Quotes About Tension

So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality, into which war-like events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains.

People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating ... an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.

The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

The thick plottens.

Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first.

The quietness of it was weird: real fights happened without a sound track.

I've waited a long time for this," Penny said. "Then this is going to be kind of an anticlimax," Alice said, and she punched him in the face. Boom! Oh my God. It was beautiful, just like in a movie: straight from the shoulder, feet planted, hips rolled, follow-through, the works. Penny never saw it coming.

One, your hair is stupid. And two, I don't know what it's like where you come from, but if you ever do anything that could get me sent back to Brooklyn again, I won't just break your nose. I will motherfucking kill you.

Shit was getting geological, yo.

Their little dance was like the endgame of a disastrously bloody chess match, just a queen chasing a beleaguered king around an empty board, sadistically refusing to checkmate.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

At the first rumors of revolt, or even in preventive anticipation, the ruling class would take up the mace and the sword to re-establish its authority. This tension kept the main beneficiaries of the parasitic regime in a state of animal alertness and fitness; and they habitually re-sharpened their predatory edge by hunting lions and tigers. Those who lost their edge and sank into parasitic inertia were speedily displaced by more able and active rivals.

Humans have both the urge to create and destroy.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

I was a huge 'Breaking Bad' fan. I just loved the whole thing. Always interesting, always urgent. The stakes were always high.

Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out.

In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.

Iran did not talk to the United States for 35 years. And now we are talking. And I believe these talks are useful. But they haven't produced the intended results. We have not seen an end to the hostility that has been exhibited in the United States against Iran. And I believe it is important that we see some of that.

Tension can be useful, exciting, flirtatious, strength-building, or destructive. Put yourself in charge of how you direct it.

The great thing for me is how Hitchcock uses guilt so well. He implicates the spectator in the character's field, and you really feel it, and there's incredible relief when it comes out right - if it does come out right.

McQueen is an astonishing film maker. He uses really unusual shots and builds incredible dramatic tension.

'Infernal Affairs' uses a vibrating terseness usually found in the writer and director Michael Mann's work. Thematically, this film deploys the techniques Mr. Mann brought to bear on 'Heat,' right down to using a similar cold-blooded electronic score.

The barn doors are open, and the horses are running out because we've got guns all over the place. It's basically a cold war for individuals: you've got a nuclear bomb, and I've got a nuclear bomb, and the only thing stopping us from using them is the fact we both have them.