Tenuously Quotes & Sayings

Gods, the pamphlets asserted, were not supernatural beings, but tenuously living things, like ethereal plants, that evolved in concert with the human species. We were simply their medium - our brains and flesh the soil in which they sprouted and grew. — Robert Charles Wilson

Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron. — Carl Sagan

I am a rootless individual, but when I land in Belize, I have that feeling of comfort that I am returning home. — Michael Ashcroft

I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. — Judith Butler

Most of the film directors expect their actors to want to work fast. — Yvonne Strahovski

Thanks for nothing, regular human mom. Footnote: nothing except for the unconditional love and support and meticulous care to make sure I faced the world fully informed about my body and reproductive health. — Lindy West

One reason (among many) that women may well take over the world of "virtual enterprises" is that they seem to have a greater instinct for networking. And the unfettered-by-machismo males who have taken to networking will do better than those who shun it as "sissy stuff." But truth is, it has always been the age of "networkers"; and in an era where organizations depend more and more on tenuously connected outsiders to get the job done, it will only become so. — Tom Peters

The hypothesis behind invisible writings was laughably complicated. All books are tenuously connected through L-space and, therefore, the content of any book ever written or yet to be written may, in the right circumstances, be deduced from a sufficiently close study of books already in existence. Future books exist in potentia, as it were, in the same way that a sufficiently detailed study of a handful of primal ooze will eventually hint at the future existence of prawn crackers. — Terry Pratchett

This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant. — John Banville

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics. — Gregory Benford

The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself 'together with' others or 'at home in' the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on. — R.D. Laing

Katherine gave in to the wonder of the moment, imagining herself in the astronauts' place. What emotions welled up from the depths of their hearts as they regarded their watery blue home from the void of space? How did it feel to be separated by a nearly unimaginable gulf from the rest of humanity yet carry the hopes, dreams, and fears of their entire species there with them in their tiny, vulnerable craft? Most people she knew wouldn't have traded places with the astronauts for all of the gold in Fort Knox. The men existed all alone out their in the void of space, connected so tenuously to Earth, with the real possibility that something could go wrong. But given the chance to throw her lot in with the astronauts, Katherine Johnson would have packed her bags immediately. Even without the pressure of the space race, even without the mandate to beat the enemy. For Katherine Johnson, curiosity always bested fear. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Want to have better and more effective meetings? Get rid of the tables in your meeting room. It's weird but it works. — Alexander Kjerulf

Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Like boats, we human beings need anchors, no matter how tenuously those links may hold us, or else we drift forever through uncharted oceans, scanning every horizon for a hint of hope. And with the chances of being picked up and rescued so small, we need our islands, our mooring points, our ports, our points of reference and our havens. — Morgana Blackrose

I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring. — Sally Mann

I don't mind if people don't like me. Well, I might a little ... but I really mind it when somebody uses their position at Time magazine to tell 10 million people they don't like me. I know what it's like to have your private life painted in the worst possible light in front of a lot of people. — Steve Jobs

There was never any fear for me, no fear of failure. If I miss a shot, so what? — Michael Jordan

The probable accumulation of the surpluses of revenue beyond what can be applied to the payment of the public debt ... merits the consideration of Congress. Shall it lie unproductive in the public vaults? ... Or shall it rather be appropriated to the improvements of roads, canals, rivers, education, and other great foundations of prosperity and union — Thomas Jefferson

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about. — Joseph Roth

We didn't draw anything," she said as she stepped through the door. "We volunteered." * — Leigh Bardugo

And it was no shame to her that she so dreamed. It was no shame that she called before her, one by one, those who had asked her to cross with them the threshold (of marriage) and those who might still ask her. It was no shame that, while her heart said always, "no," she still waited - waited for one whom she knew not, but only knew that she would know him when he came. And it was no shame to her that, even while this was so, she saw herself in the years to come a wife and mother. — Harold Bell Wright

We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep, we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and springs of wildflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear. — Susan Griffin

A character to me can't be contrived. I don't like to contrive characters. They have to have an element of truth. — Jack Kirby

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. — John Updike

Page 117 Sam says "You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people anymore. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a hole. I don't know. It's like you become ... a doughnut instead of a bun." page 117 — Jojo Moyes

In a thousand years," Alessandro said, "this incident will be remembered. By then, of course, we will have become angels, devils, or a dragon that breathes fire ... but we have given this rock a story that will be passed on."
"What good is that?"
"It isn't to our advantage, if that's what you mean. However, it's pleasurable to cast a line into the future, no matter how tenuously. You never know, the line may be unbroken all the way to the last judgment. — Mark Helprin