Tightrope Walker Quotes & Sayings

If you are going to learn, you need to forget what you know. - Pokey — Christopher Moore

It was America, after all. The sort of place where you should be allowed to walk as high as you wanted. But what if you were the one walking underneath? What if the tightrope walker really had fallen? It was quite possible that he could have killed not just himself, but a dozen people below. Recklessness and freedom - how did they become a cocktail? — Colum McCann

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

To have an inner life, to think, to juggle and leap, to become a tightrope walker in the world of ideas. To attack, to riposte, to refute, what a contest, what acclaim. To understand. The most generous word of all. Memory. To retain, a geyser of felicity. Intelligence. The agonizing poverty of my mind. Words and ideas flitting in and out like butterflies. My brain a dandelion seed blown in the wind. — Violette Leduc

Of the necessary equipment to invent really top-notch — Lemony Snicket

If you're frightened of damaging yourself, you increase the risk of doing just that. Consider the tightrope walker. Do you think he spares any thought for falling while he's walking the rope? No, he accepts the risk, and enjoys the thrill of braving the danger. If you spend your whole life being careful not to break anything, you'll get terribly bored, you know ... I can't think of anything more fun than being impulsive. — Mathias Malzieu

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground. — Walker Evans

S. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle // off my hand until I realized what it was / and began to grant it its sovereignty. — Matthea Harvey

If you had a friend who was a tightrope walker, and you were walking down a sidewalk, and he fell, that would be completely unacceptable. — Mitch Hedberg

Any man who takes Jesus Christ seriously becomes the target of the devil. Most church members do not give Satan enough trouble to arouse his opposition — Vance Havner

Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off). — J.R.R. Tolkien

Sometimes; I am caught in my building of emotions -
but my prison has, curiously, no bars -
and so I think, that escape, is possible at any time. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

The world had turned to madness, and it was tainted red. — C.M. Gray

My cousin just died. He was only 19. He got stung by a bee - the natural enemy of a tightrope walker. — Dan Rather

Like a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other, all I felt was the swaying of the precarious structure on which I stood, stricken with Terror at the realization that the ends of the balancing pole gleaming far out on the edges of my field of vision were no longer my guiding lights, as before, but malignant enticements to me to cast myself into the depths. — W.G. Sebald

Designing is a lot like a high-wire act - if the tightrope walker is only six inches off the ground, where's the excitement? — Douglas Wilson

Matilda said nothing. She simply sat there admiring the wonderful effect of her own handiwork. Mr Wormwood's fine crop of black hair was now a dirty silver, the colour this time of a tightrope-walker's tights that had not been washed for the entire circus season. — Roald Dahl

How often does the tightrope walker balance when walking across the tightrope? All the time! It is the same thing if you really want to have a successful career, and you want to have a happy home life. It is a matter of balance. — Brian Tracy

The qualities of an exceptional cook are akin to those of a successful tightrope walker: an abiding passion for the task, courage to go out on a limb and an impeccable sense of balance. — Bryan Q. Miller

When I was younger, I wanted to be a vet or a tightrope walker. But I have no sense of balance, and I can't bear animals dying, so I abandoned both ideas. — Georgia May Jagger

With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing. — Wassily Kandinsky

I think science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes its operating in midair. — Annie Dillard

Any tightrope walker can walk in a straight line and hold a cane at the same time. It's the balancing on the rope at those dizzying heights that they have to practise — Cecelia Ahern

In Murakami's short story 'The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day,' the main character is a writer. In describing the act of writing to a tightrope walker, he says, 'What a writer is *supposed* to do is observe and observe and observe again, and put off making judgments to the last possible moment.' I think that is a beautiful description of writing; it lets the world be, but also there is a moment, finally, of some kind of opinion. There is that moment, but to hold it off is a lovely and worthwhile goal. — Aimee Bender

A tightrope walker uncertain if he could make it to the other side probably would not. A race car driver wondering if he was taking a turn too fast was likely to lose control. If a man feared death, whether his own or the taking of another's, death would surely come calling. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Suffering is universal, and yet nobody teaches us how to cope with this truth of life. — Lisa Danylchuk

If one's life depends on doing something right, as in the case of the tightrope walker, one will practice on a much deeper level. — Kenny Werner

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows. — John Betjeman

The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall. — Augusten Burroughs

Be confident and not cocky. — Ashley Roberts