Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
A person in a uniform is merely an extension of another person's will.
Life is a series of pulls back and forth... A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. Most of us live somewhere in the middle. A wrestling match...Which side win? Love wins. Love always wins
I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.
If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn't ask me, I'd still have to say it.
It was ironic, really - you want to die because you can't be bothered to go on living - but then you're expected to get all energetic and move furniture and stand on chairs and hoist ropes and do complicated knots and attach things to other things and kick stools from under you and mess around with hot baths and razor blades and extension cords and electrical appliances and weedkiller. Suicide was a complicated, demanding business, often involving visits to hardware shops. And if you've managed to drag yourself from the bed and go down the road to the garden center or the drug store, by then the worst is over. At that point you might as well just go to work.
Leo lowered his screwdriver. He looked at the ceiling and shook his head like, What am I gonna do with this guy? "I try very hard to be annoying," Leo said. "Don't insult my ability to annoy. And how am I supposed to resent you if you go apologizing? I'm a lowly mechanic. You're like the prince of the sky, son of the Lord of the Universe. I'm supposed to resent you." "Lord of the Universe?" (Jason) "Sure, you're all-bam! Lightning man. And 'Watch me fly. I am the eagle that soars-" (Leo) "Shut up, Valdez." (Jason) Leo managed a little smile. "Yeah, see. I do annoy you." "I apologize for apologizing." (Jason) "Thank you." He went back to work, but the tension had eased between them. Leo still looked sad and exhausted-just not quite so angry.
Wait. This was the first lesson I had learned about love. 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.
In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
Nothing shocks me more in the men of religion and their flocks than their pretensions to be the only religious people.