Time to Panic

Sunday, October 12, 2014 – Time to Panic

We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic. ~ Cullen Hightower

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

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

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

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 treat every situation as a life and death matter, you’ll die a lot of times. ~ Dean Smith

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

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

I refuse to be burdened by vague worries. If something wants to worry me, it will have to make itself clear. ~ Robert Brault

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

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

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. ~ Ernest Hemingway

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. ~ Mark Twain

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

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

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

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

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

It ain’t no use putting up your umbrella till it rains. ~ Alice Caldwell Rice

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

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers. ~ Lewis Thomas

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

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken. ~ Jack Kerouac

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most. ~ Bob Dylan

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

Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one’s stomach the separation from terra – these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

No human thing is of serious importance. ~ Plato, The Republic

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it. ~ Henry Adams