Tenuous Quotes & Sayings

I don't know if I ended up siding with the academics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or if I ended up in graduate school because I already secretly sided with the academics. In any case, I stopped believing that "theory" had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed? — Elif Batuman

I just recently became aware of how tenuous my life is. I don't have time for fear. — Mike Phillips

God's justice stands forever against the sinner in utter severity. The vague and tenuous hope that God is 'too kind' to punish the ungodly has become deadly opiate for the consciences of millions. It hushes their fears and allows them to practice all pleasant forms of iniquity while death draws everyday nearer and the command to repent goes unregarded. As responsible moral beings, we dare not so trifle with our eternal future. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

She felt the depth of her losses before they were realized, and she wondered, Is there still hope? Did she even dare hold on to such a tenuous thing as hope? — Sage Steadman

You can't forge a relationship with learned helplessness, you can only force one and it will always be tenuous. There is always the possibility the peregrine will rediscover the strength of his heart. — Rebecca K. O'Connor

Ben launched himself from the building.
BEN!
For the second time in two nights, I watched in horror as Ben sailed through the air. His arms pinwheeled as he dropped toward the shimmering inkblot below.
Ben hit with a thunderous splash and disappeared beneath the water. Heart in my throat, I willed him to resurface.
Ben. Ben, are you okay?!
My bond with Ben grew fuzzy. Tenuous. Then it broke altogether. Frantic, I unleashed a swell of love for Ben I didn't know existed. All my hopes and cares burst outward. In a split second, I bared my soul.
The water rippled.
I never knew you cared. — Kathy Reichs

Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe. — Steven Pinker

During last night's insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realised once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly tenuous, indeed almost non-existent soil spread over a pit full of shadows, whence the powers of darkness emerge at will to destroy my life ... — Franz Kafka

Sanity is tenuous. Tenuous. Comes and goes. Many of the brightest people floating about this planet have only a finger's grip on sanity, if that. — Cathy Lamb

Every relationship is just so tenuous and precarious. — Larry David

Suspicion is a tenuous thing, so impalpable that the exact moment of its birth is not easy to determine. — Francis Iles

Scattered among these things are reminders that sound once existed: a metronome, a drumming pad, a guitar pick, a trumpet mouthpiece, a music stand, a tuning fork, a block of rosin ... The older instruments bear the marks of those who have already played them, the scuffs and bites and dents that are the mysterious scars of sound. In their midst the house hangs, tenuous and enveloping, a sounding board waiting to be struck. — Geoffrey O'Brien

I am not, as you will have observed, a man greatly enamored of his fellow human beings. I do not enter lightly into the foibles and whimsicalities of others, I do not suffer fools gladly, I seem able, in conversation, only to needle or be needled. My relationships, as a result, are few, and those few are tenuous, prickly sorts of arrangements, altogether lacking in the spontaneity and intimacy for which humans, I'm told, have an instinctive need. I am aware of no such instincts myself. — Patrick McGrath

When you live for the fight, for the blood, the relationships you form are tenuous and easily broken. — Stephenie Meyer

I think what history will show is that one of the most tragic results of the war in Iraq will be that although Sharon, the Likudites, the Neoconservatives in our country, President Bush and the Democratic party thought the war in Iraq and destroying Saddam would benefit Israeli security, we're seeing absolutely that the war in Iraq has probably put Israeli security in a more tenuous condition than it's been in since the founding of the Israeli state. — Michael Scheuer

Why read? Because books are precious guides to our humanity - civilization's backbone - that tenuous ridgeline that allows us to climb above the jungle and see what the horizon has to offer. Thus they represent the yearning to go beyond, to explore. Yet they are also human-sized. And made of paper and ink, and thus they come from the earth. Their physicality is what makes them immensely human. And they contain the flesh-and-bone thoughts of one person capturing one blink of time, now made immortal in the bound pages carried by your own hands and touched by your own eyes. How can such fragile and thin paper and spidery veins of ink be our most precious treasure, binding together the entire hope and legacy and language of a civilization - of our existence. We touch the book and turn the page, and thus we are bound to our destiny. — Carew Papritz

The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven't seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or toward impermanence. The boat's sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog's so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown. — Nick Flynn

Men are biological. Women are biological. We pretend our minds are in control, but that's a very tenuous control at best, and a civilized society can't be built on uncontrolled biology. I see it in my work: intelligence betrayed by lust, by jealousy, by macho ownership; otherwise trustworthy men who can't be trusted at all around women, or vice versa. Hell, look at Congress. Well-intentioned, progressive, admired law-makers who end up losing it all because they can't control how they react to women! And I certainly don't trust most women around men — Sheri S. Tepper

In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous. — Archie Shepp

I took many notes, more than usual before I sat down and wrote Act One, Scene One. I had perhaps eighty pages of notes ... I was so prepared that the script seemed inevitable. It was almost all there. I could almost collate it from my notes. The story line, the rather tenuous plot we have, seemed to work out itself. It was a very helpful way to write, and it wasn't so scary. I wasn't starting with a completely blank page. — Charles Busch

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day. — Rebecca Solnit

In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's aniquated support systems, circulation, and infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic ... Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment. — Ada Louise Huxtable

Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible. — Juliet Marillier

I think all geniuses - or the ones thet I've run into - tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be geniuses but they often need someone to walk around holding a string. They're sort of balloons, bobbing around. — Neil Gaiman

What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I can't penetrate.
... people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false-nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality.
What am I living on? Someone said the other day, "that old irrepressible-impossible- hope." And I thought no, this doesn't feel like hope. But maybe that's what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to get better?
Hope has to do with continuing, that's all ... I can imagine now, where I couldn't before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one's strength, until what's left is tenuous, transparent. — Mark Doty

The reality of social networking sites is that they provide platforms for online personae to interact with other online personae. Importantly, such relationships can be ended with a click of an 'unfriend,' 'unfollow,' or 'block' button. Breaking up like this constitutes a morally lightweight action. Certainly it flies in the face of Cicero's advice that a friendship 'should seem to fade away rather than to be stamped out.' The respect that Cicero demanded that we pay to a friendship, even one that has turned sour, did not anticipate the tenuous connection inherent in being a facebook friend. — Marilyn Yalom

Together they [President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger] pursued ends that frequently had a tenuous link with reality, using means that were not merely disproportionate but counterproductive and untrue to those values they were meant to defend. In fact neither man demonstrated much faith in those values. — William Shawcross

Under this swarm of waspish self-inquiries he began to feel sorry for himself - a brilliant man trapped, a Byron tamed; and his mind wandered back to Sarah, to visual images, attempts to recollect that face, that mouth, that generous mouth. Undoubtedly it awoke some memory in him, too tenuous, perhaps too general, to trace to any source in his past; but it unsettled him and haunted him, by calling to some hidden self he hardly knew existed. He said it to himself: It is the stupidest thing, but that girl attracts me. It seemed clear to him that it was not Sarah in herself who attracted him - how could she, he was betrothed - but some emotion, some possibility she symbolized. She made him aware of a deprivation. His future had always seemed to him of vast potential; and now suddenly it was a fixed voyage to a known place. She had reminded him of that. — John Fowles

Life isn't only about the big moments whether they be good or bad. Maybe it's about the small things that stretch out to strengthen the most tenuous bound. — Sarah Dessen

Let's live suddenly without thinking.
Let's live like the light that kills.
And let's as silence,
because Whirl's after all:
(after me) love, and after you.
I occasionally feel vague how
vague I don't know tenuous Now -
spears and The Then - arrows making do
our mouths, something red, something tall. — E. E. Cummings

When we finally meet how much do I confess? Our bond is tenuous. Frail as a drift of moonlight on open sea. Would the truth crash us apart? Some secrets can't be kept for too long. No matter how hard you try to hide them, sooner or later, they scurry out from your cupboards, cockroaches on the run. No way to grow closer with deceit wedged between us. Should I tell or should I hide it away? Would you run away? — Ellen Hopkins

Unlike the other darkside Lords, whose places of power were fixed geographical localities where they reigned supreme, Jack's was more a tenuous one, and liable to speedy cancellation, but it existed wherever light and objects met to make a lesser darkness. With — Roger Zelazny

I wasn't going to say anything about that, Tabitha," he said quietly. "I only wanted to tell you that your compassion for other people overwhelms me."
"Oh." She offered him a tenuous smile. "I'm just used to people condemning everything I do."
He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. "I don't condemn you, my lady. I only admire you. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I always knew my grip upon the thread of time was tenuous, and the harder I clutched, the sooner it would break. Therefore, do not weep for me, my tender sweet love-- we must all resign ourselves to the final snapping of that bond between soul and death, and though it is a present unworthy of your grace and beauty, you must know that I gift my soul to you. — Lyndsay Faye

Carrie was a girl from my music appreciation class. She had beautiful, dark brown eyes, though it was hard to notice them; she hid behind a scrim of mousy hair and soft chub, which gave her the sodden air of someone who'd found a tenuous contentment on Paxil — Siel Ju

What else had I forgotten? What else would come back, knocking me off balance and reminding me how tenuous my grip on reality was? — Susannah Cahalan

With each passing month, I was introduced to other aspects of a new and pleasant world. Yet, though most of my days were spent in happy pursuit, always, underlying, was the tenuous feeling of an uncertain future. — Kathleen Grissom

I would say the connection between art and science is very tenuous for me. It's just that I'm interested in both. I don't think that my interest in art affects the kind of science that I do. — Janna Levin

She entered the place of her dreams along a much traveled path and returned treading very carefully in order not to shatter the tenuous visions against the harsh light of consciousness. — Isabel Allende

She was my friend and I loved her and relied on her, even though there were days when her moodiness and fragility frightened me, because they reminded me of my own tenuous grasp on life. — Julie Metz

The two of us, in the rain, went down streets of vacant lots. The sidewalks in that part of the world sink and evade your step, in winter the branches of the little ash trees at the edge hold the raindrops a long time, a tenuous fairyland trembling in the breeze. Our way back to the hospital led past a number of newly built hotels, some had names, others hadn't even gone to that much trouble. "Rooms by the week" was all they had to say for themselves. The war had suddenly emptied them of all the workers and wage slaves who had lived there. They wouldn't even come back to die. Dying is work, too, but they'd do it somewhere else. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

As a Jew reading about Jesus, I thought, 'He's a pretty good guy.' It's the same conclusion Monty Python drew in 'Life of Brian' - if people actually live what he did, it would be a pretty good world. But Jesus and Christianity have a tenuous relationship at best. — David Javerbaum

Only with severe need did the hyphae curl around the alga; only when the alga was stressed did it welcome the advances. When times are easy and there's plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

With everything so perfect, reality seemed somehow fragile, as if the slightest interruption could imperil her pretty future ... all of it felt as tenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty. — Scott Westerfeld

Anyone who, for 25 years, has built a career on such tenuous foundations as a high-pitched giggle, a raspberry and a sprinkling of top 'Cs' needs all the friends he can get. — Harry Secombe

The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing. — Tim Kreider

Aware of how tenuous life can be. How too many things go unsaid or undone. How we wait too long and miss the chance." "Miss — Suanne Laqueur

My great grandparents are Scottish, and I have this very tenuous connection which I try and bump up whenever I can, because I'd much rather be Scottish than English. — Rupert Friend

Later, I would realize that the position of most black students in predominantly white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred - for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology. — Barack Obama

My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane ... "
That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex.
He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane ... — Aldous Huxley

The memory seems both real and unreal, reliable and tenuous, solid and insubstantial. — Rabih Alameddine

Anyway, there are two tentative solutions for getting rid of selfishness - both involving a stoic casting - off of the thin tenuous little identity which I love and cherish so dearly - and being confident that, once on the other side, I shall never miss my own little ambitions for my conceited self, but shall be content in serving the ambitions of my mate, or of a society, or cause. (Yet I will not, I cannot accept any of those solutions. Why? Stubborn selfish pride. I will not make what is inevitable easier for my-self by the blinding ignorance-is-bliss "losing-and-finding" theory. Oh, no! I will go, eyes open, into my torture, and remain fully cognizant, unwinking, while they cut and stitch and lop off my cherished malignant organs.) So much for selflove: I carry it with me like a dear cancerous relative - to be disposed of only when desperation sets in. — Sylvia Plath

Nonetheless, I felt like I knew him well enough so that we did not have to do much talking. From the very beginning I had felt a definite contact with Yeoman, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is pretty cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself. — Hunter S. Thompson

Ideals and opportunities and social theorizing are just fine, but if you must understand only one thing, it is this: a warm hand and words whispered into the ear are what we want. Paths that can be seen and followed and walked upon are what we most need.
...And in the end, the thing that feeds us, no matter how tenuous, is what we will reach for. — Sonja Livingston

If I had learned anything about life and love, it was that they were tenuous things that could end at any moment. Caution was essential - but not at the cost of wasting your life. — Richelle Mead

Pre-preproduction is the tenuous time before a project is greenlit; before the studio commits to spending real money. This is the most vulnerable period for any film because it's the time when your project is most likely to be put into turnaround. That's film-speak for killed off. — Peter Jackson

I've written a detective series myself, set in an imaginary, and slightly futuristic, Chinese city. The novels have an extremely tenuous relationship with the real world, since the hero is the city's Hell and ends up with a sidekick who is a demon. — Liz Williams

I think when you're dealing with very tenuous scenes and difficult and heavy subject matter, it's important to be close intimately with your cast as friends, and be able to diffuse a lot of that tension and trust each other with the work. — Jack Falahee

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse. — Justin Cronin

he'd felt the bonds between them change. No longer a tenuous tie, they'd solidified. He knew she was the one who could anchor him but not weigh him down. — Lorelei James

People like bipartisanship not because they like the substance of what bipartisanship produces, but because it reduces the cognitive stress that partisan disagreement creates. If two sides are bitterly arguing over some major piece of public policy, this forces us to choose sides, and for those with weak mastery of the issue or tenuous connections to a specific worldview, it is easy to be stalked by the worry that you're choosing the wrong side: After all, there are a ton of people screaming in righteous indignation that the side you're on is about to destroy the country. — Chris Hayes

The Bush administration also was not straightforward about the intelligence it had, releasing tenuous information that fit its goal of attacking Iraq. I feel deceived. — Ken Lucas

Anagram of Seeking by Susan Laughter Meyers
Sit, unplanted, with your back to a tree, or sink
to your knees.
If sorrow drowns the hour, let yourself keen,
each hurt recalled, the heart a siege
of old wounds. If startled by joy, let yourself sing.
Light dims, the air cools your skin.
Unclear , what it is you're seeing-
each monotone hoot of the owl, a sign-
less clear what can't be seen:
the soul, a spirit, the king of kings?
This density of leaves and skein
of tenuous moss, yours. here and now, seine
life's good fish. Child, singe
the night, boldly. O lost see, catch fire and seek. — Susan Laughter Meyers

In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle. — Charles Stross

For human beings. We almost went extinct fighting one another before. Now our numbers are even fewer. Our conditions more tenuous. Is this really what we want to do? Kill ourselves off completely? In the hopes that - what? Some decent species will inherit the smoking remains of the earth?" "I — Suzanne Collins

The first time I goofed out on Heroin was 1985. It was like sinking into a sea of warm marmalade. And once submerged in its sickly sweet balm I was cast adrift in a universe of dreams. And in the middle of vacant, non-existence I had found freedom. The outside world was no longer my enemy because my final tenuous connection with it had been severed forever. — U.V. Ray

A society without the authentic and vibrant influence of women is a society that is not fully alive. A culture lacking the vital creativity of women is disadvantaged. Without the bearing of women on world affairs, humanity's already tenuous grip on peace is made even less sure. When women are barred, whether by law, cultural prejudice, or political ideology, from developing their full potential and offering their unique gifts, it is an injustice to women themselves and to humanity as a whole. — Stephen Catanzarite

A friend argues that Americans battle between the "historical self" and the "self self." By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant. — Claudia Rankine

The threads of circumstance that lead to tomorrow are so tenuous that all the fussing and worrying about decisions is futile compared to the pure randomness of existence. — Nick Bantock

As children, we have a tenuous idea of love; we often try to quantify it with how much we feel seen and heard. — Adora Svitak

The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly
has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions. — A.W. Tozer

Vividly imagined, beautifully written, at times almost unbearably suspenseful-the stories in Kristiana Kahakauwila's debut collection, This Is Paradise, are boldly inventive in their exploration of the tenuous nature of human relations. These are poignant stories of 'paradise'-Hawai'i-with all that 'paradise' entails of the transience of sensuous beauty. — Joyce Carol Oates

Maybe marriage, like life, isn't only about the big moments, whether they be good or bad. Maybe it's all the small things - like being guided slowly forward, surely, day after day - that stretches out to strengthen even the most tenuous bond. — Sarah Dessen

If shadows were caused by the interplay between light and Life, a child's was still forming. An adult's was inextricably bound to his body, but a child had a tenuous relationship to his own permanence, and thus, his own shadow. — Anne Ursu

Another thing I noticed was how quickly the human brain paired causal events. "A" leads to "B." We love to make that link, however tenuous. — Hugh Howey

turn to say as much to Tomas when his lips find mine in a gentle kiss. My heartbeat quickens. I can't see his face in the darkness, but I know Tomas is giving me the chance to pull away. But I don't. I lean in and feel Tomas's mouth smile against mine before the kiss deepens. I snake a hand around his neck and hold tight as a thrilling shiver travels through me. Despite our tenuous situation, nothing has ever felt this perfect. — Joelle Charbonneau

Normal humanity has only the courage to react to the usual gradations that range from the beautiful to the ugly, which in the long run are nothing but nuances of the same thing. The monster, on the other hand, Don Jeronimo contended with feeling, in order to exalt them with his mystique, belongs to a different, privileged species, with its own rights and particular canons that exclude the concepts of beauty and ugliness as tenuous categories, because, in essence, monstrosity is the culmination of both qualities synthesized and exacerbated to the sublime. — Jose Donoso

Sometimes a face could be so simple: even a couple of dark spots on a lighter surface or a dark oval in the distance might be a face. An electrical socket could be a face, a mailbox or a couple of punctuation marks could congeal suddenly into something with an expression. Our faces, on the other hand, were made of hundreds of different parts, each part separate and tenuous and capable of being ugly, each part waiting for a product designed to isolate and act upon it. — Alexandra Kleeman

Oh - that family, yes. There are still some photos of them around here. They look like nice people, don't they?"
They ... 'look like nice people'?"
Well, they do, don't they? Of course, they never actually existed - except maybe in the most tenuous and retrospective way - but still, it's nice to think they were good people."
Uh. Right. Gee, I suppose you must do a lot of drugs. — Neil Gaiman

I looked away from his direct gaze and down at the scratched surface of the table. Someone had etched into it RYAN LOVES MEGAN ALWAYS ... I wondered who Ryan and Megan were. And if, wherever they were, they'd made it. I wondered how anyone could have been so sure about a concept so tenuous and impossible as 'always' that they'd be willing to carve it into a tabletop. — Morgan Matson

There is uncertainty in hope, but even with its tenuous nature, it summons our strength and pulls us through fear and grief - and even death. — Priscille Sibley

The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters. — Czeslaw Milosz

Here there is left a tenuous subterfuge, 875 which Anaxagoras seizes: think of things as mixtures of everything, all concealed but one that shows - the one that's mixed in largest measure and close to the surface and placed right at the top. — Titus Lucretius Carus

With an eBook, however, you are not a first-class commercial citizen. Instead, you have only purchased tenuous rights within someone else's company store. You cannot resell, nor can you do anything else to treat your purchase as an investment. — Jaron Lanier

Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger
reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous
thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind
amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its
forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life. — Loren Eiseley

The strays keep arriving: now we have 5 cats and they are tenuous, flighty, con- ceited, naturally bright and awesomely beautiful. one — Charles Bukowski

We lay our words like tenuous plats, build a bridge over its
unsinkable depth: Not a sea of longing,
but the brack of wanting what's physical
to help us forget we are physical. — Cate Marvin

World economies are always so tenuous and we are subject to so many losses in life, but a compassionate attitude is something we can always carry with us. — Dalai Lama

I can only assume that he must have dreamed it up at the last minute and ad-libbed it - and on just such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the destinies of us all. — Frederick Buechner

There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence --
More than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harboring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys. — H.P. Lovecraft

Warned me that the tenuous balance that exists in my brain is easily set off kilter, but like everything else he said, — Marya Hornbacher

And what a refreshing and happy horror that there was nobody there! Not even we, who walked there, were there ... For we were nobody. We were nothing at all ... We had no life for Death to have to kill. We were so tenuous and slight that the wind's passing left us prostrate, and time's passage caressed us like a breeze grazing the top of a palm. — Fernando Pessoa

It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature. — Colson Whitehead

What if you kill a man who was plotting to shoot up a McDonald's? What if you commit one murder to prevent a dozen murders? The "obviously correct" judgment of the law starts to sound more and more like an opinion when a new variable is introduced, doesn't it? And okay, these "what if this?" exercises may feel like cerebral game play, but you don't even need to look to extreme examples to see the tenuous, opinion-based nature of laws. Abortion. Gay marriage. Determining fair use in a copyright infringement case. Every time a law is applied, it is applied as a matter of opinion. And those are the laws -- the biggest and baddest rules we have. — Johnny B. Truant

One always starts work with the subject, no matter how tenuous it is, and one constructs an artificial structure by which one can trap the reality of the subject-matter that one has started from. — Francis Bacon

If the losses don't hurt, your financial survival is tenuous. — William Eckhardt

Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn't exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awareness - a vague, ethereal sense of being. Being ... but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future - only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception ... — Robert J. Sawyer

And then the line was quite but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone. — John Green

Girls think they're only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I'm going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him. — John Green

Since far fewer people are recruited to serve in a voluntary military, the connection between America and its military is increasingly tenuous and less personal. — John M. McHugh