Quotes About Tension

From the beginning, a gulf of understanding had divided the Gaullists and the leaders of the resistance movements, who risked their lives daily and who greatly resented their compatriots in London who, in their view, had lived out the war in comfort and safety, with none of the daily tension, terror, and privations of occupation.

The tension exists because you are doing the difficult work of no longer cooperating with dysfunction.

I just don't know why they're shooting at us. All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread. Transplant the American dream. Freedom. Achievement. Hyperacidity. Affluence. Flatulence. Technology. Tension. The inalienable right to an early coronary sitting at your desk while plotting to stab your boss in the back.

Family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters.

As they moved from exhibit to exhibit like reluctant tourists in some artist's studio, Buffin sat on a stool with his limbs tense. He was like an exhibit himself in the direct odd light filtering through the whitish panes, legs wound tensely round one another, his face like an apologetic bag.

Adrianne and Jo commenced a catfight. They yelled and screamed at each other. F-bombs here. "You bitch" there.

Christmas had done its usual merry work of setting husband against wife, relative against relative, and spreading bad will among men in general.

an inelasticity there that suggests... damage. Or anxiety.

German aggression tended to backfire,

A spoonful of sugar can be as helpful in dealing with foreign diplomats as it is in child psychology, for these are not unrelated fields.

I shift, an infinitesimal movement, towards him. It is like the leap from a waterfall. I do not know, until then, what I am going to do.

It was easy, in those moments, to forget that the war had not yet really begun.

Her calmness enraged me.

Men's faces are heavy with anger, but there are no more fights—it is too hot. They lie in the dark and hate each other.

Thus, in the huge compensatory ebb and flow of great creative Nature, one tension of human feeling has the power of ejecting, or completely cancelling, another strain of feeling. For the emotional tension of a frustrated passion there is no better cure than to spend an hour or two in the presence of terrible bodily anguish.

It is perfectly possible for an energetic and powerfully galvanic will to win renown for its owner, while the deepest part of the personality which that towering will-power has to carry along with it, just as a swiftly driving chariot might have to carry in the belly of its body a writhing and squirming serpent, may be secretly twitching and quivering with all manner of maniacal distates and repugnances.

Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave.

The breakfast was rather silent, but not with strain.

I heard his hasty footsteps on the dock. I kept my head down. I heard the thump and felt it as he leaped down into the cockpit. I heard his grunt of consternation. He would have to find out, and find out quickly.

answer. It sounded too damned close.

People often say that they have a very stressful job and that's why they're tense. But if they weren't conscientious about doing a good job, if they weren't trying to succeed, achieve, and excel, they wouldn't generate tension. Often such people are highly competitive and determined to get ahead. Typically, they are more critical of themselves than others are of them.

Those that involve the back of the head are clearly related to the posterior neck muscles that are part of TMS. Some patients report pain all over the head; others have it in the frontal region. A common complaint is of severe pain "behind the eyes." When they are unilateral (involving one side only), severe, and are accompanied by nausea, people are inclined to call them migraines. Tension headache can be as disabling as the worst neck, shoulder, or back pain.

It is a curious fact that each of these extreme opposites resembles the other. Each believes that we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead. [Address at the University of Washington in Seattle, November 16 1961]

The silence was terrible then, as tense as a bridge about to break, a tower to fall; unedurable in its emotion, its truth bursting to be spoken.