A Quote by Yann Martel

The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other. — © Yann Martel
The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
I felt as if I were riding a pendulum. Just as I would swing into the abyss of hopelessness, the pendulum would swing back with some small goodness.
Our advanced and fashionable thinkers are, naturally, out on a wide swing of the pendulum, away from the previous swing of the pendulum.... They seem to have an un-argue-out-able position, as is the manner of sophists, but this is no guarantee that they are right.
Swing your swing. Not some idea of a swing. Not a swing you saw on TV. Not that swing you wish you had. No, swing your swing. Capable of greatness. Prized only by you. Perfect in it's imperfection. Swing your swing. I know, I did.
Time confined into blind caves or extended through tunnels, responds to the call of infinity, which teases with its promise of freedom. outside the body, time is a pair of compasses in the hands of eternity, but inside it is a pendulum, fastened to the heart. the heart takes its measure from the lengthening swing of the pendulum surveying what time is left. in its own rhythm time spreads itself wildly here and there and is crippled elsewhere. its unequally distributed weight wounds my body - that is how the particularities of my life are manifest.
I think that the pendulum will swing back to the other side one day.
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one's life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.
Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.
All right, the pendulum isn’t working. Sometimes you need an accelerant to help it.” – Death “Like gasoline?” – Nick “Yes, Nick. We’re going to set the book and your pendulum on fire and then use them ’cause we’re just that intelligent.” – Death
Perhaps America works like this: Presidencies swing, as reactions to each other, like a pendulum. My optimistic belief is it is how we keep our country in balance.
That all opposites—such as mass and energy, subject and object, life and death—are so much each other that they are perfectly inseparable, still strikes most of us as hard to believe. But this is only because we accept as real the boundary line between the opposites. It is, recall, the boundaries themselves which create the seeming existence of separate opposites. To put it plainly, to say that "ultimate reality is a unity of opposites" is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere.
I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.
I think baseball represents something closer to our experience. There's no clock in baseball; it's not over until it's over. It's like life in that there are prolonged periods of boredom and monotony, punctuated by intense moments of excitement and sometimes terror.
I’m not so sure that the conventional wisdom makes any sense. Yes, it might be technically easy to track people and all that. But in the long-term I’m optimistic that we’ll see the pendulum swing back in the other direction towards more privacy.
In terms of our democracy, we are sort of shrugging our shoulders and saying, oh dear, Guantánamo, that's so awful, that's so awful, but it's here. The pendulum usually swings from left to right and then right to left, but there are so many people in power who have taken the pendulum and just pinned it to the right that there is a fear that it's never going to swing back.
Symbols need not limit their scope to this pendulum swing of images.
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