Tight Rope Quotes & Sayings

Showmen's Rest was truly something to behold. Throughout the entire yard, statues and carvings of elephants, clowns, and tight-rope walkers danced on the gray and white surfaces of tombstones and grave-markers. For the first time, Michael got the feeling that the men and women who'd been buried there were probably really happy with their final resting place. It was a touching tribute, one that honored their passion in life and that had been constructed out of love and respect. — Jacqueline E. Smith

When a knot gets to tight, you can always cut the rope — Dean Koontz

For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels in it, What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now! — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When we make a change, it's so easy to interpret our unsettledness as unhappiness, and our unhappiness as a result of having made the wrong decision. Our mental and emotional states fluctuate madly when we make big changes in our lives, and some days we could tight-rope across Manhattan, and other days we are too weary to clean our teeth. This is normal. This is natural. This is change. — Jeanette Winterson

That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature. — Richard P. Feynman

You always want to walk a tight-rope of flavor — Rick Bayless

One should adopt only those situations in which is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand - or escape — Friedrich Nietzsche

God says, Sure, take away the safety net. And when that's gone, take away the tight rope too. — Stephen King

Do you mind?" I looked at him from my upside-down position. The rope tight around my ankle, hands fought a losing battle with gravity over my t-shirt.
"What are you doing here?" He kneeled, hand rested on the crossbow while he dug his mismatched eyes into me.
"Oh, you know... just hanging. — Isabelle Crusoe

The essence of show business is, if you see a tight-rope walker go across a tight rope, everybody claps. But, if you see him wobble, everybody gasps. — T Bone Burnett

Blacksmiths sometimes twist a rope tight around the nose of a horse, and by thus inflicting a little pain they distract his attention from the shoeing process. One way to get air out of a
glass is to pour in water. Be Absorbed by Your Subject — Dale Carnegie

My Heart fell.
Since I could remember my heart has balanced
A long such a thin line of right and wrong, love and hate.
The line already stretched to the extremes, taught with fear and uncertainty
Tension reached its maximum
When that day came around
Ever since that day when learned the truth
The day my eyes were forcefully
peeled open by dull razors
That day the line faded and the tight rope snapped.
With no line to follow my heart fell.
Now concussed, delirious and confused.
My heart wanders between worlds.
Never certain of who it is
where it was, or how it should be. — Kevin Rose

Between birth and death, neighbour, there is no business that is not risky; drinking water in a sitting position included! . The gist of the matter is to do everything with fine tuning as an acrobat does when walking a tight rope, like a carpenter measuring everything meticulously! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word-tension-has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end-is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be? — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Maybe the church was right.
Maybe I'm selfish.
Maybe I'm evil.
Maybe I'm damned.
I feel like I'm on a tight rope,
barely balancing. I know it's
a long way down and I'm
afraid I'm destined to crash. — Ellen Hopkins

AMERICAN HERO
The man stepped right up, feet on top of a case of bottled beer. He placed his neck into a rope noose that was strung from the light fixture. He pulled it tight and leaped to the floor.

He hung for less than a minute, thinking nothing but the pain as he spun slowly in a circle; the spots in his eyes were bright red when he took a palmed razor blade and cut the rope, falling chest-first into the kitchen sink.

Then he packed his lunch for work. — Bill Shields

Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. — Oscar Wilde

A moment later, Noah's flying through the air, arms outstretched like he's on the cross. I feel a surge of adrenaline.

And then what always happens: He slows down. I can't explain it, but it takes my brother forever to hit the surface of the water. I blink a few times at him suspended there midair as if on a tight rope. I've come to think either he has a way with gravity or I'm seriously missing more than a few buttons. I did read once that anxiety can significantly alter space-time perception. — Jandy Nelson

How could I share with you how I felt when two towers that I loved, two pieces of steel and glass and concrete fell down, when actually they took with them thousands of human lives? That is the actual tragedy. But those towers were almost human for me. I was in love with them, and that's why I married them with a tight rope. — Philippe Petit

I've made choices that work with my family. I want to work and I want to be with my family so I just walk the tight-rope of showing up for both those things. — Helen Hunt

How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tight rope. — Gilles Deleuze

Jeffrey woke up, tied to the high-backed chair in his bedroom, nude. He could hear his wife giggling in the hallway, the hardwood floors creaking with her footsteps with what must have been someone else too. He was gagged, a tight cloth wrapped around his mouth, hurting his jaw when he tried to call for help. He looked down at his body, seeing that he was tied with an intricate rope pattern - a pentagram - on his chest, the hemp fibers tight. He could breathe fine, and he recognized his wife's rigging skills instantly. They'd practiced Kinbaku, a rope bondage before, on multiple occasions, but this rigging was different. It seemed to be tighter than normal, and he knew that something new was being introduced tonight. — Todd Misura

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them. — Oscar Wilde

Never ask the tight-rope walker how he keeps his balance. if he stops to think about it, he falls off — Terry Pratchett

Momma was with the pony last night. Lily and me have him in the mornings, and we give him a wash with the shammy cloths and a soapy bucket so he's ready for Jade to look after him the next night. I think Momma must ride him too rough because he's always sweating and white-eyed when we get him, pulling tight at his rope and spreading his wide beige lips. He won't settle forever and ever, he just turns circles around the stake. Me and Lily get nervy watching him paw scoops out of the backyard soil. — Kirsty Logan

We all admire the spangled acrobat with classic grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I should know. — Vladimir Nabokov

We both try to fight the rope that binds us, but the knots are too tight. — Corinne Michaels

No one wants to occupy a black hole of sadness and despair or slip on the tight rope that separates sanity from insanity, and reside in a vortex devoid of reality. I entered the world as a freeman and desire to escape a state of existential vertigo. I yearn to discover a synthesizing spirit of my being and hold my head high, free of doubt, and devoid of fear. I wish to foment the cerebral energy to stave off premature destruction and forevermore blunt an intolerable state of anguish. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope. — Edith Wharton

If I am practicing on the wire, and you pushed me, I would not move, and if you take a piece of wood and beat me up on the shoulder and the head, I would not move. You would not put me out of balance. You would not be able to. I am solid as granite when I am on the tight rope, and I should be. — Philippe Petit

I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds. — Jeanette Winterson

A good many young fellows envy their boss because they think he makes the rules and can do as he pleases. As a matter of fact, he's the only man in the shop who can't. He's like the fellow on the tight-rope - there's plenty of scenery under him and lots of room around him, but he's got to keep his feet on the wire all the time and travel straight ahead. — George Horace Lorimer

They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row. — Bob Dylan

Our memories and the events of our lives are untidy things. We wish that we could file them away and shut the door, or we wish the opposite - that they would stay with us forever. You want to banish the remembrance of a tight hold on your ankle, a rope under a bed, the amber-colored medicine bottles of your father, the door your mother slams after a night of too much wine and jealousy. You want to keep close to you always that first sweet kiss, a maple leaf, that growing sense of yourself; you want to hold the sight of your dying father on that last boat trip, the calm you remember as your mother held you. Her voice. — Deb Caletti