“I sat down and tried to rest. I could not; though I had been on foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too much excited. A phase of my life was closing tonight, a new one opening tomorrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change was being accom…”— Charlotte Brontë, amazon.comTagged: Anxiety, what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, nervousness, Anticipation
“On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn’t mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. That night, on the terrace where we were celebrating the arrival of 1959, when she w…”— Elena Ferrante, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Truth, Relatable, Depression
“But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window — maybe rearrange all the furniture.”— Raymond Carver, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, Literature, anxiety in literature, Panic, nervousness
“Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you’re breathing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can m…”— Khaled Hosseini, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, just breathe, Panic, Feelings
“Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye, And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.”— William Shakespeare, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, Care, anxiety in literature, Love, restlessness
“The suspense: the fearful, acute suspense: of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they conjure up before it; the des…”— Charles Dickens, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, suspense, Life, Depression
“My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”— Virginia Woolf, amazon.comTagged: Anxiety, what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Mind, Examples of Similes
“He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.”— J.K Rowling, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Panic, Isolation, Life
“Quite collected at cocktail parties, meanwhile in my head I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.”— Anne Sexton, amazon.comTagged: anxiety in literature, what anxiety feels like, Surface, exterior v. interior, Image
“In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his…”— Anton Chekhov, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature
“I feel like I’m underwater, weighed down, helpless.”— Iain Reid, amazon.comTagged: anxiety in literature, Horror, How Anxiety Feels, Anxiety, Sinking Feeling
“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”— Anaïs Nin, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Love, Relationships
“I was lost in the anxiety of the moment. I was crying and trying not to breathe too loudly.”— Bret Easton Ellis, amazon.comTagged: anxiety in literature, The Feeling of Anxiety, Anxiety
“The familiar panic at feeling misperceived is rising, and my chest bumps and thuds. I expend energy on remaining utterly silent in my chair, empty, my eyes two great pale zeros. People have promised to get me through this.”— David Foster Wallace, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Panic, Feelings, Energy
“There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing.”— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, amazon.com
“As I sit on the folding metal chair I begin to fear getting up. As the finale approaches, I experience outright panic. What if my feet no longer move? What if my muscles lock?”— Joan Didion, amazon.comTagged: anxiety in literature, what anxiety feels like, Panic, worry, Emotion
“And so the months had mounted, Pella lying in bed in their sunstruck loft, dragging herself to the Rite Aid and the psychiatrist and back again, David alternately peeved and given purpose by her somnolence. There were events, fights, excursions, but none of it mattered, none of it penetrated the thi…”— Chad Harbach, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, worry, Life
“It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.”— Kazuo Ishiguro, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, mistake, magnitude, Anxiety
“But how can I put this? I can’t keep my head above water one minute to the next: it’s not just the parties and the goo-gooing with what’s-her-name, I’ve got to decide how long the Five Hundredth Anniversary Parade is going to be and where does it start and when does it start and which nobleman gets…”— William. The Princess Bride: S Goldman, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, humor
“Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged …”— Bret Easton Ellis, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Society, God, Life
“All our hearts were the mansions of distress.”— Emily Brontë, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Fear, Hearts, Freedom
“He bent his head back toward the ceiling and breathed out a short pained sigh or moan. He dropped his hands, worried them in quick circles, clapped them to the top of his head again. His movements were spastic and strange, the movements of a person whose thoughts have become toxic.”— Chad Harbach, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, worry, Life
“Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the announcement of the word as you sift your brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the blank panic.”— Gillian Flynn, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Moments, Life, Childhood
“They tried closing their eyes and going to sleep, but they couldn't tell the difference between sleep and being awake. They seemed to be caught in some sort of trap, and they tossed and moaned and finally Marion bolted up in bed, gasping for breath and Harry put the light on, You alright?”— Hubert Selby Jr., amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, Panic, Drugs, withdrawl, anxiety in literature
“It tossed and tossed, — A little brig I knew, — O’ertook by blast, It spun and spun, And groped delirious, for morn.”— Emily Dickinson, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature
“After those paroxysms of deadly horror, when he had howled, flung himself about and tried frantically to tear something away from his eyes, he lapsed into a state of semi-consciousness. Then presently there would loom up once more that unbearable mountain of oppression, which was only comparable wit…”— Vladimir Nabokov, amazon.comTagged: anxiety in literature, what anxiety feels like, Horror, Fear
“He had only an intolerable, chest-crushing anxiety.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Feelings, Life, humanity
“Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes. With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the hall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire, and disappeared into the living-room.”— Francis Scott Fitzgerald, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Fear, Love, Life
“All my moments which were not consumed with efforts to escape the cold were absorbed with morbid Poe-like fancies. One night, in a dream, I saw my own corpse, hair stiff with ice and eyes wide open.”— Donna Tartt, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Fear, Winter, cold
“She lay there on a bed that inexorably became a bed of ashes and hot coals, while her imagination dwelt on every conceivable disaster, from his having forsaken her for another woman to his having, somehow, ended up in the morgue. And as the night faded from black to gray to daylight, the telephone b…”— James Baldwin, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Fear, Night, bedtime