Quotes About Anxiety

Readers find most flashbacks intolerable. Yet a lot of neophyte writers flash back like mad. Why? No one but the Creator of the Universe knows for sure, but there is a likely answer: they find the conflicts in the "now" of the story produce anxiety in themselves.

Sleep evaded him like an old friend who owed him money.

The enclosed space trapped her anxiety, amplifying her fear.

trickle of superstitious dread

When someone is always looking over their shoulder, they're more likely to trip.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.

Anxiety. Dissociation. The words came easily. We attach them to processes, they migrate to the people themselves, and we think: Now I understand. But we don't, and the words themselves interdict further attempts to do so. Maryanne

Jensen dwelled on thoughts of what the future would bring and he didn't like what he saw there.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do and dare but freedom from care and worry.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?

Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia

unbearable claustrophobia of the soul

and there she was, turning and smiling at me, at me! and there were way too many people in the theater because it was the seven o'clock show, way more people than I was comfortable with my generalized anxiety and hatred of crowded places and more people trickling in even after the show had started but I didn't care, it could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the Germans and all that mattered was her next to me in the dark, her arm beside mine.

Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?

Suddenly, I was struck by a horrible thought: is this what it's like? Is this the way it's going to be from now on?

my endless cramming felt a lot more like self destruction than any glue-sniffing I'd ever done;

When you're worried about something," said Henry abruptly, "have you ever tried thinking in a different language?

Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? Remember

consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances

the suddenness of the explosion had never left me, I was always looking for something to happen, always expecting it just out of the corner of my eye, certain configurations of people in public places could trigger it, a wartime urgency, someone cutting in front of me the wrong way or walking too fast at a particular angle was enough to throw me into tachycardia and trip-hammer panic, the kind that made me stumble for the nearest park bench;

Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way. "An outstanding feature of successful adaptation," writes George Vaillant, "is that it leaves the way open for future growth." Of course, Abraham Lincoln's capacity for growth would prove enormous.

She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties.

According to his habit, Theodore Roosevelt sought to harness anxiety through action.