Quotes about Tension

Yet he was tense, feeling that he and the elderly, estranged woman were conferring together like traitors, like enemies within the camp of the other people.

There had come into his forehead a knitting of the brows which was becoming habitual with him, particularly when he was with Miriam. She longed to smooth it away, and she was afraid of it. It seemed the stamp of a man who was not her man in Paul Morel.

Frequently he hated Miriam. He hated her as she bent forward and pored over his things. He hated her way of patiently casting him up, as if he were an endless psychological account. When he was with her, he hated her for having

good thinking deals with causes and effects and leads to logical, constructive planning; bad thinking frequently leads to tension and nervous breakdowns. I

When I find myself wondering what hell must be like, I'm reminded of the terminals in Atlanta. Thousands of people, most of whom don't know one another, crammed into a limited space, all in a hurry and trying desperately to get out.

Dr. Zachary T. Bercovitz told me: "Some people are actually draining into their bodies the diseased thoughts of their minds." Asked to specify these diseased thoughts, he replied, "Oh, the usual — fear, guilt, worry, frustration, tension, resentment, gloominess, despondency. In fact, if fear and resentment were eliminated from people's minds I believe our hospital population would be reduced by maybe fifty per cent. Certainly by a lot anyway."

It's not the work which kills people, it's the worry. It's not the revolution that destroys machinery it's the friction.

frustrated relationship

We live with this tension between self-protective isolation and the dream for meaningful relationships.

Tension is living in the gap between certainty and uncertainty. We always begin with what we know, and are irresistibly drawn to what we don't know. We are inveterately curious. We are wired to grow, and all growth stretches us beyond our comfort level. Comfort is the absence of tension; growth requires a swim in murky, dangerous waters... Tension is the medium which we breathe everyday.

The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.

Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.