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Quotes About Terror

he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.
~ Oscar Wilde
The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us
~ Oscar Wilde
It was useless. The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
~ Oscar Wilde
I'm bound to say I was not feeling entirely at my ease. There is something about the man that is calculated to strike terror into the stoutest heart. If ever there was a bloke at the very mention of whose name it would be excusable for people to tremble like aspens, that bloke is Sir Roderick Glossop. He has an enormous bald head, all the hair which ought to be on it seeming to have run into his eyebrows, and his eyes go through you like a couple of Death Rays.
~ P.G. Wodehouse
Fear envelops bones like new skin, envelops blood with night's skin, the earth moves beneath the soles of the feet - it is not your hair but the terror in your head, like long hair made of vertical nails, and what you see are not shattered streets, but rather, within you, your own crushed walls, your frustrated infinity, again the city comes crashing down: in your silence, only water's threat is heard, and in the water drowned horses gallop through your death.
~ Pablo Neruda
Language doesn't heal terror and if it brings us closer to imagining the sufferer's experience, this too doesn't necessarily make us feel greater compassion, but desire for further sensation. If we cannot articulate pain beyond inspiring in the listener a need for revenge, we only speak of and to the body.
~ Paisley Rekdal
Her gaze met his, her blue eyes filled with confusion and terror – and love. If Julian hadn't already been in love with her, that would have done it.
~ Pamela Clare
Someone once said to me: You never mention his looks. And it's true, I don't, I find it difficult. At that time, he was probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent, but that's the problem. How do you separate a tiger's beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah's elegance from the speed of the attack? Achilles was like that- the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.
~ Pat Barker
At the time, he was probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent, but that's the problem. How do you separate a tiger's beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah's elegance from the speed of its attack? Achilles was like that - the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.
~ Pat Barker
There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past. I am more fabulist than historian, but I will try to give you the insoluble, unedited terror of youth. I betray the integrity of my family's history by turning everything, even sadness, into romance. There is no romance in this story; there is only the story.
~ Pat Conroy
For the longest second imaginable, my mind was a black hole, as if my emotions had sucked away the rational part of my brain and left a cavernous skull full of nothing but fear. I can remember that terror now, and can visualize the scene as if in a photograph: emerald-green pasture, black-and-white Luke in full stride just where he ought to be, and a white bullet of doom streaking across the grass toward him.
~ Patricia B. McConnell
This lack of coverage had been convenient for the US and other Western governments because it enabled them to play down the extent to which the "war on terror" had failed so catastrophically in the years since 9/11. This failure is also masked by deceptions and self-deceptions on the part of governments.
~ Patrick Cockburn
The man now retrieved a linen cloth and stuffed it deep into Katherine's mouth. "Death," he whispered to her, "should be a quiet thing.
~ Dan Brown
La negación es parte fundamental del mecanismo de supervivencia humana. Sin ella, despertaríamos cada mañana aterrorizados, pensando en las innumerables formas en que podríamos morir. En cambio, nuestra mente bloquea esos miedos existenciales centrándose solo en las tensiones que puede afrontar, como llegar al trabajo a tiempo o pagar los impuestos.
~ Dan Brown
The true terror Jonah thought the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die but that we were all born that we were all once little babies like this unknowing and slowly reeling in the world gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn't exist and then through no fault of our own we had to.
~ Dan Chaon
All this natural misery," Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. "Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?
~ Dan Simmons
The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future - other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail - but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.
~ Dan Simmons
People scream and run for coyer.
~ Dan Simmons
Suddenly a scream froze her in her tracks. It
~ Dan Simmons
Every once in a while, the darkness was too much. It had been quite some time since I had woken up in the middle of the night and into an abyss of terror. But here I was. ... I couldn't soothe myself. ... But if that person had been accessible to me, I wouldn't have been in the state I was in to begin with. [pp. 195-196]
~ Dani Shapiro
Thus fear of danger is often thousand times more terrifying than danger itself when apparent to the eyes; and we find the burden of anxiety greater, by much, than the evil which we are anxious about;
~ Daniel Defoe
Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery?
~ Daniel Handler
After all, neither the French Revolution nor any of the other revolutions that occurred in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century had ushered in eras of glorious reform, let alone utopias. On the contrary, they had resulted in periods of terror and/or sustained counterrevolutionary repression.
~ Daniel Kalder
Define your times. Treasure your calling. Pray without ceasing. The terrors of the age are less than the grandeur of the Christ within you.
~ Calvin Miller