Quotes & Sayings About Tightrope Walking

I love, love, love live performance. It's like walking a tightrope without the net. You better be on point; you better be balanced. You better have rehearsed it and seen it from every vantage so you can do what you do best. I do love film because it's up front in your face, and hopefully you've got a great editor. — Sheryl Lee Ralph

In this day and time, with no competition you are really walking a tightrope. I mean you may think that no competition is good, but in reality no competition is really bad. — Jerry Lawler

We can't worry away our problems, but we can worry anxiety into our mind and body. Thought energy is powerful. It's not easy to do, but we serve our well-being best, when we face our struggles head on and accept difficulties that are beyond our control and trust that we can garner the support and strength we need to jump the hurdles. Life needn't feel like a walking on a tightrope of tension. True peace is the calm within the storm. — Jaeda DeWalt

You don't have to be someone who likes walking a tightrope across the Twin Towers to watch 'Man On Wire.' — Asif Kapadia

The French are never serious. They juggle with principles, make fun of difficulties and have been walking the tightrope of virtuosity for ten centuries. A singular nation, you know. — Maurice Dekobra

In psychoanalysis as in art, God resided in the details, the discovery of which required enormous patience, unyielding seriousness, and the skill of an acrobat - walking a tightrope over memory and speculation, instinct and theory, feeling and denial. — Judith Perelman Rossner

Later that year I happened to read a book by Dr. Neil Fiore that validated Bill's suspicion about being too careful. The book was called The Now Habit and was about overcoming procrastination. Dr. Fiore suggested that succeeding in a career is not unlike walking on a tightrope. The more success we achieve, the higher the rope. As we gain something, we have more to lose. Success causes a ravine beneath our careers that grows more deadly, creating a kind of fear of trying. He said the fear of letting people down is one of the primary reasons people procrastinate. — Donald Miller

Singing bel canto is like walking on a tightrope - especially with a larger voice like mine. — Sondra Radvanovsky

The thing about a cartoon is, you can do whatever you want. The tightrope that we are walking on 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama' is 'How do you continue to surprise the audience, but make them good surprises?' Not every surprise is good, but you want to continue jolting people. — Matt Groening

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

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving ... — John Updike

We were walking that tightrope between friends and something more ... — Melissa Aragon

The terrible thing about love is that it takes away your safety net, your balancing pole. Even the tightrope you walk upon will disappear beneath you, yet love expects you to keep walking anyway, arms outstretched, one foot after the other, on nothing more than air. — Christopher Barzak

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

When you're supposed to be working, work, and when you're supposed to be playing, play. It's a weird tightrope you're walking, but it's only when you get your priorities mixed up that things fall apart. — Gary Keller

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off ... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.' — Patricia MacLachlan

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

Sometimes, in a portrait, I go straight in with paint onto canvas ... Other than riding my bike up and down the hills around here, it is the most dangerous thing I do ... like tightrope-walking without a safety net! — David Cobley

[ Being naked on scene ] was like walking a tightrope without a net - with a giant fan blowing at you. — Joe Manganiello

We must be courageous but also reasonable. The world admires us for walking a tightrope without falling off. It asks us to keep our balance. — Lech Walesa

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. Intelligence is not trying. — Marilyn Vos Savant

The most ordinary everyday living is as delicate, as breath-taking, as difficult, takes as terrific physical and mental control and effort, as walking a tightrope. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Helen Keller, who lost both her sight and hearing in childhood but became a renowned activist and author, said that there is no such thing as a secure life. "It does not exist in nature ... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." Risk, then, is not just part of life. It is life. The place between your comfort zone and your dream is where life takes place. It's the high-anxiety zone, but it's also where you discover who you are. Karl Wallenda, patriarch of the legendary high-wire-walking family, nailed it when he said: "Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting. — Nick Vujicic

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood. — Milan Kundera

I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing
tightrope walking comes immediately to mind
but it's difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot. — Calvin Trillin

But Jakob had the gift of confession, could talk about how he wanted to touch her and be with her, with all the daring and athletic skill he brought to riding a unicycle or walking on a tightrope. He was small and compact and muscular, and also intellectually muscular, mentally something of an acrobat. Sometimes she felt that those intellectual acrobatics were a bit tiring; at those times she felt less as if they were feeling everything together, more as if she were simply his audience, someone to applaud his latest leap through the burning hoop of existentialism and his backflip onto the trampoline of nonconformity. But — Joe Hill

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

In the beginning you must subject yourself to the influence of nature. You must be able to walk firmly on the ground before you start walking on a tightrope. — Henri Matisse

Walking upright between the past and future, a tightrope walk across our times, became, for me, a way of living: trying to maintain a balance between the competing gravities of birth and death, hope and regret, sex and mortality, love and grief, all those opposites or nearly opposites that become, after a while, the rocks and hard places, synonymous forces between which we navigate, like salmon balanced in the current, damned some times if we do or don't. — Thomas Lynch

Thinking in words slows you down and actually decreases comprehension in much the same way as walking a tightrope too slowly makes one lose one's balance. — Bill Vaughan

The storytelling in a movie is in the cut; it's in the edit. It's not an actor's job, really. Your job is such a tiny little thing, and I love the feeling of juggling or tightrope walking. — Kerry Bishe

Science means constantly walking a tightrope between blind faith and curiosity; between expertise and creativity; between bias and openness; between experience and epiphany; between ambition and passion; and between arrogance and conviction - in short, between an old today and a new tomorrow. — Heinrich Rohrer

New York was something like a circus performer walking a tightrope an juggling at the same time ... It could barely maintain its position, but an movement would tip the whole balance. — John Lindsay

As far as vocal preparation goes, it's really an interesting thing for such a fragile instrument and using it properly is like walking a tightrope. I have learned not to do extensive warm-ups. It's really more of a cerebral mind-body connection Zen hippy thing, just knowing your body and figuring out if I do that then I will be able to speak tomorrow. — Davey Havok

You must walk that tightrope between accident and discipline. Accident by itself ... so what? Discipline by itself is boring. By walking that tightrope and putting down something on a canvascoming from your guts, you have a chance of making marks that will live longer than you. — Fritz Scholder

Doing theater is like walking a tightrope without a net. — Joe Manganiello

(L)ife is like walking between two tall buildings on a tightrope. For some, the rope is wide enough and the walk is easy. For others, it's narrow and hard and maybe there's a strong wind blowing through their days — Walter Dean Myers

Those who have accepted the facts of my life often find me admirable for surviving, even thriving, in spite of it all. You might think I would find that comforting, but I never have. It creates, or emphasizes, the distance between us. They see triumph over past obstacles, whereas I experience the continuing vulnerability of walking a tightrope. There is no point of completion, no sigh of relief, no victory dance in the end zone. — Marla Handy

Every working mom I know is constantly walking some kind of a tightrope of guilt. — Sarah Wayne Callies

But Hannah's friend didn't understand the volatile balancing act between art and sanity, that the act of creation was like walking a tightrope during an earthquake. She didn't understand Hannah's stupid need for validation, or that the size of the audience increased the stakes and multiplied the fear. She didn't understand that creativity was dangerous, that, yes, there were some people who could stand before a canvas, paint a sunset that would bring the world to its knees, and return to their loved ones as a complete person who didn't hurt, didn't cry, didn't spill blood to appease the host of fickle muses. But Hannah did. Hannah's best ideas - sometimes her only ideas - were buried beneath the skin. — Jake Vander Ark

It's like I'd been walking a tightrope with a big safety net underneath me, but I never really thought about the net until someone took it away. And then every single step scared me to death. — Margaret Peterson Haddix