From my youth, I’d never stopped thinking in the future tense.
As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‘Where did we come from, what happens next?’ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.
A great free joy surges through me when I work… with tense slashes and a few thrusts the beautiful white fields receive their color and the work is finished in a few minutes.
One of my personal indulgences is getting a weekly massage – it helps to re-align my body. I usually feel so much less tense after I’ve gotten rid of some knots in my shoulders and back.
The latter 1940s and early ’50s were a time of tense, explosive conflict, in the world at large and in the politics of our nation.
My ‘Book of Prayer’ is the most important thing I carry. If I’m tense about something or need to pray for protection for my kids, it always helps.
I’m a serious-minded and intense little devil, terribly gauche and so tense I don’t see how people stay in the same room with me. I know I wouldn’t tolerate myself.
Rodgers and Hammerstein didn’t mean anything to me. I just wanted to have a hit, I just wanted to be like those people on the radio. It was all of a case of the present tense with no projecting into the future, particularly.
Where you come from now is much less important than where you’re going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself.
Musclemen grow on trees. They can tense their muscles and look good in a mirror. So what? I’m interested in practical strength that’s going to help me run, jump, twist, punch.
We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’
You were not supposed to show off in Negroland because you are supposed to be perfectly decorous and well behaved. You were also not supposed to tell any stories that reflected badly on the group because that reflected badly on the race. I use past tense, but it still feels like present tense.
I carry tension in my shoulders, and I fell in love with yoga because it stretches the muscles that have become tense as a result of stress.
I’m an appalling flyer. I get very tense, although I no longer weep uncontrollably for no reason – I just sob if there’s turbulence.
If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead.
Two or three notes of music can instantly make you feel sad or tense or afraid or angry. To do that in words is much more difficult.
I’ve got a lot of weaknesses. One of them is that I often get scared and tense when I’m working – and fear is one of the big threats to any good performance, because it closes you down and makes it harder for you to produce life in front of the camera.
Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.
You can’t look at a sleeping cat and be tense.
As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‘Where did we come from, what happens next?’ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.
While Fidel Castro used to deliver his marathon seven-hour speeches in Havana, Cubans used to joke that if Spanish lacked a future tense, their leader would be speechless. He was only fluent in broken promises, they lamented.
Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.
I do feel a wave come over me when I hear those two words, ‘Star’ and ‘Wars,’ said together. I feel tense, shut up, and stare into the middle distance.
What I realized is that it doesn’t matter how big or small your film is. The actual filmmaking process, the actual storytelling, it’s still the same thing. It’s still all about creating characters that you like and creating moments that get you excited or get you tense.
Musclemen grow on trees. They can tense their muscles and look good in a mirror. So what? I’m interested in practical strength that’s going to help me run, jump, twist, punch.
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