59 Tension Quotes

Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.

Washington's adventuristic policy, whipping up international tension to the utmost, is pushing mankind towards nuclear catastrophe.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

They darted down and rose up like a wave Or buzzed impetuously as before; One would have thought the corpse was held a slave To living by the life it bore!

I've lost my white mouse ('Revenge of the Creature', as the lab technician, his first line in a movie - 1955)

One day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand.

It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively: something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart.

I felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung walls, and shrank from glancing through the arched, latticed windows that opened so bewilderingly on every hand.

Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving....

Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled: - It has not epiphanised yet, he said.

Somehow this was it, I knew. Maybe fate wants you dead, too: We've come together in the very same room, And I'm coming for you!

Jesus Pietro was worried. The Sons of Earth, if they got this far, would go straight to the vivarium to free their compatriots. But if Matthew Keller was his own agent... If the ghost of Alpha Plateau was not a rebel, but a thing with its own unpredictable purpose... Jesus Pietro worried.

Igor: (Marty Feldman): 'Sed-a...' Inga: (Teri Garr): 'Sed-a...' Igor: (Marty Feldman): 'Dirty word! He said a dirty word!'

I couldn't think. I couldn't remember. I was wound up like a spring and ready to bust. All I could see was the dead guy in the middle of the room and my gun. My gun! Somebody grabbed at my arm and hauled me upright and the questions started again. That was as much as I could take. I gave a hell of a kick and a fat face in a fedora pulled back out of focus and started to groan, all doubled up. Maybe I laughed, I don't know.

The two young men turned and they didn't smile because they were Woody Ballinger's two boys, Carl and Sammy, and for one brief instant, there was something in their faces that didn't belong in that atmosphere of joviality and the little move they instinctively made that shielded them behind the others in back of them was involuntary enough to stretch a tight-lipped grin across my face that told them I could know. Could. From away back out of the years I got that feeling across my shoulders and up my spine that said things were starting to smell right and if you kept pushing the walls would go down and you could charge in and take them all apart until there was nothing left but the dirt they were made of.

You have no sex life whatsoever. Don't you realize how dangerous that is? You don't even masturbate. The tension and hostility inside you must be tremendous.

No, Chels, you have to overstretch it because when you let go, it's gonna snap back into shape. OK, let go!

Where sits our sulky, sullen dame, Gathering her brows like gathering storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

We celebrate who we are although we come from different communities. We are one nation, one people. We have differences and these cause problems and tension at times but we are not on the brink of inter ethnic strife.

'It's a very treacherous city. A lot of people are afraid of it and a lot of people enjoy it. The ones who are afraid of it can't cope and the ones who enjoy it get off on tension. I get off on the place, but only for so long, cause I hate fuckin' walkin' and I don't like the cab drivers, the roads are bumpy, the people... The bitches there are so tough, you score one of those girls, take her to bed, you squirt, she hasn't come yet and you're dodgin' punches because you came too fast...' -on visiting New York City

...any move made in a state of tension will be of more important, and will have more results, than it would have made in a state of eqilibrium. In times of maximum tension this importance will rise to an infinite degree.

Sverdlov Hall was already nearly full...The provincial elite were all there. And it was all the usual things: people kissing each other and shouting greetings across the rows of seats, chattering about the snow and the harvest prospects and generally feeling themselves to be masters of their fate. In all the cacophony I didn't hear the name of Andropov mentioned once, not anything said about his death. At twenty minutes to eleven the hall hushed. The waiting began. With each minute the tension rose and the atmosphere felt charged with electricity...The tension reached a climax. All eyes turned towards the door...Who would come through it first? At precisely eleven, Chernenko's head appeared in the doorway. He was followed by Tikhonov, Gromyko, Ustinov, Gorbachev and the rest. The delegates' reaction was silence.

He stood with his back angled to the wall. To an indifferent observer he was simply in idle conversation, but it wasn't like that at all. This was an instinctive gesture of survival, being in constant readiness for an attack. His head didn't turn and his eyes didn't seem to move, but I knew he saw us. I could feel the hackles on the back of my neck stiffening and I knew he felt the same way. Dog was meeting dog. Nobody knew it but the dogs and they weren't telling. He was bigger than I thought. The suggestion of power I had seen in his photographs was for real. When he moved it was with the ponderous grace of some jungle animal, dangerously deceptive, because he could move a lot faster if he had to. When we were ten feet away he pretended to see us for the first time and a wave of charm washed the cautious expression from his face and he stepped out to greet Dulcie with outstretched hand. But it wasn't her he was seeing. It was me he was watching. I was one of his own kind. I couldn't be faked out and wasn't leashed by the proprieties of society. I could lash out and kill as fast as he could and of all the people in the room, I was the potential threat. I knew what he felt because I felt the same way myself.

Beside me was Savanna, her robe falling open carelessly (though I knew she was aware of just how much arousal each centimeter of her exposure produced), her finger tickling me unbearably while I pretended not to feel it

Slingshot: engage.

Where do you think I was today? I stood straight in front of him (Himmler) for a whole hour and talked, and he... he played with a puzzle the whole time - you know, this glass cube with three balls on the inside... When I finished, he took off his pince-nez, wiped it with a handkerchief - he has a skull even on his handkerchief - and said, 'Listen, Ernst! Have you by any chance, ever had a dream, where you're riding in the back of a ragged truck to who knows where, and some monsters are sitting around you?' I didn't say anything. Then he smiled and said, 'Ernst, you know, I know as well as you that no astral exists. But what do you think, if you, and even Canaris, have your own people in 'Annenerbe', shouldn't I have my own people there as well?' I did not understand what he meant. 'Think Ernst, think!' he said. I kept silent. Then he smiled and asked, 'Whose man do you think is Kroger?' ...Yes, Emma... It seems I'm too simple for all these intrigues... But I know that while the Fuhrer needs me, my heart will keep beating...You know, Emma... Sometimes it seems to me, that it's not me who is alive, but it's the Fuhrer who is living inside me...

'A priest warned me that we must keep a careful and guarded watch over fellow Indo-Fijians because they are like weeds. They tend to push to grab and take over the land and the nation. (Era dau sugusugu vanua). I really appreciated the meaning of the words 'sugusugu vanua' because this is what we, the indigenous people (i.e. taukei) have proven and believe is the design of the foreigners (vulagi)'.

We are sleeping on a volcano... A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon.

There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it.

I'm beginning to feel like a microwaved egg that will explode if anybody so much as breathes onto the surface.

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

Thug:[repeating] Look, bud, I said 'Your money or your life.'

Preparation for war is a constant stimulus to suspicion and ill will.

Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light ... We all know that, as the old adage has it, 'It is later than you think.' ..., but I also say occasionally: 'It is lighter than you think.' In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

The two men walked on and stopped eight feet in front of him and faced him head-on. Reacher flexed his fingers by his side, to test how cold they were. Eight feet was an interesting choice of distance. It meant they were going to talk before they tangled. He flexed his toes and ran some muscle tension up through his calves, his thighs, his back, his shoulders. Moved his head side to side and then back a little, to loosen his neck. He breathed in through his nose. The wind was on his back. The guy on the left took his hands out of his pockets. No gloves. And either he had bad arthritis or he was holding rolls of quarters in both palms.

The cop climbed out of his car exactly four minutes before he got shot. He moved like he knew his fate in advance.

Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

'There's no escape from the Acid Drop!'

Bradbury Fisher shuddered from head to foot, and his legs wobbled like asparagus stalks.

Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes.

He's wound up like a thousand day clock.

'Government seems unaware that the more race-based measures it tries to put in place the faster that time bomb burns to detonation point.'

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

She is as in a field of silken tent At midday when the sunny summer breeze Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, So that in guys it gently sways at ease.

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To every thing on earth the compass round, And only by one's going slightly taut In the capriciousness of summer air Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

'Somebody's gonna get their ass whipped!'

'Oh, I understand that perfectly. That's how we feel in Scotland too, but the English won't allow it.'

I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.