Fear and Anxiety

Life is first boredom, then fear.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

Fear and dull disposition, lukewarmness and sloth, are not seldom wont to cloak themselves under the affected name of moderation.

Our throats were tight as tourniquets.

The solitude of writing is … quite frightening. It’s close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

Courage is not the lack of fear. It is acting in spite of it .

Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.

There are no clear paths. Only pitfalls and tripwires and darkness.

 

To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.

 

I am caught like a beast at bay. Somewhere are people, freedom, light, But all I hear is the baying of the pack, There is no way out for me.

Further, the war—our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation—has taken away the outer wall of security. . . . We pour to the edgeof a precipice . . . and then? I can’t conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.

Oh, what can ail thee knight at arms

The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and hope.

It's a dangerous business going out your front door. J. R. R.

Terror … often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.

 

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.

Keep cold, young orchard. Goodbye and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below.

The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,

But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,

True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recoverthis time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins.

It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did.