Quotes About Tension

Arguing leave the participants emotionally exhausted and mentally depressed.

The war... was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides.

In the nuclear age, superpowers make war like porcupines make love—carefully.

One of the ironic things," Kennedy observed to Norman Cousins in the spring of 1963, "…is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I've got similar problems…. The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another."8

When Khrushchev asked whether his brass hats would guarantee that keeping the missiles in Cuba would not bring about nuclear war, they looked at him, he later told Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, an informal emissary between Kennedy and Khrushchev, "as though I were out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor. So I said to myself, 'To hell with these maniacs.'"6

Instead, so long as Kennedy lived and Khrushchev stayed in power, there was steady movement toward the relaxation of tension—the American University speech, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the establishment of the "hotline" between the White House and the Kremlin.

Y cuando explotó la primera bomba, sonó dentro del primer vehículo de los nuestros como un estallido detrás de nosotros. Los policías con sus pasamontañas sabían lo que era, y la segunda bomba detonó a 100 metros de distancia mientras yo abría la puerta trasera.

One basic principle found throughout nature is this: Tension seeks resolution. From the spider web to the human body, from the formation of galaxies to the shifts of continents, from the swing of pendulums to the movement of wind-up toys, tension-resolution systems are in play.

When you merely choose a process, you do not establish structural tension, and you do not make energy available to complete the creative process.

I do," said Robin in a ringing voice, looking straight into the eyes, not of her stony-faced new husband, but of the battered and bloodied man who had just sent her flowers crashing to the floor.

As suddenly as they had reached for each other, they broke apart. Tears were rolling down Robin's face. For one moment of madness, Strike yearned to say, "Come with me", but there are words that can never be unsaid or forgotten, and those, he knew, were some of them.

He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings—feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous—to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds.

The instantaneous shift from calm to calamity. The slowing of time. Every sense suddenly wire-taut and screaming.

I've upset you, haven't I?" said Morris. "No, you haven't upset me," said Robin. After all, "upset" wasn't quite the same as "enrage.

The argument had been in full swing when Matthew's father telephoned with the news that a funny turn Matthew's mother had suffered the previous week had been diagnosed as a mini-stroke. After this, she and Matthew felt that squabbling about Strike was in bad taste, so they went to bed in an unsatisfactory state of theoretical reconciliation, both, Robin knew, still seething. It was

Strike had long since come to believe that she engineered situations out of an apparently insatiable need for conflict.

In a family there is always something or other going awry…

Everyday things became so strange, when you were waiting for something dreadful to happen. Her heart was pounding fast.

She and I aren't each other's favorite people.

She's like that, always shifting the goalposts. What was right one minute was wrong the next. You had to walk on eggshells, you really did.

Yet here she sat on the sofa, working rather than dealing with the subject that seemed to fill the small flat, pressing against the walls, keeping the atmosphere perpetually stiff with tension. Commentators

Strike, meanwhile, had seen just enough of Robin to be shocked by her appearance. He had never seen her face so pale, nor her eyes so puffy and bloodshot. Even as he sat down at his desk, eager to hear what information on Whittaker Shanker had brought to his office, the thought crossed his mind: What's the bastard done to her? And for a fraction of a second, before fixing all his attention on Shanker, Strike imagined punching Matthew and enjoying it.

Strike se dio cuenta de que estaba asistiendo a una crisis unilateral

insouciance, he was edgy. Why didn't he ask why Strike was there? Or did