#tension

...what goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at - if for some reason you wanted to guess at it - it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality. It looks as if, to a believer, things can never be allowed just to be what they are. They always have to be translated, moralised - given an unnecessary and rather sentimental extra meaning. A sunset can't just be part of the mixed magnificence and cruelty and indifference of the world; it has to be a blessing. A meal has to be a present you're grateful for, even if it came from Tesco and the ingredients cost you £7.38. Sex can't be the spectrum of experiences you get used to as an adult, from occasional earthquake through to mild companionable buzz; it has to be, oh dear oh dear, a special thing that happens when mummies and daddies love each other very much... Our fingers must be in our ears all the time - lalala, I can't hear you - just to keep out the plain sound of the real world. The funny thing is that to me it's exactly the other way around. In my experience, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. It's belief which demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending. Pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture. ↗

— Francis Spufford

#unapologetic #experience

There's a basic kind of tension here. It's between those who say, I'd like to clear cut this forest and reduce it to saw timber because that's an economically productive thing for me to do. ↗

— Bruce Babbitt

#because #between #clear #cut #economically

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit. ↗

— Freda Adler

#chooses #crime #ethical #group #philosophical

There's always been a lot of pressure and tension on the line. If 'Pi' didn't work out, I have no idea what my career would be. I don't think I would have gotten another shot at it. If 'Requiem for a Dream' didn't work out, they would have called me a 'one-hit wonder with a sophomore slump'. ↗

— Darren Aronofsky

#another #been #called #career #dream

We worked very hard to make extensions very simple. ↗

— Mitchell Baker

#hard #make #simple #very #worked

When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed. ↗

— Russell Baker

#among #beginnings #death #dramatic #flourish

...you can be angry and silent, but it's no use - there's no distance in the spirit - besides, my words touch you more softly than my hands... ↗

— John Geddes

#hands #love #relationships #silence #spirit

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps. ↗

— Havelock Ellis

#doubt #height #intellectual #means #nervous

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#adult #apparently #cherish #conflicting #constantly

Lazarus had never thought of himself as lovable. Therefore it should come as no shock at all that Temperance did not, in fact, love him. No, not a shock... but it would have been nice had she had some small feeling for him. Lazarus pondered his own sickening craving as he guided his black gelding through the London morning throng the day after he'd walked out on Temperance. It appeared that his own nascent emotions had provoked a new desire as well: the urge to be loved. How banal. And yet, banal or not, he could not change the way his heart felt. A corner of his mouth quirked up humorlessly. It seemed he must be like other men after all. ↗

— Elizabeth Hoyt

#lazarussgextraordinaire #wicked-intensions #change