Quotes About Paranoia

You can feel people staring; it's like heat that rises from the pavement during summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don't have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it's about you.

Shame is the affect which is the source of many complex and disturbing inner states: depression, alienation, self doubt, isolating loneliness, paranoid and schizoid phenomena, compulsive disorders, splitting of the self, perfectionism, a deep sense of inferiority, inadequacy or failure, the so-called borderline conditions and disorders of narcissism.

Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don't and is gaining an unfair advantage by it. For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it's wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

I trust no one, not even myself.

When you're waiting alone in the car...everyone outside automatically becomes a rapist...

I am sick of death and worst of all this sickness feeds on itself, the more afraid I am the more I am afraid the more I flee the more I am afraid the more I am haunted.

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've always felt un-trusted.

If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

When I was twelve and thirteen I used to get high at school every day—not because I liked it, it broke me out in cold sweats and panic—but because in the lower grades it was such a fabulous prestige to be thought a pothead, also because I was so expert at hiding the paranoiac flulike symptoms it gave me.

An external enemy is a wonderful thing for politicians to have," Rione said dryly. "They can excuse and justify a great many things by pointing to that enemy. But that doesn't mean external enemies are never real. What is that old saying? Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't really out to get you.

Paranoiac people suffer from megalomania, a need to dominate others, feelings of persecution, and a compulsion to falsify the past to fit their view of the world. Fascism, aggression, and anti-Semitism, then, were only symptoms of what ailed Nazi Germany.

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.

He was insane, he thought people were trying to destroy him, to suck out his guts, but, she noted, in the rare event that someone was trying to destroy you, to suck out your guts, insanity was a goodly metaphysics.

Don't be a little paranoid; worry about everything, or let it all go.

My dear Ninety-Nine,' Aria said, 'paranoia is our friend. Paranoia is our sunscreen, our condom, our duct tape. Paranoia tells the nine times out of ten, and the tenth time is when you weren't paranoid enough. We will never correctly anticipate what flavour of shit will hit the fan, but we can calculate the trajectory and attempt to avoid the splatter.

A paranoiac, like a poet, is born, not made.

McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties

If Finn Toller had in his nervous organisation anything resembling what in popular parlance is called a complex, such a complex consisted in the idea—almost, although not quite, a complete illusion—that people were continually wanting to bribe him to commit some murder.

I'm being followed so much I'm causing traffic jams.

Is she schizophrenic?" Joel asked. "I don't think so. For the most part, she understands reality and does not engage in false beliefs, with the exception of an occasional bout of paranoia. She does not hear voices. It is difficult to determine how she would act in social settings since she has not been released from here. But, no, I do not diagnose your mother as schizophrenic. Severely depressed, yes.

He felt like his victims were now crawling out of their graves and lining up, zombie-like, to come after him. He was living in a state of stunned disbelief, his thoughts a mush of rampant flashes, his debates raging over strategies that changed by the hour.

believing that whatever else she did, she would be surrounded by treachery and deceit.