Tension Quotes - Page 9

• Like the panic stricken populace of 'The War of the Worlds' and countless other 1950s invasion movies, the victims are there to provide the human ground over which monster and expert, threat and defender, disordering and ordering impulses can battle it out. Second-class citizens of the genre, they are narratively indispensable because physically entirely disposable. We are only really involved with them in the momentary tension of their capture or demise.

  Andrew Tudor

  War, Class, Battle

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• Why should I be feeling tension? It's The Daily Show.

  Rob Corddry

  Feelings, Comedy, Should

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• The tension of a mysterious danger is even more unbearable than danger itself. People hate the vacuum of an unknown situation. They want security. They even prefer war to the insecure expectation of a war with its threat of enemy surprise. This vague fearful expectation acts on their fantasies. They anticipate all kinds of mysterious dangers; they begin to provoke them. It is the evocation of fear and danger in order to escape the tension of insecurity.

  Joost Meerloo

  Hate, War, Insecure

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• As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.

  C. Wright Mills

  Atheism, World, Variables

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• There's more tension in golf than in boxing because golfers bring it on themselves. It's silly really because it's not as if the golf ball is going to jump up and belt you on the whiskers, is it?

  Henry Cooper

  Silly, Golf, Boxing

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• It's his show and I'm just trying to make him look good. If we were the same age there might be a little tension, but I'm on my way out... I am here to serve your every need, King James.

  Shaquille O'Neal

  Basketball, Kings, Nba

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• I think people are at their most creative when they're relaxed. I don't believe that tension is good for creativity. Everyone is relaxed and therefore can feel able to express their own individual creativity and lots of ideas come in. It's a joy like that.

  Joe Wright

  Believe, Creativity, Thinking

  Source: collider.com

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• People are weird. We do live on all levels at the same time and you can be fighting and flirting, and there can be fury and sexual tension. All that stuff can co-exist so it's just a testament to how complex we are. Or maybe it's a testament to how boringly we try and simplify everything.

  Alice Eve

  Fighting, Flirting, People

  Source: collider.com

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• There's always a tension between wanting to write a really concise, instant gratification type song that gets under your skin the first time you hear it, and wanting to really stretch out. I think it's a healthy tension.

  Andrew Bird

  Song, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Joshua Klein, pitchfork.com. May 22, 2007.

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• Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn't mean they are right, that doesn't mean there is isn't a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality.

  Chris Hayes

  Mean, Hierarchy, Natural

  "The age of illusion". Interview with Jake Blumgart, www.origin.salon.com. June 30, 2012.

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• Sports allow men to build up situations of emergency. What he then demands of himself is unnecessary achievement - and unnecessary sacrifice. He artificially creates the tension that he has been spared by affluent society.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Sports, Sacrifice, Men

  Viktor E. Frankl (2011). “The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy and Humanism”, p.108, Simon and Schuster

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• Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses, of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York.

  Anais Nin

  New York, Two, Paris

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• But every human path leads on to God;
  He holds a myriad finer threads than gold,
  And strong as holy wishes, drawing us
  With delicate tension upward to Himself.

  Edmund Clarence Stedman

  Strong, Drawing, Wish

  Edmund Clarence Stedman (1873). “The Poetical Works of Edmund Clarence Stedman”, p.45

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• When we feel joyful, euphoric, happy, we are more open to life, more capable of seeing things clearly and handling daily tensions.

  Leo Buscaglia

  Joyful, Feels, Euphoric

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• The woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman.

  May Sarton

  Art, Psychics, Mad

  May Sarton, Edith Royce Schade (1994). “From May Sarton's well: writings of May Sarton”, Papier Mache Pr

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• I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!

  May Sarton

  Anger, People, Safety

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• The best marriages, like the best lives, were both happy and unhappy. There was even a kind of necessary tension, a certain tautness between the partners that gave the marriage strength, like the tautness of a full sail. You went forward on it.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Unhappy, Maid Of Honor, Kind

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Joseph Viertel, Fletcher Knebel, Paul De Kruif, Charles Waldo Bailey (1962). “Reader's digest condensed books”

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• Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Sex, Issues, Foraging

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• Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow. ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Song, Pain, Writing

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• Temptation is a fearful word. It indicates the beginning of a possible series of infinite evils. It is the ringing of an alarm bell, whose melancholy sounds may reverberate through eternity. Like the sudden, sharp cry of "Fire!" under our windows by night, it should rouse us to instantaneous action, and brace every muscle to its highest tension.

  Horace Mann

  Night, Fire, Evil

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• Unfulfilled dreams, ongoing relational tension, the loss of friendships, a hard marriage, rebellious teenagers, the death of loved ones, remaining sinful patterns - whatever it is for you - live long enough, lose enough, suffer enough, and the idealism of youth fades, leaving behind the reality of life in a broken world as a broken person.

  Tullian Tchividjian

  Dream, Teenager, Loss

  Tullian Tchividjian (2013). “One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World”, p.208, David C Cook

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• The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility. In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture's essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us see and know.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Art, Responsibility, Vision

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.34, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Believe, Writing, Solitude

  Nadine Gordimer (1983). “Selected Stories”, Viking Press

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• Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one's own and somebody else's. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Different, Inspired, Sometimes

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• I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it. This tension - tension is the only word for it - can be painted.

  Patrick Swift

  Believe, Rooms, Plant

  Patrick Swift (1993). “PS -- of Course: Patrick Swift, 1927-1983”

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