“
You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
“
To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck--paddling, paddling, paddling.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
She had somehow given over the thinking to him, and in his absences her every action seemed automatically governed by what he would like, so that now she felt inadequate to match her intentions against his. Yet think she must; she knew at last the number on the dreadful door of fantasy, the threshold to the escape that was no escape; she knew that for her greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
“
He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
“
It is a fact—I say this from experience—that being severely anxious is depressing. Anxiety can impede your relationships, impair your performance, constrict your life, and limit your possibilities.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
social phobics are better at picking up on subtle social cues than other people are—but they tend to overinterpret anything that could be construed as a negative reaction.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
When the pain of leaving behind what we know outweighs the pain of embracing it, or when the power we face is overwhelming and neither flight nor fight will save us, there may be salvation in sitting still. And if salvation is impossible, then at least before perishing we may gain a clearer vision of where we are. By sitting still I do not mean the paralysis of dread, like that of a rabbit frozen beneath the dive of a hawk. I mean something like reverence, a respectful waiting, a deep attentiveness to forces much greater than our own.
”
”
Scott Russell Sanders
“
While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.
”
”
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
“
We are all adventurers here, I suppose, and wild doings in wild countries appeal to us as nothing else could do. It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilised world.
”
”
Robert Falcon Scott
“
I think it's fair to say most video games let players experience only eight emotions: anger, panic, dread, surprise, wonder, satisfaction, joy and disappointment. And some games only disappoint.
”
”
Scott Rogers (Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design)
“
Helplessness. If women were hope´s oldest companions, it was due to helplessness. Certainly women often exerciced dreadful power over a single hearth, but the world between hearths belonged to men.
”
”
R. Scott Bakker (The Warrior Prophet (The Prince of Nothing, #2))
“
for the existentialists, what generated anxiety was not the godlessness of the world, per se, but rather the freedom to choose between God and godlessness. Though freedom is something we actively seek, the freedom to choose generates anxiety. “When I behold my possibilities,” Kierkegaard wrote, “I experience that dread which is the dizziness of freedom, and my choice is made in fear and trembling.” Many people try to flee anxiety by fleeing choice. This helps explain the perverse-seeming appeal of authoritarian societies—the certainties of a rigid, choiceless society can be very reassuring—and why times of upheaval so often produce extremist leaders and movements: Hitler in Weimar Germany, Father Coughlin in Depression-era America, or Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Vladimir Putin in Russia today. But running from anxiety, Kierkegaard believed, was a mistake because anxiety was a “school” that taught people to come to terms with the human condition.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
A panic attack is interesting the way a broken leg or a kidney stone is interesting—a pain that you want to end.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
panic disorder with agoraphobia (DSM-V code 300.22): the condition, as Hippocrates described it, “usually attacks abroad, if a person is travelling a lonely road somewhere, and fear seizes him.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
(Researchers at the University of Iowa have for years been studying a woman, known in the literature as S.M., whose amygdala was destroyed by a rare disease—and who cannot, as a consequence, experience fear.)
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
Some social phobics find even positive attention to be aversive. Think of the young child who bursts into tears when guests sing “Happy Birthday” to her at a party—or of Elfriede Jelinek afraid to pick up her Nobel Prize. Social attention—even positive, supportive attention—activates the neurocircuitry of fear. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Calling positive attention to yourself can incite jealousy or generate new rivalries.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“
More than a few people, some of whom think they know me quite well, have remarked that they are struck that I, who can seem so even-keeled and imperturbable, would choose to write a book about anxiety. I smile gently while churning inside and thinking about what I’ve learned is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: “the need and ability”—as described in the self-help book Your Phobia—“to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside.”c
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters.
”
”
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
“
Individuals who rate high on the so-called Anxiety Sensitivity Index, or ASI, have a high degree of what's known as interoceptive awareness, meaning they are highly attuned to the inner workings on their bodies, to the beepings and bleatings, the blips and burps, of their physiologies; they are more conscious of their heart rate, blood pressure, digestive burblings, and so forth than other people are.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
But none of these treatments have fundamentally reduced the underlying anxiety that seems woven into my soul and hardwired into my body and that at times makes my life a misery. As the years pass, the hope of being cured of my anxiety has faded into a resigned desire to come to terms with it, to find some redemptive quality or mitigating benefit to my being, too often, a quivering, quaking, neurotic wreck.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
”
”
Francis Scott Key (The Star-Spangled Banner)
“
We all know perfectly well that the man who lives out his life as a consumer,” he writes in “The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry,” “a sexual partner, an ‘other-directed’ executive; who avoids boredom and anxiety by consuming tons of newsprint, miles of film, years of TV time; that such a man has somehow betrayed his destiny as a human being.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
Then Gerry heard through his helmet radio the two most dreaded words any crew never wanted to hear during a space mission; "Oh sh*t
”
”
Scott Mackay (Phytosphere)
“
The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.”)
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
No wonder I’m anxious: I’m like Woody Allen trapped in John Calvin.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the eyes of the tortured man
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories)
“
Haven't you heard, the Dread Scott decision has been overturned?"
"Not out here, baby," Warren replied, without a second's hesitation. "For that matter, not in Washington, either, or in Detroit, or at the Vatican, or at the Harvard Law School. People are objects and we use them. Out here, I like to think, the trappings surrounding the transaction are a little more attractive. But we're all the users.
”
”
Joyce Haber (The Users)
“
Hippocrates, the ancient Greek doctor, concluded in the fourth century B.C. that pathological anxiety was a straightforward biological and medical problem. “If you cut open the head [of a mentally ill individual],” Hippocrates wrote, “you will find the brain humid, full of sweat and smelling badly.” For Hippocrates, “body juices” were the cause of madness; a sudden flood of bile to the brain would produce anxiety.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
As Dostoyevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov, love in practice is a dreadful thing compared to the love in dreams. In real life, disagreeing about sensitive subjects can reveal pain, sorrow, and complexity.
”
”
Scott Sauls (Jesus Outside the Lines: A Way Forward for Those Who Are Tired of Taking Sides)
“
The prospect of sharing the rest of their lives held no dread for them. . . every word and movement between them carried their history and their future like background movement, shaping each moment even when they weren't aware of it.
”
”
Orson Scott Card (Enchantment)
“
Then the time he had left was going to be spent making his wife laugh. Because try though he might, he couldn’t shake the quiet dread that settled in the pit of his stomach that tonight was the last night of normalcy he had on this earth.
”
”
Jessica Scott (I'll Be Home For Christmas (Coming Home, #0.5))
“
The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture. Even as anxiety is experienced at a spiritual and psychological level, it is scientifically measurable at the molecular level and the physiological level. It is produced by nature and it is produced by nurture. It’s a psychological phenomenon and a sociological phenomenon. In computer terms, it’s both a hardware problem (I’m wired badly) and a software problem (I run faulty logic programs that make me think anxious thoughts). The origins of a temperament are many faceted; emotional dispositions that may seem to have a simple, single source—a bad gene, say, or a childhood trauma—may not.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those things that hurt, instruct.” It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.
”
”
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
“
For the social phobic, any kind of performance—musical, sporting, public speaking—can be terrifying because failure will reveal the weakness and inadequacy within. This in turn means constantly projecting an image that feels false—an image of confidence, competence, even perfection.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
You know I'm old in some ways--in others--well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-- and I dread responsibility. I don't want to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the summer.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
“
Is pathological anxiety a medical illness, as Hippocrates and Aristotle and modern pharmacologists would have it? Or is it a philosophical problem, as Plato and Spinoza and the cognitive-behavioral therapists would have it? Is it a psychological problem, a product of childhood trauma and sexual inhibition, as Freud and his acolytes would have it? Or is it a spiritual condition, as Søren Kierkegaard and his existentialist descendants claimed? Or, finally, is it—as W. H. Auden and David Riesman and Erich Fromm and Albert Camus and scores of modern commentators have declared—a cultural condition, a function of the times we live in and the structure of our society?
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
We Dûnyain, Cnaiür, are guides and trackers, students of the Logos, the Shortest Way. Of all the world, we alone have awakened from the dread slumber of custom. We alone.” He drew Cnaiür’s young hand to his lap. Thumbs probed the spaces between his calluses. How could bliss ache so? “Tell me, Chieftain-son, what do you desire before all things? What circumstance? Tell me, one who is awake, and I’ll show you the trail you must follow.” Cnai
”
”
R. Scott Bakker (The Darkness that Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing, #1))
“
There is one thing that ought to be taught in all the colleges,
Which is that people ought to be taught not to go around always making apologies.
I don't mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five dollars or step on your feet,
Because I think that is sort of sweet;
No, I object to one kind of apology alone,
Which is when people spend their time and yours apologizing for everything they own.
You go to their house for a meal,
And they apologize because the anchovies aren't caviar or the partridge is veal;
They apologize privately for the crudeness of the other guests,
And they apologize publicly for their wife's housekeeping or their husband's jests;
If they give you a book by Dickens they apologize because it isn't by Scott,
And if they take you to the theater, they apologize for the acting and the dialogue and the plot;
They contain more milk of human kindness than the most capacious diary can,
But if you are from out of town they apologize for everything local and if you are a foreigner they apologize for everything American.
I dread these apologizers even as I am depicting them,
I shudder as I think of the hours that must be spend in contradicting them,
Because you are very rude if you let them emerge from an argument victorious,
And when they say something of theirs is awful, it is your duty to convince them politely that it is magnificent and glorious,
And what particularly bores me with them,
Is that half the time you have to politely contradict them when you rudely agree with them,
So I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf,
Which is don't spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.
”
”
Ogden Nash
“
The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows—the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. It had sucked in the cheeks and the chest and the girth of arm and leg. It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one, suspended his small eyes in dark-bluish sacks, tweeked out his hairs, changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in others—callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a paintbox. Then through his body and his soul it had attacked his brain. It had sent him night-sweats and tears and unfounded dreads. It had split his intense normality into credulity and suspicion. Out of the coarse material of his enthusiasm it had cut dozens of meek but petulant obsessions; his energy was shrunk to the bad temper of a spoiled child, and for his will to power was substituted a fatuous puerile desire for a land of harps and canticles on earth.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“
Pastor Bates was a careful reader of theology, literature and history. He delighted especially in Gibbon's woeful treatment of Christians in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, perusing the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters routinely and with glee. He enjoyed brilliant heretics as only the confidently faithful can, seeing in Gibbon the inspired rantings of a cheerleader working himself into a frenzy for a losing team, getting especially rabid come the dreaded fourth quarter, when Jesus begins running up the score.
”
”
Scott M. Morris (The Total View of Taftly: A Novel)
“
And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharpwitted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD, The Concept of Anxiety (1844)
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
I am aware I may be here reminded of the necessity of rendering instruction agreeable to youth, and of Tasso's infusion of honey into the medicine prepared for a child; but an age in which children are taught the driest doctrines by the insinuating method of instructive games, has little reason to dread the consequences of study being rendered too serious or severe. The history of England is now reduced to a game at cards, the problems of mathematics to puzzles and riddles, and the doctrines of arithmetic may, we are assured, be sufficiently acquired by spending a few hours a-week at a new and complicated edition of the Royal Game of the Goose. There wants but one step further, and the Creed and Ten Commandments may be taught in the same manner, without the necessity of the grave face, deliberate tone of recital, and devout attention hitherto exacted from the well-governed childhood of this realm. It may in the mean time be subject to serious consideration, whether those who are accustomed only to acquire instruction through the medium of amusement, may not be brought to reject that which approaches under the aspect of study; whether those who learn history by the cards, may not be led to prefer the means to the end; and whether, were we to teach religion in the way of sport, our pupils might not thereby be gradually induced to make sport of their religion.
”
”
Walter Scott (Waverley)
“
Prithee, sir,” Ian said, controlling his impatience, “tell us what Dougal said.”
“He said he’d tell the world that he’s had his way with our Lina, even shared her with his men. Och, but I wanted to hang him from the tree outside me gate right then! In short, if Dougal canna have her, he’ll murder her reputation. So, in my fury, I’ve condemned my daughter to the sad future of an unmarried, unwanted woman. A future in which others will revile her, if Dougal has his say. Och, I’m a villain m’self to do such a vile thing. Mayhap I should think more on it, unless . . .”
He looked at Rob, who stared silently, blankly back at him.
After a glance at Ian, Andrew chose a point midway between the two men and said with a slight, self-deprecating shrug, “I dinna suppose ye’d . . . either o’ ye . . . be willing to marry the poor lassie and save her from such a dreadful fate.”
Ian saw the pit yawning before him, but he barely heeded it. Having saved Lina from one wretched fate, he did not want to watch her fall victim to another.
Impulsively, he said, “I . . . I’d be willing to give the idea some thought, sir.”
“Good lad,” Andrew said cheerfully. “I’ll let ye have her.
”
”
Amanda Scott (The Knight's Temptress (Lairds of the Loch, #2))
“
I will bestow them in good works and masses for the benefit of thy soul,” said Quentin.
“Name not that word again,” said Hayraddin, his countenance assuming a dreadful expression; “there is—there can be, there shall be—no such thing!—it is a dream of priestcraft.”
“Unhappy, most unhappy being! Think better! let me speed for a priest—these men will delay yet a little longer. I will bribe them to it,” said Quentin. “What canst thou expect, dying in such opinions, and impenitent?”
“To be resolved into the elements,” said the hardened atheist, pressing his fettered arms against his bosom; “my hope, trust, and expectation is that the mysterious frame of humanity shall melt into the general mass of nature, to be recompounded in the other forms with which she daily supplies those which daily disappear, and return under different forms—the watery particles to streams and showers, the earthy parts to enrich their mother earth, the airy portions to wanton in the breeze, and those of fire to supply the blaze of Aldebaran and his brethren.—In this faith have I lived, and I will die in it!—Hence! begone!—disturb me no farther!—I have spoken the last word that mortal ears shall listen to.
”
”
Walter Scott (Quentin Durward)
“
He approached his head to the dismal cavity, and heard, as at a great depth, the sound of a sullen and, as it seemed, subterranean stream. The sunless waves appeared murmuring for their victim. Death is dreadful at all ages; but in the first springtide of youth, with all the feelings of enjoyment afloat, and eager for gratification, to be snatched forcibly from the banquet to which the individual has but just sat down, is peculiarly appalling, even when the change comes in the ordinary course of nature. But to sit, like young Philipson, on the brink of the subterranean abyss, and ruminate in horrid doubt concerning the mode in which death was to be inflicted, was a situation which might break the spirit of the boldest; and the unfortunate captive was wholly unable to suppress the natural tears that flowed from his eyes in torrents, and which his bound arms did not permit him to wipe away. We have already noticed that, although a gallant young man in aught of danger which was to be faced and overcome by active exertion, the youth was strongly imaginative, and sensitive to a powerful extent to all those exaggerations which, in a situation of helpless uncertainty, fancy lends to distract the soul of him who must passively expect an approaching evil.
”
”
Walter Scott (Anne of Geierstein)
“
The Erl-King
O, who rides by night thro’ the woodland so wild?
It is the fond father embracing his child;
And close the boy nestles within his loved arm,
To hold himself fast, and to keep himself warm.
“O father, see yonder! see yonder!” he says;
“My boy, upon what doest thou fearfully gaze?” —
“O, ’tis the Erl-King with his crown and his shroud.”
“No, my son, it is but a dark wreath of the cloud.”
(Tke Erl-King speaks.)
“O come and go with me, thou loveliest child;
By many a gay sport shall thy time be beguiled;
My mother keeps for thee full many a fair toy,
And many a fine flower shall she pluck for my boy.”
“O, father, my father, and did you not hear
The Erl-King whisper so low in my ear?” —
“Be still, my heart’s darling — my child, be at ease;
It was but the wild blast as it sung thro’ the trees.”
Erl-King.
“O wilt thou go with me, thou loveliest boy?
My daughter shall tend thee with care and with joy;
She shall bear thee so lightly thro’ wet and thro’ wild,
And press thee, and kiss thee, and sing to my child.”
“O father, my father, and saw you not plain,
The Erl-King’s pale daughter glide past thro’ the rain?” —
“O yes, my loved treasure, I knew it full soon;
It was the grey willow that danced to the moon.”
Erl-King.
“O come and go with me, no longer delay,
Or else, silly child, I will drag thee away.” —
“O father! O father! now, now keep your hold,
The Erl-King has seized me — his grasp is so cold!”
Sore trembled the father; he spurr’d thro’ the wild, Clasping close to his bosom his shuddering child;
He reaches his dwelling in doubt and in dread,
But, clasp’d to his bosom, the infant was dead!
- From the German of Goethe, translation, 1797.
”
”
Walter Scott (Sir Walter Scott: Complete Works)
“
Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects’ self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
On the other hand, I can tell you, both from extensive research and from firsthand experience, that as convincing as the case made by Lane and his fellow Antipharma critics can be, the distress felt by some social phonics is real and intense. Are there some 'normally' shy people, not mentally ill or in need of psychiatric attention, who get swept up in the broad diagnostic category of social anxiety disorder, which has been swollen by the profit-seeking imperatives of the drug companies? Surely. But are there also socially anxious people who can legitimately benefit from medication and other forms of psychiatric treatment- who in some cases are saved by medication from alcoholism, despair, and suicide? I think there are.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
But even drugged to the gills, I remained filled with dread about the impending book tour, so I went also to a young but highly regarded Stanford-trained psychologist who specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. “First thing we’ve got to do,” she said in one of my early sessions with her, “is to get you off these drugs.” A few sessions later, she offered to take my Xanax from me and lock it in a drawer in her desk. She opened the drawer to show me the bottles deposited there by some of her other patients, holding one up and shaking it for effect. The drugs, she said, were a crutch that prevented me from truly experiencing and thereby confronting my anxiety; if I didn’t expose myself to the raw experience of anxiety, I would never learn that I could cope with it on my own.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
“
Studies of the DSM-II found that when two psychiatrists consulted the same patient, they gave the same DSM diagnosis only between 32 and 42 percent of the time.
”
”
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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The voyage of the Beagle, four years and nine months long, was a pivotal experience, enabling Darwin to develop his scientific work.k The months in port prior to the launch of the Beagle were, as Darwin would write in his old age, “the most miserable which I ever spent”—and that’s saying something, given the terrible physical suffering he would later endure. “I was out of spirits at the thought of leaving all my family and friends for so long a time, and the weather seemed to me inexpressibly gloomy,” he recalled. “I was also troubled with palpitations and pain about the heart, and like many a young ignorant man, especially one with a smattering of medical knowledge, was convinced I had heart disease.” He also suffered from faintness and tingling in his fingers. These are all symptoms of anxiety—and in particular of the hyperventilation associated with panic disorder.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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He installed a mirror outside his study window so he could see guests coming up the drive before they saw him, allowing him time to brace himself or to hide.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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If I seem unduly preoccupied with Darwin’s stomach, perhaps you can understand why. It seems both apt and ironic that the man responsible for launching the modern study of fear—and for identifying it as an emotion with concrete physiological, and especially gastrointestinal, effects—was himself so miserably afflicted by a nervous stomach.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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biomedical view, for its part, increasingly recognizes the power of things like meditation and traditional talk therapy to render concrete structural changes in brain physiology that are every bit as “real” as the changes wrought by pills or electroshock therapy. A study published by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2011 found that subjects who practiced meditation for an average of just twenty-seven minutes a day over a period of eight weeks produced visible changes in brain structure. Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects’ self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for similar reasons as psychiatric medications do, exerting their effects not just on some abstract concept of mind but concretely on our bodies, on the somatic correlates of our feelings. Recent research has shown that even old-fashioned talk therapy can have tangible, physical effects on the shape of our brains. Perhaps Kierkegaard was wrong to say that the man who has learned to be in anxiety has learned the most important, or the most existentially meaningful, thing—perhaps the man has only learned the right techniques for controlling his hyperactive amygdala.o
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Anxiety,” he wrote, “is apprehension about future suffering—the fearful anticipation of an unbearable catastrophe one is hopeless to prevent.” For Dr. W., the defining signature of anxiety, and what makes it more than a pure animal instinct, is its orientation toward the future.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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The result of a physiological fear response that has no legitimate object, or that is disproportionate to the size of the threat, can be pathological anxiety—an evolutionary impulse gone awry.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more in apprehension than in reality,
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside.”c
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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The very best meditators seem even to be able to suppress their startle response, a rudimentary physiological reaction to loud noises or other sudden stimuli that is mediated through the amygdala. (The strength of one’s startle response—whether measured in infancy or adulthood—has been shown to be highly correlated with the propensity to develop anxiety disorders and depression.)
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Physical states create psychic ones and not vice-versa. The James-Lange theory was later undermined by research on patients with spinal cord injuries that prevented them from receiving any somatic information from their viscera—people who literally could not feel muscle tension or stomach discomfort; people who were, in effect, brains without bodies—yet who still reported experiencing the unpleasant psychological sensations of dread or anxiety. This suggested that the James-Lange theory was, if not wholly wrong, at least incomplete. If patients unable to receive information about the state of their bodies can still experience anxiety, then maybe anxiety is primarily a mental state, one that doesn’t require input from the rest of the body.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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But various studies conducted since the early 1960s suggest that the James-Lange theory was not, after all, completely wrong. When researchers at Columbia gave study subjects an injection of adrenaline, the heart rate and breathing rate of all the subjects increased, and they all experienced an intensification of emotion—but the researchers could manipulate what emotion the subjects felt by changing the context. Those subjects given reason to feel positive emotions felt happy, while those given reason to feel negative emotions felt angry or anxious—and in every case they felt the respective emotion (whatever it happened to be) more powerfully than those subjects who had been given a placebo injection. The injection of adrenaline increased the intensity of emotion, but it did not determine what emotion that would be; the experimental context supplied that. This suggests that the autonomic systems of the body supply the mechanics of the emotion—but the mind’s interpretation of the outside environment supplies the valence.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Other recent research suggests that James and Lange were right in observing that physiological processes in the body are crucial to driving emotions and determining their intensity. For instance, a growing number of studies show that facial expressions can produce—rather than just reflect—the emotions associated with them. Smile and you will be happy; tremble, as James said, and you will be afraid.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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species that “fear rightly” increase their chances of survival. We anxious people are less likely to remove ourselves from the gene pool by, say, frolicking on the edge of cliffs or becoming fighter pilots.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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The moan of the wind grew loud, and it filled him with dread. For the rest of his life it would be for him the particular sound of anguish.
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N. Scott Momaday (House Made of Dawn)
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A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the eyes of the tortured man—a picture of himself walking through the crowded streets of the city with this appalling apparition stalking by his side.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Tales from the Jazz Age)
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The ten critical psychological elements and characteristics of resilience that Charney has identified are optimism, altruism, having a moral compass or set of beliefs that cannot be shattered, faith and spirituality, humor, having a role model, social supports, facing fear (or leaving one’s comfort zone), having a mission or meaning in life, and practice in meeting and overcoming challenges.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Tapping rubber was hazardous work, Soldado explained, rife with danger. There were índios bravos in the woods, not to mention aggressive, venomous snakes. And jaguars. One time he went to visit the station of a fellow rubber tapper and found it vacant. “His ladder was kicked over,” Soldado said in his low, deadpan voice. “His bucket was turned over. Latex was splashed on the ground like spilled milk.” Jaguar paw prints the size of a human hand led away into the forest, where he and his neighbors found the beast seated triumphantly on the body, the man’s throat ripped open, head devoured, stomach spilling innards. The animal bolted, and when the men tracked it down and finally shot it, they found their friend’s hair lodged in its teeth. “That jaguar came right up into the tree after him,” Soldado said, dread seeming to strangle his voice, as though it’d happened only yesterday.
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Scott Wallace (The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes)
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A report published by Britain’s Mental Health Foundation in 2009 concluded that a “culture of fear”—marked by a shaky economy and hyperbolic threat-mongering by politicians and the media—had produced “record levels of anxiety” in Great Britain.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Paul Tillich, a theologian who grew up in Weimar Germany, similarly explained the rise of Nazism as a response to anxiety. “First of all a feeling of fear or, more exactly, of indefinite anxiety was prevailing,” he writes of 1930s Germany. “Not only the economic and political, but also the cultural and religious, security seemed to be lost. There was nothing on which one could build; everything was without foundation. A catastrophic breakdown was expected every moment. Consequently, a longing for security was growing in everybody. A freedom that leads to fear and anxiety has lost its value; better authority with security than freedom with fear.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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If you do the same thing every time you schedule physical activity, you are likely to get bored and start to dread your workout appointments.
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Scott Sterling (Carb Cycling: Carb Cycling For Weight Loss: Flexible Dieting, Low Carb, Intermittent Fasting (Carb Cycling Diet, Carb Cycling Recipes, Cyclic Ketogenic, ... Gains, High Protein, Belly Fat, Ketogenic))
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The dead don’t die. Death is something a living person suffers through, once the dead are gone from here. The departed don’t know anything about dread, or longing, or the inevitable. They leave that to the survivors.
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Scott Kelly
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Dread is the first and the strongest types of fear. It is that tension, that waiting that comes when you know there is something to fear but you have not yet identified what it is. The fear that comes when you first realize that your spouse should have been home an hour ago; when you realize that a window you are sure you closed is now open, the curtains billowing, and you're alone in the house.
Terror only comes when you see the thing you're afraid of. The intruder is coming at you with a knife. The headlights coming toward you are clearly in your lane. The Klansmen have emerged from the bushes and one of them is holding a rope. This is when all the muscles of your body, except perhaps the sphincters, tauten and you stand rigid; or you scream; or you run. There is a frenzy to this moment, a climactic power-but it is the power of release, not the power of tension. And bad as it is, it is better than dread in this respect: Now, at lest, you know the face of the thing you fear. You know its borders, its dimensions. You know what to expect.
Horror is the weakest of all. After the fearful thing has happened, you see its remainder, its relics. The grisly, hacked-up corpse. Your emotions range from nausea to pity for the victim. And even your pity is tinged with revulsion and disgust; ultimately you reject the scene and deny its humanity; with repetition, horror loses its ability to move you and, to some degree, dehumanizes the victim and therefore dehumanizes you. As the sonderkommandos in the death camps learned, after you move enough naked murdered corpses, it stops making you want to weep or puke. You just do it. They've stopped being people to you.
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Orson Scott Card
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Social phobics worry that their interpersonal awkwardness or the physical manifestations of anxiety—their blushing and shaking and stammering and sweating—will somehow reveal them to be weak or incompetent. So they get nervous, and then they stammer or blush, which makes them more nervous, which makes them stammer and blush more, which propels them into a vicious cycle of increasing anxiety and deteriorating performance. Blushing
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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According to the National Institute of Mental Health, some forty million Americans, nearly one in seven of us, are suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder at any given time, accounting for 31 percent of the expenditures on mental health care in the United States.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Fear arises from a weakness of mind and therefore does not appertain to the use of reason. —BARUCH SPINOZA (CIRCA 1670)
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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But less so than I did before. Not long ago in my own therapy with Dr. W., we moved gingerly into “imaginal” exposure for my phobias.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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It is an irony of medical history that even as Freud’s later work would make him the progenitor of modern psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is generally premised on the idea that mental illness arises from unconscious psychological conflicts, his papers on cocaine make him one of the fathers of biological psychiatry, which is governed by the notion that mental distress is partly caused by a physical or chemical malfunction that can be treated with drugs.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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The young minister was a very good young man, and tried to do his duty; but he was dreadfully afraid of meeting old Mr. Scott, because he had been told that the old minister was very angry at being set aside, and would likely give him a sound drubbing, if he ever met him. One day the young minister was visiting the Crawfords in Markdale, when they suddenly heard old Mr. Scott's voice in the kitchen. The young minister turned pale as the dead, and implored Mrs. Crawford to hide him. But she couldn't get him out of the room, and all she could do was to hide him in the china closet. The young minister slipped into the china closet, and old Mr. Scott came into the room. He talked very nicely, and read, and prayed. They made very long prayers in those days, you know; and at the end of his prayer he said. 'Oh Lord, bless the poor young man hiding in the closet. Give him courage not to fear the face of man. Make him a burning and a shining light to this sadly abused congregation.
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L.M. Montgomery (The Anne Stories (Anne of Green Gables, #1-3, 5, 7-8) (Story Girl, #1-2))
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While there is substantial evidence that specific phobias—particularly those based on fears that would have been adaptive in the state of nature, like phobias of heights or snakes or rodents—are genetically transmittable, or “evolutionarily conserved,” isn’t it just as plausible, if not more so, to conclude that I learned to be fearful by watching my mother be fearful? Or that the generally unsettled nature of my childhood psychological environment—my mother’s constant anxious buzzing, my father’s alcoholic absence, the unhappy tumult of their marriage that would end in divorce—produced in me a comparably unsettled sensibility? Or that my mother’s paranoia and panic while pregnant with me produced such hormonal Sturm und Drang in the womb that I was doomed to be born nervous? Research suggests that mothers who suffer stress while pregnant are more likely to produce anxious children.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Some eighty years ago, Freud proposed that anxiety was “a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence.” Unlocking the mysteries of anxiety, he believed, would go far in helping us to unravel the mysteries of the mind: consciousness, the self, identity, intellect, imagination, creativity—not to mention pain, suffering, hope, and regret. To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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I smile gently while churning inside and thinking about what I’ve learned is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: “the need and ability”—as described in the self-help book Your Phobia—“to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside.”c
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Dread Lord,” I said. “With respect, I told you that a dragon his age shouldn’t be eating knights. Especially not knights in full plate armor.
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Scott G. Huggins (A Doctor to Dragons)
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It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
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She must not allow herself to forget the manner in which their marriage had begun. He had abducted her from London, bound her wrists, and even gagged her. And then, he had blackmailed her. “Callie?” Isabella’s worried voice cut through her madly spinning thoughts. “Are you well? You look dreadfully pale all of a sudden.” No, she was not well. She felt…dizzy. Sick. Overheated. Her skin was hot. The room seemed to spin. Her eyes could not find a safe place to fall. It was as if she stood still whilst everything and everyone else was whirling around. The edges of her vision went dark. Benny and Isabella seemed suddenly too far away. Their voices were hushed and strange. And then Callie was falling, falling, falling. Backward, into the abyss. Darkness claimed her. Sin paced the hall outside his wife’s apartments, trying to tamp down his rage and his worry. Callie had swooned. His strong, fierce, fiery wife had bloody well fainted. It still seemed impossible to believe. He had abducted her, bound her, dragged her through the countryside, done his best to frighten her, and she had remained stalwart.
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Scarlett Scott (Lady Ruthless (Notorious Ladies of London, #1))
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Nothing made him that way,” said Bean. “No matter what terrible things happened in his life, no matter what dreadful hungers rose up from his soul, he chose to act on those desires, he chose to do the things he did. He’s responsible for his own actions, and no one else. Not even those who saved his life.
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Orson Scott Card (Shadow of the Hegemon (Shadow, #2))
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complaints without hope, remorse without repentance, a dreadful sense of present agony, and a presentiment that it cannot cease or be diminished!
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Walter Scott (The Complete Novels of Sir Walter Scott: Waverly, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, The Pirate, Old Mortality, The Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, The Heart of Midlothian and many more (Illustrated))
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People are not disturbed by things but by the view they take of them
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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„Nu există cauză mai mare a melancoliei decât pierderea vremii”, scrie el, citându-l pe medicul arab Rhasis. Adunând înțelepciunea epicurienilor și stoicilor (și, din Orient, a budiștilor), el recomandă moderarea ambiției și acceptarea propriei căi spre fericire: „Dacă oamenii nu s-ar încumeta la mai mult decât pot duce ar avea o viață de mulțumire și, învățând să se cunoască pe ei înșiși, și-ar limita ambiția; ar afla că natura are îndeajuns fără a căuta lucruri neînsemnate și neprofitabile care nu aduc nimic altceva decât durere și împovărare. Așa cum trupul gras este mai supus bolilor, la fel sunt supuși cei bogați lucrurilor absurde și prostești, pierderilor multe și neplăcerilor potrivnice”.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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(If we can’t control something, there’s no value in fearing it, since the fear accomplishes nothing.)
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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fact—I say this from experience—that being severely anxious is depressing. Anxiety can impede your relationships, impair your performance, constrict your life, and limit your possibilities.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Also, an animal cannot fear death. Rats and marine snails are not abstractly aware of the prospect of a car accident, or a plane crash, or a terrorist attack, or nuclear annihilation—or of social rejection, or diminishment of status, or professional humiliation, or the inevitable loss of people we love, or the finitude of corporeal existence. This, along with our capacity to be consciously aware of the sensations of fear, and to cogitate about them, gives the human experience of anxiety an existential dimension that the “alarm response” of a marine snail utterly lacks. For Dr. W., this existential dimension is crucial.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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W., echoing Freud, says that while fear is produced by “real” threats from the world, anxiety is produced by threats from within our selves. Anxiety is, as Dr. W. puts it, “a signal that the usual defenses against unbearably painful views of the self are failing.” Rather than confronting the reality that your marriage is failing, or that your career has not panned out, or that you are declining into geriatric decrepitude, or that you are going to die—hard existential truths to reckon with—your mind sometimes instead produces distracting and defensive anxiety symptoms, transmuting psychic distress into panic attacks or free-floating general anxiety or developing phobias onto which you project your inner turmoil. Interestingly, a number of recent studies have found that at the moment an anxious patient begins to reckon consciously with a previously hidden psychic conflict, lifting it from the murk of the unconscious into the light of awareness, a slew of physiological measurements change markedly: blood pressure and heart rate drop, skin conductance decreases, levels of stress hormones in the blood decline. Chronic physical symptoms—backaches, stomachaches, headaches—often dissipate spontaneously as emotional troubles that had previously been “somaticized,” or converted into physical symptoms, get brought into conscious awareness.p But
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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In Dr. W.’s view, anxiety and panic symptoms serve as what he calls a “protective screen” (what Freud called a “neurotic defense”) against the searing pain associated with confronting loss or mortality or threats to one’s self-esteem (roughly what Freud called the ego). In some cases, the intense anxiety or panic symptoms patients experience are neurotic distractions from, or a way of coping with, negative self-images or feelings of inadequacy—what Dr. W. calls “self-wounds.” I find Dr.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Dr. W. believes, as Freud did, that anxiety could be an adaptation meant to shield the psyche from some other source of sadness or pain. I ask him why, if that’s the case, the anxiety often feels much more intense than the sadness.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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When man lost his faith in God and in reason, existentialists like Kierkegaard and Sartre believed, he found himself adrift in the universe and therefore adrift in anxiety. But for the existentialists, what generated anxiety was not the godlessness of the world, per se, but rather the freedom to choose between God and godlessness. Though freedom is something we actively seek, the freedom to choose generates anxiety. “When I behold my possibilities,” Kierkegaard wrote, “I experience that dread which is the dizziness of freedom, and my choice is made in fear and trembling.” Many
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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bitter fights over revisions for the DSM-V—which have included public denunciations of it by the chairmen of the task forces that produced the DSM-III and DSM-IV, respectively—suggest that psychiatric diagnosis may be more a matter of politics and marketing than either art or science. c
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Curiosity is crucial to success. What worked yesterday is out-of-date today and forgotten tomorrow—replaced by a new tool or technique we haven’t yet heard of. Consider that the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users, whereas television was in 50 million households within 13 years, the internet in 4, . . . and Angry Birds in 35 days. In the tech era, the pace is accelerating further: it took Microsoft Office 22 years to reach a billion users, but Gmail only 12, and Facebook 9. Trying to resist this tide of change will drown you. Successful people in the digital age are those who go to work every day, not dreading the next change, but asking, “What if we did it this way?” Adherence to process, or how we’ve always done it, is the Achilles’ heel of big firms and sepsis for careers. Be the gal who comes up with practical and bat-shit crazy ideas worth discussing and trying. Play offense: for every four things you’re asked to do, offer one deliverable or idea that was not asked for.
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Scott Galloway (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google)
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Studies of the DSM-II found that when two psychiatrists consulted the same patient, they gave the same DSM diagnosis only between 32 and 42 percent of the time. Rates of consistency have improved since then, but the diagnosis of many mental disorders remains, despite pretensions to the contrary, more art than science.b
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)