#tension

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#behave #between #contradiction #imposed #kind

The day drags along, you make thousands of plans, you imagine every possible conversation, you promise to change your behavior in certain ways–and you feel more and more anxious until your loved one arrives. But by then, you don't know what to say. The hours of waiting have been transformed into tension, the tension has become fear, and the fear makes you embarrassed about showing affection. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#behavior #change #conversation #day #fear

I looked at him like a stranger, someone I’d never seen before, and he looked at me like I’d been lost to him for a thousand years and finally found. ↗

— Emme Rollins

#look #lost #lost-and-found #love #romance

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

The only result of our present system - unless we reverse the drift - must be the gradual extension of the fascist sector and the gradual disappearance of the system of free enterprise under a free representative government. ↗

— John T. Flynn

#drift #enterprise #extension #fascist #free

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

I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie. ↗

— Damian Lewis

#i think #like #movie #people #scared

The average session takes about one to two hours. It's totally amazing because when a person breathes, they go through one stage of relaxation after another, and every stage releases tension. ↗

— Leonard Orr

#after #amazing #another #average #because

I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#tension #unhappiness #imagination

He(Prophet Muhammad) was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope's pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue; if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by the right divine, it was Muhammad, for he had all the power without its instruments and without its supports. ↗

— Reverend B. Smith

#atheist #bodyguard #caesar #christian #divine