Anxiety Quotes

Isn’t everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you’re in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love— and to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria— and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame— and your wildebeest, everyone’s wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can’t bear the tension of walking around the world as if we’re always going to be walking around the world, because we’re not, because here comes a cancer, an illness a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.

~ Catherine Lacey

Never ignore the elephant in the room. That’s rude, play with it and introduce it.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

We were made to be distracted by life, by story.

~ Donald Miller

It was a myth you couldn't function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point of spasticity and cerebral palsy-pills were the key to being not only competent, but high-functioning.

~ Donna Tartt

When presented with a member of the opposite sex, some of us get numbers and some of us throw up.

~ Daria Snadowsky

I remember that I did feel, starting my mini-tour, the resident anxiety you develop when you know you've been too lucky; at any moment, maybe next Tuesday afternoon, I would be stricken with something unbearable.

~ Carol Shields

It's hard to imagine which is worse, living with fear, or living without it in a fantasyland were consequences don't exist.

~ Brooke Hauser

If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.

~ Franz Kafka

Before New York, the cracks were already there, but now they began to split open and gape, and the difference between how a thing or a place or a person appears and the reality becomes alarmingly visible, garish.

~ Elizabeth Winder

I didn't look over my shoulder; there wasn't a sound behind me on the pavement, but I knew he was coming slowly after me. The crawl of the skin up and down my back told me. Little needles of warning that gathered at the back of my skull told me. I'd never known until then that the jungles aren't so very far behind us, after all, and tails, and four feet instead of two. Where else did those symptoms come from?(Don't Wait Up For Me, Tonight)

~ Cornell Woolrich

I'm going to Hell in a basketWeaved in from my sins,Like wickerWith little Wiccan tiesAs if I'm a witchAccused.

~ Matthew Little

Mark felt eyes on him as tight as a sniper's aim.

~ Davis Bunn

We all want to go there something awful, but to stand there takes some grace.

~ Rich Mullins

Fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thinking that there is something to be avoided manifests something to avoid.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

(My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.)

~ Tina Fey

Panic is something that good operations officers plan for.

~ Tom Clancy

The mind that constantly wanders through the past is always a terrible mess.

~ Marwane Caber

Earthly goods deceive the human heart into believing that they give it security and freedom from worry. But in truth, they are what cause anxiety.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I want to feel calm and at ease. Like someone who lives in Half Moon Bay, California, and makes hummus from scratch. Instead, I feel like I'm a contestant on some awful supermarket game show where I've got sixty seconds to hurl my shopping cart down the aisles, piling it with as much as possible before the buzzer goes off.

~ Augusten Burroughs

When I penetrate into that house, if I ever do, it will be to go on turning, faster and faster, more and more convulsive, like a constipated dog, or one suffering from worms, overturning furniture, in the midst of my family all trying to embrace me at once, until by virtue of a supreme spasm I am catapulted in the opposite direction and gradually leave backwards, without having said good evening.

~ Samuel Beckett

Summer turns and marches away, fed up with being handled like a child. Like she’s a glass doll that might break at any minute. She hasn’t been a child since the day she was whipped into muteness. Anxiety might strangle her sometimes, but she’s not some baby needing to be coddled.

~ Laura Kreitzer

If a transaction in progress appeared threatened with failure, if a shipment of goods seemed to have gone astray, or if a debtor appeared unable to repay his debt, Kamaswami was never able to persuade Siddhartha that it was useful to speak words of worry or of anger, to have a wrinkled brow, or to sleep poorly.

~ Hermann Hesse

that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Once he traveled to a village to purchase a large rice harvest, but when he arrived the rice had already been sold to another tradesman. Nevertheless, Siddhartha remained in this village for several days; he arranged a feast for the peasants, distributed copper coins among their children, helped celebrate a marriage, and returned from his trip in the best of spirits.Kamaswami reproached him for not having returned home at once, saying he had wasted money and time.Siddhartha answered, Do not scold me, dear friend! Never has anything been achieved by scolding. If there are losses, let me bear them. I am very pleased with this journey I made the acquaintance of many different people, a Brahmin befriended me, children rode on my knees, peasants showed me their fields, and no one took me for a tradesman.How very lovely! Kamaswami cried out indignantly. But in fact a tradesman is just what you are! Or did you undertake this journey solely for your own pleasure?Certainly. Siddhartha laughed. Certainly I undertook the journey for my pleasure. Why else? I got to know new people and regions, enjoyed kindness and trust, found friendship. You see, dear friend, had I been Kamaswami, I'd have hurried home in bad spirits the moment I saw my purchase foiled, and indeed money and time would have been lost. But by staying on as I did, I had some agreeable days, learned things, and enjoyed pleasures, harming neither myself nor others with haste and bad spirits. And if ever I should return to this place, perhaps to buy some future harvest or for whatever other purpose, I shall be greeted happily and in friendship by friendly people and I shall praise myself for not having displayed haste and displeasure on my first visit. So be content, friend, and do not harm yourself by scolding! When the day arrives when you see that this Siddhartha is bringing you harm, just say the word and Siddhartha will be on his way. But until that day, let us be satisfied with each other.

~ Hermann Hesse

Out of the abundance of the imagination rises the beast called worry and it is soon joined by its partners, anxiety and stress. If you would care to do away with all three at once, simply change your imagination.

~ G.v. Richards

When I’ve been anxious, it was because I believed I couldn’t handle whatever came my way and instead tried to stop life from happening.

~ Elizabeth Fox Brewer

When anxiety comes knocking on your door, don't invite it in.

~ E'yen A. Gardner

Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?

~ Ann Patchett

Cath couldn't control whether she saw Levi on campus. But she could worry about it, and as long as she was worrying about it, it probably wasn't going to happen. Like some sort of anxiety vaccine. Like watching a pot to make sure it never boiled.

~ Rainbow Rowell

Her voice sounded much cooler than she felt. Inside, her internal organs were grinding themselves into nervous pulp. Her intestines were gone. Her kidneys were disintegrating. Her stomach was wringing itself out, yanking on her trachea.

~ Rainbow Rowell

Panic attacks are crazy beasts. They don’t care what you think you’re ready for. They don’t care what you want. They just take control, and then you suffer.

~ Catherine Gayle

He Himself makes the mortals anxious, and He Himself takes the anxiety away.

~ Guru Amar Das

I don't like this ideaIt is too much focuson something I am trying to forgetI am afraidthat this attention to detailwill only fuel my anxiety

~ Samantha Schutz

I know everything's alright but I want proof and the Buddhas and the Virgin Marys are there reminding me of the solemn pledge of faith in this harsh and stupid earth where we rage our so-called lives in a sea of worry, meat for Chicagos of Graves - right this minute my very father and my very brother lie side by side in mud in the North and I'm supposed to be smarter than they are - being quick I am dead.

~ Jack Kerouac

My landlord lives in the flat at the bottom of the stairs. I rent a studio flat from him, and live at the top of the staircase. There are two more flights of stairs and four more flats, but it’s me he is obsessed with.

~ Craig Stone

She went downstairs slowly and sat in front of the fire, rocking herself to and fro as she imagined all of the harm he might have suffered: she could see him enticed into a car by a stranger, she could see him knocked down by a lorry in the road, she could see him falling into the Thames and being carried away by the tide. It was her instinctive belief, however, that if she dwelled upon such scenes in sufficient detail she could prevent them from occurring: anxiety was, for her, a form of prayer. And then she spoke his name aloud, as if she were able to conjure him into existence.

~ Peter Ackroyd

You can tell a lot about a society by what it fears.

~ Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

But here we see the peace of God is not the absence of negative thoughts, it is the presence of God himself.

~ Hafiz

His terror became his companion. When it seemed to diminish, or grow easier to bear, he forced himself to remember the details of what he had said and done so that his fears returned, redoubled. His previous life, which had been without fear, he now dismissed as an illusion since he had come to believe that only in fear could the truth be found. When he woke from sleep without anxiety, he asked himself, What is wrong? What is missing? And then his door opened slowly, and a child put its head around and gazed at him: there are wheels, Ned thought, wheels within wheels. The curtains were now always closed, for the sun horrified him: he was reminded of a film he had seen some time before, and how the brightness of the noonday light had struck the water where a man, in danger of drowning, was struggling for his life.

~ Peter Ackroyd

Disquite SonnetI wish that I could find the words to tellYou were it hurts; nothing breaking my skinSlices whispering in my brain like hellLeaking suggestions of a morose grinCannot collect my thoughts long enough toShare them in an understandable waySo I lock my lips firmly and walk throughLife, searching for the perfect words to sayTrapped in my head, I seek to be let outGrasping connections with those who might knowWhat it feels like, alone in a crowd, doubtFilling my body with reasons to goFace to face, I might not find the right phraseBut I hope someone hears me anyway

~ Kathy Trithardt