Quotes About Tension

War is what happens when language fails.

His older compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche had entertained no such hopes: "For long now our entire European culture has been moving with a tormenting tension that grows greater from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restless, violent, precipitate, like a river that wants to reach its end."23

Animosity hung between them like a two-edged sword; neither of them could use it without first getting hurt herself.

The two women looked at each other as if through the periscopes of enemy submarines across a fathomless and crawling sea.

I went out to dinner with a Marine. He looked across the table and he goes, "I could kill you in seven seconds." I go, "I'll just have toast then."

Most people cope in some fashion or other with the various strains under which they live, or they simply come out in spots, or leave home, or get drunk.

The whole world's safety depends on the words of two men who are enemies.

All the cells in my body seemed to race and freeze at the same time.

Each of them, living, was intolerable to the other, and in fury, they fell to it.

All I could do was to hold on tight to the sides of the chair, and keep myself from sucking his fingers. 'Would

If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Which is colder, the hand or the gun?

My heart's a dance of fear.

But fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction...

His body tensed as his gut was struck with a frozen bullet of shock. He couldn't breathe.

i am so crammedfull of fearsthat if you were to touch me i might eitherfly or break.

The world's only lessons are tension and fear — relax into yourself.

High finance trembles in its boots whenever there is some political complication.

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

Put your hands where I can see 'em, so they look like 12 PM On the dot, see this Glock? Don't make me give these shells freedom.

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

You know, Jacob, if it weren't for the fact that we're natural enemies and that you're also trying to steal away the reason for my existence, I might actually like you.

It doesn't feel like a date. It doesn't feel like friendship. It feels like something that fell off the tightrope but hasn't yet hit the net.