Sunday, August 5, 2018 – Panic Attacks
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover. ~ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios – the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preemptive paranoia. ~ Adam Gopnik
Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr
Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee
When you suffer an attack of nerves you’re being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system? ~ Russell Hoban
So the pie isn’t perfect? Cut it into wedges. Stay in control, and never panic. ~ Martha Stewart
Someone may offer you a freshly caught whole large fish, like a salmon or striped bass. Don’t panic – take it! ~ Julia Child
Nothing prompts creativity like poverty, a feeling of hopelessness, and a bit of panic. ~ Catherine Tate
It only seems as if you are doing something when you’re worrying. ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery
You can never worry your way to enlightenment. ~ Terri Guillemets
The only hope I can see for the future depends on a wiser and braver use of the reason, not a panic flight from it. ~ F. L. Lucas
We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic. ~ Cullen Hightower
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint, can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. ~ Graham Greene
It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition. ~ Northrop Frye
They need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. ~ Jack Kerouac
If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you’ll die a lot of times. ~ Dean Smith
I refuse to be burdened by vague worries. If something wants to worry me it will have to make itself clear. ~ Robert Brault
I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~ Lily Tomlin
There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them. ~ Robert Benchley
It’s a funny thing that when a man hasn’t anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married. ~ Robert Frost
If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones. ~ Don Herold
Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which will never happen. ~ James Russell Lowell
If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today. ~ E. Joseph Cossman
If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you. ~ Calvin Coolidge
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. ~ Mark Twain
Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken. ~ Jack Kerouac
Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles. ~ Paul Fussell
Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. Make the bastard chase you. He will follow. ~ Johnny Depp
When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come. ~ Joseph Joubert
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due. ~ William Ralph Inge
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. ~ Soren Kierkegaard
We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives. ~ Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979
Anything scares me, anything scares anyone but really after all considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening. ~ Gertrude Stein
Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion. ~ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Fear is a darkroom where negatives develop. ~ Usman B. Asif
Fear can be headier than whiskey, once man has acquired a taste for it. ~ Donald Dowes
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ~ T. S. Eliot
The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them. ~ Alfred Hitchcock
We are largely the playthings of our fears. To one, fear of the dark; to another, of physical pain; to a third, of public ridicule; to a fourth, of poverty; to a fifth, of loneliness … for all of us, our particular creature waits in ambush. ~ Horace Walpole
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. ~ Bertrand Russell
There’s nothing I’m afraid of like scared people. ~ Robert Frost
American society is a sort of flat, freshwater pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it. ~ Henry Adams
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature. ~ Henry David Thoreau
No human thing is of serious importance. ~ Plato, The Republic
Just Above Sunset 