Quotes About Terror

There is an underbelly of terror to all life. It is suffering, it is hurt. Deep within all of us are intense fears that have left few of us whole. Life's terrors haunt us, attack us, leave ugly cuts. To buffer ourselves, we dwell on beauty, we collect things, we fall in love, we desperately try to make something lasting in our lives. We take beauty as the only worthwhile thing in this existence, but it cannot veil cursing, violence, randomness, and injustice.

Doug Winter wrote in his 1982 anthology Prime Evil

Children are only terrified of invisible ghosts. But some human beings are just as terrible as these creatures.

The full experience of something beautiful or terrifying cannot be expressed in words.

Strange things have been spoken, why does your heart speak strangely? The dream was marvellous but the terror was great; we must treasure the dream whatever the terror.

I need magic. I want spells and incantations. I want someone to help me. I can't do this by myself. This is how a criminal feels when she has pleaded guilty and stands all alone, when the judgment has been given and the gavel dropped down. This is how she feels, full of self-loathing and a smothering terror, unable to breathe, choking on her very life.

The power has been passed from palm to palm here for three years now. And the many death-bearing hands of women have a name here: Kali, the eternal. Kali, who destroys to bring fresh growth. Kali, intoxicated by the blood of the slain. Kali, who puts out the stars with her thumb and forefinger. Terror is her name and death is her breathing in and out. Her arrival in this world has been long expected.

The two armies which but recently attacked you with audacity are fleeing before you in terror; the wicked men who laughed at your misery and rejoiced at the thought of the triumphs of your enemies are confounded and trembling.

'Twas my object to carry terror and destruction wherever we went.

She decided that day to study Russian, the language of violence, terror, and absurdity. She knew she would never be bored.

The central premise behind Oslo was that if Arafat were given enough legitimacy, territory, weapons and money, he would use his power to fight terror and make peace with Israel.

Annie looked into his eyes with their blood-crazed whites and for the first time in her life knew how one might come to believe in the devil.

Halloween wraps fear in innocence, As though it were a slightly sour sweet. Let terror, then, be turned into a treat...

In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.

Rulers who represent only a minority have to invent civilization in order not to perish. The delegates of a majority, on the other hand, can be vulgar, rude, cruel, with impunity. The greater the majority that supports him, the less cautious the ruler is, the less tolerant, the less respectful of human diversity. When rulers deem themselves governors of all humanity, terror is near.

What most likely is upon us is not a revolutionary terror, but a counter-revolutionary terror implemented by disgusted revolutionaries.

They were terrified out of their wits, the devil knows why: they take you for a brigand and a spy. And the prosecutor has died of fright; the funeral is to-morrow. Won't you be there?

True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected, but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces.

George W. Bush, the son, talked of a war on terror, then brought precisely that to the Middle East, lying to the world about the pretexts for war while causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

In that atrocious second I understood that desire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual idea of hell and its horror.

The "world," after all, was still a place of bottomless horror.

Just when I was beginning to forget, that bird of ill-omen came flapping my way, to rip open with its beak the wounds of memory. All at once shame over the past and the recollection of sin unfolded themselves before my eyes and, seized by a terror so great it made me want to shriek, I could not sit still a moment longer. "How about a drink?" I asked.