“I believe in tension and release, in that if you stay in the the same tone and mode and intensity for too long, it actually becomes monotonous.”

“When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.”

“To cry was to release all sorts of ugly little pressures and tensions. Like waking out of a long, dark dream to a sun-filled day.”

“Biologically, life is not maintenance or restoration of equilibrium but is essentially maintenance of disequilibria, as the doctrine of the organism as open system reveals. Reaching equilibrium means death and consequent decay. Psychologically, behaviour not only tends to release tensions but also builds up tensions; if this stops, the patient is a decaying mental corpse in the same way a living organism becomes a body in decay when tensions and forces keeping it from equilibrium have stopped.”

“Nothing stays the same, Gina, nothing works forever. If I don’t like it, that’s too bad. If you don’t like it, that’s still too bad.”

“Is someone different at age 18 or 60? I believe one stays the same.”

“I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it. This tension — tension is the only word for it — can be painted.”

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”

“Laughing and crying, you know it's the same release.”

“there’s too much tension in the world… what hope is there in the middle east if you and i can’t make peace.”