Quotes About Anxiety

But Harry is shaking. He can't help it—he's shaking. He can't believe what happened, and knows he shouldn't be embarrassed, but he is. He feels reduced, ridiculed. By shitheads.

If we could feel the things we fear ahead of time, we would be traumatized. So instead we venture out thinking we know how things will feel, but knowing nothing of how things will really feel.

As much as you obsess about all the things that can go wrong, it is inevitably something you can't imagine that ends up going wrong. Which justifies worrying about everything just to make sure it's all covered.

David Foster Wallace: I always fear that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me.

I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it's really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid.

DFW: Well, when you're meeting a whole lot of new people and having to do things, you're in—I'm in a constant low-level state of anxiety. Which produces adrenaline, and kind of shuts down—there's a difference between short-term, people-based anxiety. And sort of deep, existential, you know, fear, that you feel kind of all the way down to your butthole. And that, I, that's … that's what I'll have when I'm alone.

But young parents, educated middle-class ones anyway, are very jumpy these days, they get so much information from the media about all the things that could be wrong with their child - autism, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, allergies, obesity and so on - they're in a constant state of panic, watching their offspring like hawks for warning signs.

common phobias of heights and snakes can be cured relatively easily through short-term desensitization therapy.

He is blind... He can't fear what he doesn't see.

One of the things people generally admire about Van Gogh, even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it.

the anxiety of the unpredictable came only when you dealt with amateurs

They made me angry." "He got me upset." "It scared me." "World events are the cause of my anxiety." Actually, it's the exact opposite. The suppressed and repressed feelings seek an outlet and utilize the events as triggers and excuses to vent themselves. We are like pressure-cookers ready to release steam when the opportunity arises. Our triggers are set and ready to go off.

I have so little control over the act of writing that it's all I can do to remain conscious. Actual formal considerations are almost beyond my capacity. Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately you are always bad before you can get a little better.

I like everything, I replied, feeling misrepresented and only half amused right back. I don't hate the world. I'm scared of it. There's a difference.

It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.

I am a person who feels guilty for crimes I have not committed, or have not committed in years. The police search the train station for a serial rapist and I cover my face with a newspaper, wondering if maybe I did it in my sleep. The last thing I stole was an eight-track tape, but to this day I'm unable to enter a store without feeling like a shoplifter. It's all the anxiety with none of the free stuff.

Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they're not living in a democratic nation. People stand in line for two houres and they go over the edge.

My sister's the type who religiously watches the fear segments of her local Eyewitness News broadcasts, retaining nothing but the headline...Everything is dangerous all of the time, and if it's not yet been pulled off the shelves, then it's certainly under investigation -- so there.

If I'm walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I'll say, Hello. This because, if I don't say it, he or she might think that I'm anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I'd walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians. Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I'm more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people.

My conscience is crosswired with my sweat glands, but there's a short in the system and I break out over things I didn't do, which only makes me look more suspect.

Every time I see him could be the last, and the pressure I feel to make our conversation meaningful paralyzes me.

You're afraid of moths?" He nodded yes and winced a little. "But nobody's afraid of moths." "I am," he whispered, and he looked behind us, as if afraid that one might be listening.

For my fifty dollars, I want to leave the doctor's office in tears, but instead I walk out feeling like a hypochondriac

Would the teacher take note of my bulging eyes or comment on the thin strand of saliva hanging like fishing wire from the corner of my mouth?