Sheer Terror Quotes

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

In a moment of sheer terror, I realized I couldn't feel my brain. It was there just a minute ago. Maybe I really was dead. "Do I look dead to you?

It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.

We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.

Man had created God in his own image, not the other way around. He had done it through sheer terror, and who could blame him? Unfortunately he had made too good a job. The god he had invented was just as cruel and careless as man himself. Not a deity to whom one should seriously address a prayer.

Ah, my old friend, anxiety-throwing itself into the blender with sheer terror and embarrassment.

There's a moment of sheer terror when I discover Paul's apartment overlooks the park

Himoto had once called war ninety percent boredom so extreme you'd do anything for relief and ten percent sheer, unrelenting terror.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism.

It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it." "For sheer terror?" I remember asking. He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. "For dreadful — dreadfulness!" "Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.

There is an emotion that operates on a register above sheer terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength—a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak.

...library terror - that feeling of being hopelessly overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of available books...

Ever since childhood, when I found out that the ultimate fate for all humans was death, sheer terror and morbid curiosity had been fighting for supremacy in my mind.

Sheer terror has no voice.

There is the old pilot quip that their jobs are “hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Like many other Catholics, Esmond had a crust of Catholic complacency over a thin layer of doubt, which spanned a deep morass of sheer terror.

Mama, Ollie taught me how to play ‘Let It Go’ on guitar,” Crista piped up in a muffled voice as she pulled her pajama shirt over her head. Aunt Linda shot me a look that was half sheer terror, half witch hunt. The face of someone at peak Frozen saturation. I didn’t, I swear, I mouthed, making chopping motions by my neck.

I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can.

the reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. the basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us

Then you may have sheer clotted nonsense; I once chased Julius Caesar all over London to get his recipe for curried eggs.

war was long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

life of a professional spy as one of constant travel and mind-numbing boredom broken by interludes of sheer terror.

It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.

Keto wasn’t just any dog. He was vicious, trained to be a killing machine when called on. Pack had invested much time and effort into training Keto. He hadn’t barked before attacking the murderer. It was close to a stealth attack. Probably flew through the air the final eight or ten feet. Mouth open wide, upper and lower incisors ready to rip the prey apart painfully, efficiently.  And the killer’s screams weren’t just any screams. They were shrieks, the kind arising from sheer terror. Knowing your means of defense are dead, as dead as you soon will be.  

Lord Henry laughed. "The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

I've about had it with flying," he grumbled, switching off the plane's systems, "It's ninety-nine percent boring and one percent sheer terror.

And then when you wake up, there's a moment of sheer terror in your body. Every bit of softness leaves your muscles, and you greet the day like it was the apocalypse.

There is the old pilot quip that their jobs are “hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” It’s the same in investing.

It preyed on human desire and it paid off by sheer terror.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.

Then we looked back and saw where the clear line of Dracula’s castle cut the sky; for we were so deep under the hill whereon it was set that the angle of perspective of the Carpathian mountains was far below it. We saw it in all its grandeur, perched a thousand feet on the summit of a sheer precipice, and with seemingly a great gap between it and the steep of the adjacent mountain on any side. There was something wild and uncanny about the place. We could hear the distant howling of wolves. They were far off, but the sound, even though coming muffled through the deadening snowfall, was full of terror.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.

One should nevertheless not fall into the old stereotype of an organization that kept its place in Spanish society by sheer terror. Certainly the Inquisition used torture and executed some of its victims, but so did nearly all legal systems in Europe at the time, and it is possible to argue that the Spanish Inquisition was less bloodthirsty than most – as we will see, it showed a healthy scepticism about witches and put a stop to witch-persecution where it could

It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms—like 'Stalinism,' say—just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat. After the terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who’d escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiance! That night at the opera comes back to me even now… the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood. I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I’d never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

The stranger slowly pulled off the gargoyle mask to reveal himself, and Lilac was horrified when she saw his face. His wicked black eyes pierced her soul in a manner so familiar to her that, in the past, it would have caused her heart to be seized by sheer terror.

What if I were to tell you the game’s been rigged, that I was destined to win from the very beginning? To be clear: Winning is subjective. For the record: I win by losing, by avoiding the confusion of possibility, the sheer terror of potential. To make a long story short: I win when I lose and I lose by running, by pushing you away.

It might surprise you to discover that some of the superstars you see on the big screen or those entertaining thousands in stadiums, have moments of sheer terror before they go on stage. They also compare themselves to others in their field and worry that they will not live up to the expectations of those who are supporting and depending on them.

Flying involves endless hours of sheer boredom, punctuated by moments of stark terror.

It seems that such notions were the product of folklore, vivid dreams, and sheer confabulation—and confirmed by confessions elicited under the most gruesome torture

I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.

One of these days lightning is going to fill the sky from the rising of the sun to its setting, and there is going to appear in the clouds one like a son of man with his mighty angels in flaming fire. And we will see him clearly. And whether from terror or sheer excitement, we will tremble and we will wonder how, how we ever lived so long with such a domesticated, harmless Christ.

Somebody said combat is 99 percent sheer boredom and 1 percent pure terror. They weren’t an MP in Iraq. On the roads I was scared all the time. Maybe not pure terror. That’s for when the IED actually goes off. But a kind of low-grade terror that mixes with the boredom. So it’s 50 percent boredom and 49 percent normal terror, which is a general feeling that you might die at any second and that everybody in this country wants to kill you. Then, of course, there’s the 1 percent pure terror, when your heart rate skyrockets and your vision closes in and your hands are white and your body is humming. You can’t think. You’re just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do. And then you go back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, and you go back to thinking.

Since it morphed from “battle fatigue” or “shell shock” into a formal psychiatric illness, combat PTSD has been framed as a result of the sheer terror of being under attack, of someone trying to kill you and those around you. As we’ve seen, it is an illness where fear conditioning is overgeneralized and pathological, an amygdala grown large, hyperreactive, and convinced that you are never safe. But consider drone pilots—soldiers who sit in control rooms in the United States, directing drones on the other side of the planet. They are not in danger. Yet their rates of PTSD are just as high as those of soldiers actually “in” war. Why? Drone pilots do something horrifying and fascinating, a type of close-range, intimate killing like nothing in history, using imaging technology of extraordinary quality. A target is identified, and a drone might be positioned invisibly high in the sky over the person’s house for weeks, the drone operators always watching, waiting, say, for a gathering of targets in the house. You watch the target coming and going, eating dinner, taking a nap on his deck, playing with his kids. And then comes the command to fire, to release your Hellfire missile at supersonic speed.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.

Ego or fixed identity doesn’t just mean we have a fixed idea about ourselves. It also means that we have a fixed idea about everything we perceive. I have a fixed idea about you; you have a fixed idea about me. And once there is that feeling of separation, it gives rise to strong emotions. In Buddhism, strong emotions like anger, craving, pride, and jealousy are known as kleshas—conflicting emotions that cloud the mind. The kleshas are our vehicle for escaping groundlessness, and therefore every time we give in to them, our preexisting habits are reinforced. In Buddhism, going around and around, recycling the same patterns, is called samsara. And samsara equals pain. We keep trying to get away from the fundamental ambiguity of being human, and we can’t. We can’t escape it any more than we can escape change, any more than we can escape death. The cause of our suffering is our reaction to the reality of no escape: ego clinging and all the trouble that stems from it, all the things that make it difficult for us to be comfortable in our own skin and get along with one another. If the way to deal with those feelings is to stay present with them without fueling the story line, then it begs the question: How do we get in touch with the fundamental ambiguity of being human in the first place? In fact, it’s not difficult, because underlying uneasiness is usually present in our lives. It’s pretty easy to recognize but not so easy to interrupt. We may experience this uneasiness as anything from slight edginess to sheer terror. Anxiety makes us feel vulnerable, which we generally don’t like. Vulnerability comes in many guises. We may feel off balance, as if we don’t know what’s going on, don’t have a handle on things. We may feel lonely or depressed or angry. Most of us want to avoid emotions that make us feel vulnerable, so we’ll do almost anything to get away from them. But if, instead of thinking of these feelings as bad, we could think of them as road signs or barometers that tell us we’re in touch with groundlessness, then we would see the feelings for what they really are: the gateway to liberation, an open doorway to freedom from suffering, the path to our deepest well-being and joy. We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased. So the challenge is to notice the emotional tug of shenpa when it arises and to stay with it for one and a half minutes without the story line. Can you do this once a day, or many times throughout the day, as the feeling arises? This is the challenge. This is the process of unmasking, letting go, opening the mind and heart.

You can't remain in a state of sheer panic and terror indefinitely, and both had run their course. Ever since, I've thought that must be why we cry: our bodies are coping with something our minds and hearts can't absorb by themselves.

Lord Henry laughed. “The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism.

There’s nothing like the first time ten thousand honeybees surround you. Not that a second time is any more charming, but it’s the sheer terror that grips one’s heart when such an encounter takes place for the first time. Words do not do justice to the experience as you can never convey to someone how nerve-racking it is to stand next to ten thousand honeybees looking to sting you. Yet, despite the sheer terror you experience, your heart threatening to jump out of your chest, you feel compelled to take a closer look;

Holy terror is rather fear of oneself, fear of oneself and in the world. It is also fear of punishment. Without this necessary fear, charisma is not possible. To live without this high fear is to be terror oneself, a monster. And yet to be monstrous has become our ambition, for it is our ambition to live without fear. All holy terror is gone. The interdicts have no power. This is the real death of God and of our own humanity. It is out of sheer terror that charisma develops. We live in terror, but never in holy terror.

Imagine all of L.A. filled with windup men wandering empty-headed and waiting for orders and directions and purpose. That’s L.A. in a nutshell. A city of driven creatures, but no one is a hundred percent sure what they’re driven toward. Wealth. Fame. Power. Love. Revenge. These are all the obvious end points for the citizens of a spectral city, but none of them quite encompass a final goal. That’s more fragile. Something that slips away like smoke the moment it’s in your hands. It’s a moonshine cocktail of desperation and desire, the certainty that you can find perfection through sheer willpower and the cold terror that if you do reach the goal it will have twisted into something new. A new fevered need born of the search for this one. Searching for the next goal will breed another. And on and on. L.A. and Kill City full of Pinocchios with whirring gears for brains, all wanting to be real boys but sunk in the certainty that they’ll never become anything because they’re nothing. They came from nothing and are headed for a further and harder nothing.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. And as for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.

Gary Moore is another legendary figure of sheer violence. In prison, Gary has spent most of his adult life inside one jail or another. When, on the odd occasion, he does get out of prison, it doesn’t take him long to go on a murderous campaign of total terror. Gary has been charged and stood trial for some three or four different murders.

He was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men, yet he spoke of coming on the clouds of heaven with the glory of God. He was so austere that evil spirits and demons cried out in terror at his coming, yet he was so genial and winsome and approachable that the children loved to play with him, and the little ones nestled in his arms. His presence at the innocent gaiety of a village wedding was like the presence of sunshine. No one was half so compassionate to sinners, yet no one ever spoke such red hot scorching words about sin. A bruised reed he would not break, his whole life was love, yet on one occasion he demanded of the Pharisees how they ever expected to escape the damnation of Hell. He was a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions, yet for sheer stark realism He has all of our stark realists soundly beaten. He was a servant of all, washing the disciples feet, yet masterfully He strode into the temple, and the hucksters and moneychangers fell over one another to get away from the mad rush and the fire they saw blazing in His eyes. He saved others, yet at the last Himself He did not save. There is nothing in history like the union of contrasts which confronts us in the gospels. The mystery of Jesus is the mystery of divine personality.

Galaxies are as mothers, every star a child, every planet a grandchild. The eyes many. The sheer size of the universe offer a chilling stream of terror down the spines of those who truly fathom. Most, unaware how terrified they should be. Astronomers are very rarely barbaric. Just as gravity keeps us grounded, those few enlightened with ability to grasp (even a little) the awes (and threats) of our cosmos, unwilling to obtain the strengths and powers necessary to get our affairs in order. Too few world leaders as terrified as reality demands, and whatever could be said of the majority. Without full realization of the skies can they never hope to know the true meaning of horror and hopelessness [even with all its beauty]. To the strongest, wisest, most heartful. To the bravest, most fearless [warrior philosopher kings]. May (the god of) luck be with us.

Elizabeth,” he interrupted in a husky whisper, and suddenly his eyes were smoldering as he held out his hand, sensing victory before Elizabeth ever realized she was defeated. “Come here.” Of its own accord Elizabeth’s hand lifted, his fingers closed around it, and suddenly she was hauled forward; arms like steel bands encircled her, and a warm, searching mouth descended on hers. Parted lips, tender and insistent, stroked hers, molding and shaping them to fit his, and then the kiss deepened abruptly while hands tightened on her back and shoulders, caressing and possessive. A soft moan interrupted the silence, but Elizabeth didn’t know the sound came from her; she was reaching up, her hands grasping broad shoulders, clinging to them for support in a world that had suddenly become dark and exquisitely sensual, where nothing mattered except the body and mouth locked hungrily to hers. When he finally dragged his mouth from hers Ian kept his arms around her, and Elizabeth laid her cheek against his crisp white shirt, feeling his lips brush the hair atop her head. “That was an even bigger mistake than I feared it would be,” he said, and then he added almost absently, “God help us both.” Strangely, it was that last remark that frightened Elizabeth back to her senses. The fact that he thought they’d gone so far that they’d both need some sort of divine assistance hit her like a bucket of ice water. She pulled out of his arms and began smoothing creases from her skirt. When she felt able, she lifted her face to his and said with a poise born of sheer terror, “None of this should have happened. However, if we both return to the ballroom and contrive to spend time with others, perhaps no one will think we were together out here. Good-bye, Mr. Thornton.” “Good night, Miss Cameron.” Elizabeth was too desperate to escape to remark on his gentle emphasis on the words “good night,” which he’d deliberately used instead of “good-bye,” nor did she notice at the time that he didn’t seem to realize she was correctly Lady Cameron, not Miss Cameron.

It is over. The long Occupation that created Israeli generations born in Israel and not knowing another ‘homeland’ created at the same time generations of Palestinians strange to Palestine; born in exile and knowing nothing of the homeland except stories and news. Generations who posses an intimate knowledge of the streets of faraway exiles, but not of their own country. Generations that never planted or built or made their small human mistakes in their own country. Generations that never saw our grandmothers quarter in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his headdress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took of their clothes and bathed, naked, in the pool of ‘Ein al-Deir. The Occupation has created generations without a place whose colours, smell, and sounds they can remember; a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles. There is no childhood bed for them to remember, a bed on which they forgot a soft cloth doll, or whose white pillows - once the adults had gone out of an evening were their weapons in a battle that had them shirking with delight. This is it. The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved; distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror. The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine. I have always believed that it is in the interests of an occupation, any occupation, that the homeland should be transformed in the memory of its people into a bouquet of ’symbols’. Merely symbols, they will not allow us to develop our village so that it shares features with the city, or to move without city into a contemporary space. The Occupation forced us to remain with the old. That is its crime. It did not deprive us of the clay ovens of yesterday, but of the mystery of what we could invent tomorrow.

The deeper the Whites moved into the steppe, the more they resorted to terror against a hostile population. Their Ice March left a trail of blood. It was perhaps unavoidable, given the Volunteers' desperate need for food and the reluctance of the peasants to give it to them. The Whites were stranded in a Red peasant sea. But there was also an element of sheer class war and revenge in their violence, as in so many acts of the White Terror, which was a mirror image of the class resentment and hatred that drove the Red Terror. Terror lay at the heart of both regimes.

Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art; it draws the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void. Artaud’s oeuvre experiences its own absence in madness, but that experience, the fresh courage of that ordeal, all those words hurled against a fundamental absence of language, all that space of physical suffering and terror which surounds or rather coincides with the void—that is the work of art itself: the sheer cliff over the abyss of the work’s absence.

William Blake said, “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.” When we send our grief into exile, we simultaneously condemn our lives to an absence of joy. This gray-sky existence is intolerable to the soul. It shouts at us daily to do something about it, but in the absence of meaningful ways to respond to sorrow or from the sheer terror of entering the terrain of grief naked, we turn instead to distraction, addiction, or anesthesia. On my visit to Africa, I remarked to one woman that she had a lot of joy. Her response stunned me: “That’s because I cry a lot.” This was a very un-American sentiment. She didn’t say it was because she shopped a lot, worked a lot, or kept herself busy. Here was Blake in Burkina Faso—sorrow and joy, grief and gratitude, side by side. It is indeed the mark of the mature adult to be able to carry these two truths simultaneously. Life is hard, filled with loss and suffering. Life is glorious, stunning, and incomparable. To deny either truth is to live in some fantasy of the ideal or to be crushed by the weight of pain. Instead, both are true, and it requires a familiarity with both sorrow and joy to fully encompass the full range of being human.

Just as we turn into animals when we go up to the line, because that is the only thing which brings us through safely, so we turn into wags and loafers when we are resting. We can do nothing else, it is a sheer necessity. We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peacetime, would be out of place here. Kemmerich is dead, Haie Westhus is dying, they will have a job with Hans Kramer’s body at the Judgment Day, piecing it together after a direct hit; Martens has no legs anymore, Meyer is dead, Max is dead, Beyer is dead, Hämmerling is dead, there are a hundred and twenty wounded men lying somewhere or other; it is a damnable business, but what has it to do with us now—we live. If it were possible for us to save them, then it would be seen how much we cared—we would have a shot at it though we went under ourselves; for we can be damned quixotic when we like; fear we do not know much about—terror of death, yes; but that is a different matter, that is physical. But our comrades are dead, we cannot help them, they have their rest—and who knows what is waiting for us? We will make ourselves comfortable and sleep, and eat as much as we can stuff into our bellies, and drink and smoke so that hours are not wasted. Life is short.

Elizabeth, we’re going to have to stop.” Elizabeth’s swirling senses began to return to reality, slowly at first, and then with a sickening plummet. Passion gave way to fear and then to anguished shame as she realized she was lying in a man’s arms, her shirt unfastened, her flesh exposed to his gaze and touch. Closing her eyes, she fought back the sting of tears and shoved his hand away, lurching into an upright position. “Let me rise, please,” she whispered, her voice strangled with self-revulsion. Her skin flinched as he began to fasten her shirt, but in order to do it he had to release his hold on her, and the moment he did, she scrambled to her feet. Turning her back to him, she fastened her shirt with shaking hands and snatched her jacket from the peg beside the fire. He moved so silently that she had no idea he’d stood until his hands settled on her stiff shoulders. “Don’t be frightened of what is between us. I’ll be able to provide for you-“ All of Elizabeth’s confusion and anguish exploded in a burst of tempestuous, sobbing fury that was directed at herself, but which she hurtled at him. Tearing free of his grasp, she whirled around. “Provide for me,” she cried. “Provide what? A-a hovel in Scotland where I’ll stay while you dress the part of an English gentleman so you can gamble away everything-“ “If things go on as I expect,” he interrupted her in a voice of taut calm, “I’ll be one of the richest men in England within a year-two at the most. If they don’t, you’ll still be well provided for.” Elizabeth snatched her bonnet and backed away from him in a fear that was partly of him and partly of her own weakness. “This is madness. Utter madness.” Turning, she headed for the door. “I know,” he said gently. She reached for the door handle and jerked the door open. Behind her, his voice stopped her in midstep. “If you change your mind after we leave in the morning, you can reach me at Hammund’s town house in Upper Brook Street until Wednesday. After that I’d intended to leave for India. I’ll be gone until winter.” “I-I hope you have a safe voyage,” she said, too overwrought to wonder about the sharp tug of loss she felt at the realization he was leaving. “If you change your mind in time,” he teased, “I’ll take you with me.” Elizabeth fled in sheer terror from the gentle confidence she’d heard in his smiling voice. As she galloped through the thick fog and wet underbrush she was no longer the sensible, confident young lady she’d been before; instead she was a terrified, bewildered girl with a mountain of responsibilities and an upbringing that convinced her the wild attraction she felt for Ian Thornton was sordid and unforgivable.

I had never been any good at reading out loud at school. I would forever stutter over my consonants—I dreaded k’s in particular. Long words terrified me. What if I pronounced them wrong and everyone laughed at me? But now, sitting up there on the magic unicorn, I began to read, and all my dread and all my terror simply vanished. I heard my voice speaking out strong and loud. It was as if I was up in the mountains alone and singing a song at the top of my voice, for the sheer joy of the sound of it. The words danced like music on the air, and I could feel everyone listening. And I knew they were listening not to me at all, but to the story of The Little Match Girl, because they were just as lost in it as I was.

There is a moment following tragedy that some people never get to experience. You have to be ready for it or it will crush you to dust. It's like a window flung open and naked to the day. It's like being lifted away. It's like being stranded with everything you need. It's the moment you call a cornfield beautiful because you mean it, because you've never seen the world like this before, because newness no longer strikes terror but rather brings hope. You jerk awake into it like meeting yourself on a blind date. You surrender to that sudden first rush of joy without consequence, no more doom or fear or guilt, surrender to the sheer devastating presence of life, huge and indifferent, pushing into you like God's breath.

And so at Binz, dragged out of my pleasant dream to night and loneliness, I could not move for a moment for sheer extremity of fright. When I did, when I did put out a shaking hand to feel for the matches, the dread of years became a reality—I touched another hand. Now I think it was very wonderful of me not to scream. I suppose I did not dare. I don’t know how I managed it, petrified as I was with terror, but the next thing that happened was that I found myself under the bedclothes thinking things over. Whose hand had I touched? And what was it doing on my table? It was a nasty, cold hand, and it had clutched at mine as I tore it away. Oh—there it was, coming after me—it was feeling its way along the bedclothes—surely it was not real—it must be a nightmare—and that was why no sound came when I tried to shriek

I hung up the phone after saying good night to Marlboro Man, this isolated cowboy who hadn’t had the slightest probably picking up the phone to say “I miss you.” I shuddered at the thought of how long I’d gone without it. And judging from the electrical charges searing through every cell of my body, I realized just how fundamental a human need it really is. It was as fundamental a human need, I would learn, as having a sense of direction in the dark. I suddenly realized I was lost on the long dirt road, more lost than I’d ever been before. The more twists and turns I took in my attempt to find my bearings, the worse my situation became. It was almost midnight, and it was cold, and each intersection looked like the same one repeating over and over. I found myself struck with an illogical and indescribable panic--the kind that causes you to truly believe you’ll never, ever escape from where you are, even though you almost always will. As I drove, I remembered every horror movie I’d ever watched that had taken place in a rural setting. Children of the Corn. The children of the corn were lurking out there in the tall grass, I just knew it. Friday the 13th. Sure, it had taken place at a summer camp, but the same thing could happen on a cattle ranch. And The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Oh no. I was dead. Leatherface was coming--or even worse, his freaky, emaciated, misanthropic brother. I kept driving for a while, then stopped on the side of the road. Shining my brights on the road in front of me, I watched out for Leatherface while dialing Marlboro Man on my car phone. My pulse was rapid out of sheer terror and embarrassment; my face was hot. Lost and helpless on a county road the same night I’d emotionally decompensated in his kitchen--this was not exactly the image I was dying to project to this new man in my life. But I had no other option, short of continuing to drive aimlessly down one generic road after another or parking on the side of the road and going to sleep, which really wasn’t an option at all, considering Norman Bates was likely wandering around the area. With Ted Bundy. And Charles Manson. And Grendel.

He reached his own first memory and kept going—back to the self before him, and then the one before that. He traveled each life from death to birth, watching himself worship gods and idols of every stripe. In each life his terror of judgment was all-consuming, and his belief absolute. For how could it be otherwise when each faith gave him such powers, allowing him to conjure illusions, scry futures, hurl curses? His own singed and stolen book, the source of all his wonders and horrors: never once had he doubted that it was the knowledge of the Almighty, the One before whom all others were mere graven images. Did its efficacy not prove that the Almighty was the supreme truth, the only truth? But now he saw that truths were as innumerable as falsehoods—that for sheer teeming chaos, the world of man could only be matched by the world of the divine. And as he traveled backward the Almighty shrank smaller and smaller, until He was merely another desert deity, and His commandments seemed no more than the fearful demands of a jealous lover. And yet Schaalman had spent his entire life in terror of Him, dreading His judgment in the World to Come—a world that he would never see!

Cannabis, the sensation that had reignited in America and helped bring hemp’s recreational usage back to prominence in a quiet, steady British counter-culture, had helped dispel much of the prejudice, entitlement and arrogance that had eluded the careful eye of Simon’s mother, undermining her care during the once-restlessly energetic yet gentle soul’s dedicated mothering of the studious boy. It took root in his thoughts and expectations. Bravado and projection replaced genuine yet understated confidence; much of that which had been endearing in him ceased to be seen, to his mother’s despondency. A bachelor of the arts, the blissfully apathetic raconteur left university, having renounced his faith and openly claiming to feel no connection, either socially or intellectually with the student life and further study. Personal failures and parental despair combined to sober the-21yr old frustrated essayist and tentative poet. Cannabis, ironically sought following the conclusion of his stimulant-fuelled student years, had finally levelled him out, and provided the introspection needed to dispel the lesser demons of his nature. Reefer Madness, such insanity – freely distributed for the mass-consumer audience of the west! Curiosity pushed the wealthy young man’s interest in the plant to an isolated purchase, and thence to regular use. Wracked by introspection, the young man struggled through several months of instability and self-doubt before readjusting his focus to chase goals. Once humorous, Reefer Madness no longer amused him, and he dedicated an entire afternoon to writing an ultimately unpublished critique of the film, that descended into an impassioned defence of the plant. He began to watch with keen interest, as the critically-panned debacle of sheer slapstick silliness successfully struck terror into the hearts of a large section of non-marijuana smoking people in the west. The dichotomy of his own understanding and perception only increased the profound sense of gratitude Simon felt for the directional change in which his life was heading. It helped him escape from earlier attachments to the advantage of his upbringing, and destroyed the arrogance that, he realised with shock, had served to cloud years of his judgement. Thus, positive energy led to forward momentum; the mental readjustment silenced doubts, which in turn brought peace, and hope.

TO DODD, PAPEN’S REMARK ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking seemed to have bedazzled Germany, to the highest levels of government. Earlier in the year, for example, Göring had claimed with utter sobriety that three hundred German Americans had been murdered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the start of the past world war. Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will “sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.” Now here was the nation’s vice-chancellor claiming not to understand why the United States had entered the world war against Germany. Dodd looked at Papen. “I can tell you that,” he said, his voice just as level and even as before. “It was through the sheer, consummate stupidity of German diplomats.” Papen looked stunned. His wife, according to Sigrid Schultz, looked strangely pleased. A new silence filled the table—not one of anticipation, as before, but a charged emptiness—until suddenly everyone sought to fill the chasm with flecks of diverting conversation. In another world, another context, it would have been a minor incident, a burst of caustic banter readily forgotten. Amid the oppression and Gleichschaltung of Nazi Germany, however, it was something far more important and symbolic.

I kept driving for a while, then stopped on the side of the road. Shining my brights on the road in front of me, I watched out for Leatherface while dialing Marlboro Man on my car phone. My pulse was rapid out of sheer terror and embarrassment; my face was hot. Lost and helpless on a county road the same night I’d emotionally decompensated in his kitchen--this was not exactly the image I was dying to project to this new man in my life. But I had no other option, short of continuing to drive aimlessly down one generic road after another or parking on the side of the road and going to sleep, which really wasn’t an option at all, considering Norman Bates was likely wandering around the area. With Ted Bundy. And Charles Manson. And Grendel. Marlboro Man answered, “Hello?” He must have been almost asleep. “Um…um…hi,” I said, squinting in shame. “Hey there,” he replied. “This is Ree,” I said. I just wanted to make sure he knew. “Yeah…I know,” he said. “Um, funniest thing happened,” I continued, my hands in a death grip on the steering wheel. “Seems I got a little turned around and I’m kinda sorta maybe perhaps a little tiny bit lost.” He chuckled. “Where are you?” “Um, well, that’s just it,” I replied, looking around the utter darkness for any ounce of remaining pride. “I don’t really know.” Marlboro Man assumed control, telling me to drive until I found an intersection, then read him the numbers on the small green county road sign, numbers that meant absolutely nothing to me, considering I’d never even heard the term “county road” before, but that would help Marlboro Man pinpoint exactly where on earth I was. “Okay, here we go,” I called out. “It says, um…CR 4521.” “Hang tight,” he said. “I’ll be right there.” Marlboro Man was right there, in less than five minutes. Once I determined the white pickup pulling beside my car was his and not that of Jason Voorhees, I rolled down my window. Marlboro Man did the same and said, with a huge smile, “Having trouble?” He was enjoying this, in the exact same way he’d enjoyed waking me from a sound sleep when he’d called at seven a few days earlier. I was having no trouble establishing myself as the clueless pansy-ass of our rapidly developing relationship. “Follow me,” he said. I did. I’ll follow you anywhere, I thought as I drove in the dust trail behind his pickup. Within minutes we were back at the highway and I heaved a sigh of relief that I was going to survive. Humiliated and wanting to get out of his hair, I intended to give him a nice, simple wave and drive away in shame. Instead, I saw Marlboro Man walking toward my car. Staring at his Wranglers, I rolled down my window again so I could hear what he had to say. He didn’t say anything at all. He opened my car door, pulled me out of the car, and kissed me as I’d never been kissed before. And there we were. Making out wildly at the intersection of a county road and a rural highway, dust particles in the air mixing with the glow of my headlights to create a cattle ranch version of London fog. It would have made the perfect cover of a romance novel had it not been for the fact that my car phone, suddenly, began ringing loudly.

The very successes of the megamachine re-enforced dangerous potentialities that had hitherto been kept in check by sheer human weakness. The inherent infirmity of this whole power system lies exposed in the fact that kings, exalted above all other men, were constantly cozened, flattered, and fed with misinformation-zealously protected from any disturbing counterbalancing 'feedback.' So kings never learned from either their own experience or from history the fact that unqualified power is inimical to life: that their methods were self-defeating, their military victories were ephemeral, and their exalted claims were fraudulent and absurd. From the end of the first great Age of the Builders in Egypt, that of the Sixth Dynasty Pharaoh, Pepe I, comes corroborative evidence of this pervasive irrationality, all the more telling because it issues from the relatively orderly and unbedevilled Egyptians: The army returned in safety After it had hacked up the land of the Sand Dwellers ...After it had thrown down its enclosures... After it had cut down its fig trees and vines... After it had cast fire into all its dwellings... After it had killed troops in it by many ten-thousand. That sums up the course of Empire everywhere: the same boastful words, the same vicious acts, the same sordid results, from the earliest Egyptian palette to the latest American newspaper with its reports, at the moment I write, of the mass atrocities coldbloodedly perpetrated with the aid of napalm bombs and defoliating poisons, by the military forces of the United States on the helpless peasant populations of Vietnam: an innocent people, uprooted, terrorized, poisoned and roasted alive in a futile attempt to make the power fantasies of the American military-industrial-scientific elite 'credible.

The Negro had never really been patient in the pure sense of the word. The posture of silent waiting was forced upon him psychologically because he was shackled physically. In the days of slavery, this suppression was openly, scientifically and consistently applied. Sheer physical force kept the Negro captive at every point. He was prevented from learning to read and write, prevented by laws actually inscribed in the statute books. He was forbidden to associate with other Negroes living on the same plantation, except when weddings or funerals took place. Punishment for any form of resistance or complaint about his condition could range from mutilation to death. Families were torn apart, friends separated, cooperation to improve their condition carefully thwarted. Fathers and mothers were sold from their children and children were bargained away from their parents. Young girls were, in many cases, sold to become the breeders of fresh generations of slaves. The slaveholders of America had devised with almost scientific precision their systems for keeping the Negro defenseless, emotionally and physically. With the ending of physical slavery after the Civil War, new devices were found to "keep the Negro in his place." It would take volumes to describe these methods, extending from birth in jim-crow hospitals through burial in jim-crow sections of cemeteries. They are too well known to require a catalogue here. Yet one of the revelations during the past few years is the fact that the straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South. The result has been a demeanor that passed for patience in the eyes of the white man, but covered a powerful impatience in the heart of the Negro.

Mirrors I have been horrified before all mirrors not just before the impenetrable glass, the end and the beginning of that space, inhabited by nothing but reflections, but faced with specular water, mirroring the other blue within its bottomless sky, incised at times by the illusory flight of inverted birds, or troubled by a ripple, or face to face with the unspeaking surface of ghostly ebony whose very hardness reflects, as if within a dream, the whiteness of spectral marble or a spectral rose. Now, after so many troubling years of wandering beneath the wavering moon, I ask myself what accident of fortune handed to me this terror of all mirrors– mirrors of metal and the shrouded mirror of sheer mahogany which in the twilight of its uncertain red softens the face that watches and in turn is watched by it. I look on them as infinite, elemental fulfillers of a very ancient pact to multiply the world, as in the act of generation, sleepless and dangerous. They extenuate this vain and dubious world within the web of their own vertigo. Sometimes at evening they are clouded over by someone's breath, someone who is not dead. The glass is watching us. And if a mirror hangs somewhere on the four walls of my room, I am not alone. There's an other, a reflection which in the dawn enacts its own dumb show. Everything happens, nothing is remembered in those dimensioned cabinets of glass in which, like rabbits in fantastic stories, we read the lines of text from right to left. Claudius, king for an evening, king in a dream, did not know he was a dream until the day on which an actor mimed his felony with silent artifice, in a tableau. Strange, that there are dreams, that there are mirrors. Strange that the ordinary, worn-out ways of every day encompass the imagined and endless universe woven by reflections. God (I've begun to think) implants a promise in all that insubstantial architecture that makes light out of the impervious surface of glass, and makes the shadow out of dreams. God has created nights well-populated with dreams, crowded with mirror images, so that man may feel that he is nothing more than vain reflection. That's what frightens us.

There is a show tonight in the Highwood, John. There will be all sorts of people to play music there. We must go tonight to the Highwood, john. we'll breathe in the music and the cold-starred air. * And Cornelius has taken down the moon - hasn't he? - with gleam-of-eye and giddying snout and his touch on the wheel is delicate as the spring, here a soft tip, there a glanced tap for each swerve of the road as it runs the country and turns. Oh this is the knack of it - John can see clearly now - the carefree life, and he envies him the spring. And before we know it, John? The summer proper will be in on top of us and the woods will be whispering. Fuck the whispering woods, Cornelius. Just get me to my fucking island. But he is snagged again; he turns helplessly. How'd you mean, about the woods? Cornelius beams - There are things we can't describe, he says. Go on? What we see around us is only at the ten per cent level, John. Of? The reality. And what's the leftover? Unseen. How'd you mean? Well, he says. The way sometimes you'd walk across a field and a sense of elation would come over you. Are you with me? Okay... You're half risen from the skin. the feet are not touching the stones. The little heart is about to hop out of your chest from the sheer fucken joy. And the strange thing about it? Go on. That patch of happiness could be floating around the field for the last ten years. Or for the last three hundred and fifty years. Out of love that was had there or a child that was playing or an old friend that was found again after a long time lost. Whatever it was, it caused a great happy feeling and it was left there in the field. You're after walking into it. And for half a minute you're lifted and soaring but then you're out the far side again and back into your own poor stride and woes. You'd find a sadness just the same? Or an evil, John. Or a blackness. Or terror, John, or fucken terror, because there's plenty of terror in the world. Always was and has been. A soft whisper - I mean take a look out the window. A sweep of the arm for the greys and sea-greens of the moonful hills, the pale night as they pass by - I mean why'd you think I've the fucken foot down, John?

...emergency medicine is extended periods of intense boredom, interrupted by occasional spurts of sheer terror...

Hurrying back into the rouge lighting in sheer terror, Amelia ran without another word, escaping into the shadows of the dungeon, and she shrieked for salvation that never came.

There are some DID clients whose pathological dissociation was triggered by accidents or natural disasters. For example, I treated one client whose first alter was created after the young host accidentally fell off a raft and was pulled under by a strong wave. In sheer terror, she utilized her innate capacity to dissociate before she was rescued.

We trekked through the left side of the fortress for a bit, and then we found it. The thing that made that terrifying sound. When I laid my eyes on whatever that made that sound, I peed my pants a bit. But only a little bit! The sheer power of it was unimaginable. The terror and havoc it could wreck… the thought of it made me shiver.  “Holy… moly…” I said with my eyes wide opened. “Oh… so, that’s what they’re doing…” said Alex. “Uhhhhh… what is that thing?! How is that even possible?!” yelled Arthur. “Shhhh…” said Cindy. “We can’t give away our location… even if that thing is crazy shocking…” Lawton shook his head. “I can’t believe such a thing exists…” “It’s unnatural,” said Pierce. “What do we do…?” asked Calvin, completely shaken. Then he turned and looked at me. “Steve…?” “Uh… I don’t know…” I said.

it. I didn’t understand the sheer terror that comes with having children, the possibility of losing something much more important than yourself. The love so deep it defies logic, knowledge or reason.

Taking a deep breath, Sailor decided to lay himself at her feet. "I was imagining the future and thinking of how if everything went according to plan, I'd have a very successful business with a high turnover." He made sure his hands were locked behind Ísa's back--just in case she decided to leave him in her dust a fourth time. "And since I'd be rich, I'd be able to buy houses and other nice things for my family." Ísa frowned. "I don't think your family expects that." "They don't exactly need my largess either," Sailor muttered. "But in my future fantasy, I'm buying everyone fancy cars and houses. Go with it." Ísa's lips twitched. "Okay, big spender. What else is fantasy Sailor doing?" "He's building a ginormous mansion. Swimming pool, tennis court, the works." "Is he hiring a buff personal masseuse named Sven?" "Hell no." He glared at her. "The masseuse is a fifty-year-old forner bodybuilder named Helga. Now, can I carry on?" Pretending to zip up her lips and throw away the key, Ísa made a "go on" motion. "Future Sailor is also creating a huge walk-in closet for you and filling it with designer shoes and clothes. He's giving you everything your heart desires." A flicker of darkness in Ísa's gaze, but she didn't interrupt... though her hands went still on his shoulders. "And there's a tricked-out nursery too," he added. "Plus a private playground for our rug rats." Throat moving, Ísa said, "How many?" It was a husky question. "Seven, I think." "Very funny, mister." "I'm not done." Sailor was the one who swallowed this time. "And in this fantasy house, future Sailor walks in late for dinner again because of a board meeting, and he has a gorgeous, sexy, brilliant wife and adorable children. But his redhead doesn't look at him the same anymore. And it doesn't matter how many shoes he buys her or how many necklaces he gives her, she's never again going to look at him the way she did before he stomped on her heart. Ísa's lower lip began to quiver, but she didn't speak. "I'm so sorry, baby." Sailor cupped her face, made sure she saw the sheer terror he felt at the thought of losing her. "I've been so tied to this idea of becoming a grand success that I forgot what it was all about in the first place--being there for the people I love. Sticking through the good and the bad. Never abandoning them." Silent tears rolled own Ísa's face. "But that great plan of mine?" he said, determined not to give himself any easy outs. "It'd have mean abandoning everyone. How can I be there for anyone when all I do is work? When I shove aside all other commitments? When the people I love hesitate to ask for my time because I'm too tired and too busy?" Using his thumbs, he rubbed away her tears. More splashed onto the backs of his hands, her hurt as hot as acid. "Spitfire, please," he begged, breaking. "I'll let you punch me as many times as you want if you stop crying. With a big red glove. And you can post photos online." Ísa pressed her lips together, blinked rapidly several times. And pretended to punch him with one fist, the touch a butterfly kiss. Catching her hand, he pressed his lips to it. "That's more like my Ísa." He wrapped his arms around her again. And then he told her the most important thing. "I realized that I could become a multimillionaire, but it would mean nothing if my redhead didn't look at me the way she does now, if she expected to have to take care of everything alone like she's always done--because her man was a selfish bastard who was never there." Ísa rubbed her nose against his. "You're being very hard on future Sailor," she whispered, her voice gone throaty. "That dumbass deserves it," Sailor growled. "He was going to put his desire to be a big man above his amazing, smart, loving redhead.

Corlda looked at them both in sheer terror her eyes where firmly fixed on the camera “Agres...” she stammered Agres stopped tending to Tria and joined her.

Police work can grind a man down, mentally, more than physically. I sensed that it is because of the hours of tedium and boredom, interrupted by moments of sheer terror.

Sometimes I feel it in my bones—Duke loving me. Sometimes I don't feel anything but sheer terror at the thought that he might be telling me the truth. Because when you love and you are loved by someone else, you have something to lose.

Taylor and Fitz sat at a patio table in the back of Las Palmas. The front room was filled with giggling Vanderbilt co-eds and migrant workers on their lunch break, a testament to the quality of the restaurant as well as its reasonable prices. Taylor was nibbling a steak fajita quesadilla, Fitz was plowing through a taco salad. A pitcher of sweet tea separated them. “So what did Price say?” Fitz asked. “He understood, for starters. He’ll fight any disciplinary action taken against Lincoln. So Linc will feel a lot better about that. Poor guy, he was completely rattled. I don’t know if it was the dope or the sheer terror of having to report that he’d been smoking it. Can you imagine Lincoln with a few toots in him?” Fitz laughed. “No. Mr. Fancypants has always struck me as the one scotch before dinner because it looks good, rather than enjoying it type. He isn’t much for losing control.” “Well, that’s to be expected, if you think about his background. Damn, it would be nice to have him back to work this Wolff case. I’ll bet there’s a ton of financial discovery, right up his little computer-literate heart’s alley. Marcus is back tomorrow, right?” Marcus Wade, her youngest detective, had been out for four days doing his in-service training rotation. Without the two detectives, the squad had been too quiet. “He’ll be in bright and early tomorrow. We can get him up to speed with the Wolff case, let him go to town. Media’s having a field day with the 911 tape.

The first experience of the inner realm is impossible to describe, but the feelings it involes are those of terror, wonder, and sheer disbelief.

The only thing I like is shark attacks. Now, I don’t say that with a cold heart. In fact, I feel really bad for anyone unlucky enough to get killed or injured in a shark attack. And more generally, I’m fairly certain I possess basically normal levels of empathy and compassion for my fellow humans. However, I just can’t help but love reading and/or listening to news stories about shark attacks. Call it a morbid obsession if you will. Will you? In fact, I daresay I don’t give a fiddler’s curse about anything in the universe other than shark attacks. And if sharks suddenly were to cease attacking humans so that I could no longer hear about shark attacks in the news, I’d likely blow my fucking brains out for sheer boredom! Anyhow, all that is to say that I am the founder of the International Shark Attack Conservation Society (ISACS). I must admit that membership in the ISACS is rather low at the moment. Okay, membership has always been low. Okay, the society has only ever had one member: moi. As it turns out, while many folks are all about conserving sharks and other wildlife, not everybody is so keen on conserving shark attacks. But, hey, I’ve always marched to the beat of my own drum.

Is that really a good idea?” I asked. He tilted his head at Vince's conga line, which was collapsing in a heap of spastic hilarity. “Is that?” he said. And of course he had a point, although in terms of sheer lethal pain and terror a conga line on the floor couldn't really compete with Dr. Danco. Still, I suppose one has to consider human dignity, if it truly exists somewhere.

I only make it a few steps before I'm forced to look back into the blazing heart of the fire. From deep within it, I hear a scream of sheer terror that slices right through me. It divides my life in an excruciating instant, severing the before from the after

I only make it a few steps before I'm forced to look back into the blazing heart of the fire. From deep within it, I hear a scream of sheer terror that slices right through me. It divides my life in an excruciating instant, severing the before from the after

In the night, when the owl is less than exquisitely swift and perfect, the scream of the rabbit is terrible. But the scream of the owl, which is not of pain and hopelessness and the fear of being plucked out of the world, but of the sheer rollicking glory of the death-bringer, is more terrible still. When I hear it resounding through the woods, and then the five black pellets of its song dropping like stones into the air, I know I am standing at the edge of the mystery, in which terror is naturally and abundantly part of life, part of even the most becalmed, intelligent, sunny life — as, for example, my own. The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world

That was sheer bravery.” “It was bloody terror!” “Well, the dividing line is narrow.

She reminds me of...” He winced. “Oh, fraxx. She reminds me of you.” Royan threw back his head and laughed at the expression on his lover’s face. It was somewhere between desire and sheer terror.

The Dumpster had two lids, side by side, and one of them was open. I put both hands on the closed side—and something bolted up and out of the opening with a horrible screech and flew past my ear and I was absolutely paralyzed by sheer terror before I recognized it as a cat. It was tattered and filthy and beat-up, but it landed a few feet away and arched its back and spit at me in the full Halloween pose. I just looked back and for a second I thought the music had started up again in the club, until I realized the thumping was only my heartbeat. The cat turned and stalked away out of the alley, I leaned on the Dumpster and took a deep breath, and the Passenger stirred itself just enough to give me a serves-you-right chuckle. I

In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.