audre Lorde

  Moving, Thinking, Erotic

  Audre Lorde, Joan Wylie Hall (2004). “Conversations with Audre Lorde”, p.99, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Directing offers you the hope that your vision will reach the screen, unmolested and intact. Therefore, it's tantalizing to all writers.

  Jon Spaihts

  Vision, Offers, Screens

  Source: collider.com

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• All who are caught in its seductive, tantalizing web and remain so will become addicted to its immoral, destructive influence. For many, that addiction cannot be overcome without help. The tragic pattern is so familiar. It begins with curiosity that is fueled by its stimulation and is justified by the false premise that when done privately, it does no harm to anyone else. For those lulled by this lie, the experimentation goes deeper, with more powerful stimulations, until the trap closes and a terribly immoral, addictive habit exercises its vicious control.

  Richard G. Scott

  Powerful, Lying, Exercise

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• The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings, and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to senses tried by the present day kaleidoscope of events.

  Morris Kline

  Teaching, Math, Challenges

  Morris Kline (1964). “Mathematics in Western Culture”, p.470, Oxford University Press

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• There are some people in your life who bring back old memories. And there are others - your first kiss, your first love, your first sex - who, the moment you see them, bring a spark...and something far more potent. They bring back your old life and with that, potential. And possibilities. And the feeling that if you were back in that time, life could be so very different from where you're stuck right now. That's the most tantalizing thing....I want my potential back.

  Brad Meltzer

  Sex, Memories, Love You

  Brad Meltzer (2011). “The Inner Circle: The Culper Ring Trilogy 1”, p.148, Hachette UK

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• We don't tend to ask where a lake comes from. It lies before us, contained and complete, tantalizing in its depth but not its origin. A river is a different kind of mystery, a mystery of distance and becoming, a mystery of source. Touch its fluent body and you touch far places. You touch a story that must end somewhere but cannot stop telling itself, a story that is always just beginning.

  John Daniel

  Distance, Lying, Lakes

  John Daniel (2009). “The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature”, p.67, Counterpoint

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• You are saying, are you not, I said to Manuelito, that stories have more room in them than ideas? [...] He laughed. That is correct, Señor. It is as if ideas are made of blocks. Rigid and hard. And stories are made of a gauze that is elastic. You can almost see through it, so what is beyond is tantalizing. You can't quite make it out; and because the imagination is always moving forward, you yourself are constantly stretching. Stories are the way spirit is exercised.

  Alice Walker

  Block, Moving, Ideas

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• Your novels show only the tiniest fraction of detective work, the brilliant crime, the tantalizing clues, the dramatic chase, the final battle atop a lofty peak with ocean waves crashing down below, and then… justice served! If they wrote about the real world, four-fifths of the story would consist of the hero sitting in a library for months and following false leads.

  Stefan Petrucha

  Real, Hero, Ocean

  Stefan Petrucha (2012). “Ripper”, Penguin

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• Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Trying, Path

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.67, Vintage Canada

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• The art of banking is always to balance the risk of a run with the reward of a profit. The tantalizing factor in the equation is that riskier borrowers pay higher interest rates. Ultimate safety - a strongbox full of currency - would avail the banker nothing. Maximum risk - a portfolio of loans to prospective bankrupts at usurious interest rates - would invite disaster. A good banker safely and profitably treads the middle ground.

  James Grant

  Running, Art, Safety

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• If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'

  Henry James

  Writing, People, Trying

  "The Art of Fiction" (1884)

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• Wave particle duality is a core feature of our world. Or rather, we should say, it is a core feature of our mathematical descriptions of our world. But what is critical to note here is that, however ambiguous our images, the universe itself remains whole and is manifestly not fracturing into schizophrenic shards. It is this tantalizing wholeness and the thing itself that drives physicists onward like an eternally beckoning light that seems so teasingly near. It is always out of reach.

  Margaret Wertheim

  Our World, Light, Wave

  "The Grandeur and Limits of Science". Interview with Krista Tippett, onbeing.org. February 16, 2017.

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• In some parallel universe, there was a Gansey who could tell Blue that he found the ten inches of her bare calves far more tantalizing than the thirteen cubic feet of bare skin Orla sported. But in this universe, that was Adam’s job. He was in a terrible mood.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Jobs, Blue, Feet

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• The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill....[The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century....Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature.

  Kevin Myers

  Thinking, Skills, Two

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• For me it's a new experience every single time, because - The dance community has a great strength in synergizing immediately. So we recognize that opposed to being competition, which we are in the audition process, once we're on the job is about cohesion, it's about striving to highlight each individual in their own element, while also creating something that is visually tantalizing to the audience. While the ingredients of each movie has been different, the recipe for success is the same, which is to click immediately and make the best possible movie.

  Alyson Stoner

  Jobs, New Experiences, Creating

  Source: www.nerdprobs.com

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• Bedding her could be anything from tenderness to riot, but to take her when she was a bit the worse for drink was always a particular delight. Intoxicated, she took less care for him than usual; abandoned and oblivious to all but her own pleasure, she would rake him, bite him - and beg him to serve her so, as well. He loved the feeling of power in it, the tantalizing choice between joining her at once in animal lust, or of holding himself-for a time- in check, so as to drive her at his whim.

  Diana Gabaldon

  Animal, Choices, Feelings

  Diana Gabaldon (2015). “The Outlander Series 8-Book Bundle: Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, An Echo in the Bone, Written in My Own Heart's Blood”, p.3795, Dell

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• The reason we'd stopped was that the buffet car was on fire, that was the reason we stopped. One of the giant biscuits spontaneously combusted out of boredom. Whoever was charged with making the announcement momentarily lost all sense of procedure and we got this tantalizing glimpse into the chaos on the trains, and all we could hear was (bangs on microphone) "Gary, it's burning, what we gonna do?!" And everyone on the carriage just cheered, "Hooray! We're rubbish!"

  Bill Bailey

  Funny, Humor, Fire

  "Part Troll". Documentary, Comedy, Music, 2004.

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