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Quotes About Terror

The sun has returned," Gandang croaked in religious terror. "It is the prophecy, the whole prophecy. The stone falcons have flown, the stars shine on the hills, and now the sun burns at midnight.
~ Wilbur Smith
I was struck with the consuming terror that the miser must feel for his hoard. It was so vulnerable.
~ Wilbur Smith
Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean, I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather. And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan. And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further, Showed me its feet, the feet of many men, And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.
~ Wilfred Owen
For Mercy has a human heart; Pity, a human face; And Love, the human form divine: And Peace the human dress. Songs of Innocence Cruelty has a human heart And jealousy a human face, Terror the human form divine, And secrecy the human dress. The human dress is forged iron, The human form a fiery forge, The human face a furnace seal'd, The human heart its hungry gorge. Songs of Experience - This poem was discovered posthumously.
~ William Blake
Cruelty has a human heart, And Jealousy a human face; Terror the human form divine, And Secresy the human dress. The human dress is forged iron, The human form a fiery forge, The human face a furnace sealed, The human heart its hungry gorge. - A DIVINE IMAGE
~ William Blake
If Jesus returned today we would have to crucify him quick in our own defense, to justify and preserve the civilization we have worked and suffered and died shrieking and cursing in rage and impotence and terror for two thousand years to create and perfect in mans own image; if Venus returned she would be a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards--
~ William Faulkner
She thought of them, woolly, shapeless; savage, petulant, spoiled, the flatulent monotony of their sheltered lives snatched up without warning by an incomprehensible moment of terror and fear of bodily annihilation at the very hands which symbolised by ordinary the licensed tranquillity of their lives.
~ William Faulkner
Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else.
~ William Finnegan
What greater comfort does time afford, than the objects of terror re-encountered, and their fraudulence exposed in the flash of reason?
~ William Gaddis
Neuromancer] is about the present. It's not really about an imagined future. It's a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired […] by the world in which we live.
~ William Gibson
She realized then that she was screaming. Not words or anything, just screaming.
~ William Gibson
They are frightened of the air.
~ William Golding
They knew very well why he hadn't: because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood.
~ William Golding
Apocalyptic literature was created to speak in a powerful way and with a dramatic seriousness that would match the sense of hopelessness and terror that can easily grip a generation in the midst of a profound crisis.
~ William J. Abraham
What the masses needed, he thought, were not only ideas—a few simple ideas, that is, that he could ceaselessly hammer through their skulls—but symbols that would win their faith, pageantry and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence and terror, which if successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans drawn to the strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak.
~ William L. Shirer
Thus was parliamentary democracy finally interred in Germany. Except for the arrests of the Communists and some of the Social Democratic deputies, it was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror. Parliament
~ William L. Shirer
He came to three conclusions which explained to him the success of the Social Democrats: They knew how to create a mass movement, without which any political party was useless; they had learned the art of propaganda among the masses; and, finally, they knew the value of using what he calls "spiritual and physical terror.
~ William L. Shirer
Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes—an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler.
~ William L. Shirer
I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down… This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty…
~ William L. Shirer
To sum up these three years: Personally, they have not been unhappy ones, though the shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparation for war has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never clears.
~ William L. Shirer
Maybe it was always that way and everyone has always been forever waking in a flustered confusion deep at night trying to believe that the awful sound they think woke them was nothing, or was the nervous bark of a dog, not the sound of violence or of a child weeping in the kind of desolation or terror that demands intervention
~ China Mieville
The one that goes: I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.
~ China Mieville
No one...can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.
~ Chris Kraus
They were people I knew, neighbors actually, acting like animals. They killed thousands of Tutsis. The machetes they used to cut people were the same as they used to cut crops and cows, they didn't care.
~ Christina Lamb