Quotes about terror

Alexis de Tocqueville - Recollections on the French Revolution

Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy those who had anything united in common terror.

Harold Edmund Stearns - America And The Young Intellectual

Our morality system has become a mechanical device for protecting us against ourselves it is the handiwork of terror.

Terry Pratchett - Unseen Academicals

Contrary to popular belief and hope, people don't usually come running when they hear a scream. That's not how humans work. Humans look at other humans and say, 'Did you hear a scream?' because the first scream might have been you screaming inside your head, or a horse backfiring.

Vanessa Veselka - Zazen

I tried to map the cultural trends leading up to it but as I did they grew, interconnecting and weaving backwards and sideways out to everything. Next to the megalithic institutionalized shredding of people's humanity, marked by tombstone malls and scabby hills, the Styrofoam gullets and flag-waving god-chatterers casting their votes for eternal paternity on the lap rapists - next to all of that, the intimacy between a terrorist and his target was almost a beautiful thing but I still couldn't so

H.G. Wells - The Holy Terror

The essence of the Revolution is to abolish the attainment of unqualified power of man over man either by vote-getting, money-pressure or crude terror. The Revolution repudiates profit or terror altogether as methods of human intercourse. It turns the attention of men and women back from a frantic and futile struggle for the means of power, a struggle against our primary social instincts, to an innate urgency to make and to a beneficial competition for preeminence in social service. It recalls m

Ramana Pemmaraju -

When psychologically unfit form the majority in any sect, and yet proclaim to be the only fittest, will not only be a threat to the existence of the sane minority, but are surely catastrophic for the human race as a whole!

Frank Lentricchia - Crimes of Art and Terror

...that out of the quarrel with others we produce rhetoric, matter for the editorial page, while out of the quarrel with ourselves we create art.

Barbara Lieberman - the Glass Is Half-Full But I've Forgotten Where I Put It

Soul work is the 'more' that we need to do to heal our souls.Soul retrieval is one more step toward balance and wholeness. The trauma of major illness, death, financial devastation, abuse, terror, and other stressors in our lives will not cease while we live and breathe. But, knowing they can rob us of our soul allows us to address those loses before or as they occur, so that we do not have to struggle to survive without that which makes us who we are.

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It’s one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something. Galileo thought that comets were an optical illusion. This is fertile ground: since we are cer

Lev Grossman - The Magician's Land

She was the most beautiful, terrible thing he'd ever seen, like an acetylene flame, an incandescent filament, a fallen star right in front of him.

Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?” he said. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown

Rainer Maria Rilke -

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

Rainer Maria Rilke - Duino Elegies

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'hierarchies? and even if one of thempressed me against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdainsto annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams

For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors.

Rainer Maria Rilke - Duino Elegies

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.

Michael Harris -

terrorism is adamant. Fight against requires endurance, specific Counter-terrorism, Intelligence and swift operation

Doris Lessing -

But it isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessar

E.A. Bucchianeri - Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

The gates of Hell are terrible to behold, are they not?

Patricia Highsmith -

Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown. It is an enormous pit reaching below the deepest crater of the earth, or it is the thinnest air far beyond the moon. But it is frightening and essentially “unlike” man as he knows himself familiarly, so we spend all our days living at the other antipodes of ourself.

Dominic Riccitello -

Sadness brings delicacy. Happiness brings subliminal terror.

Franz Rottensteiner - The Fantasy Book: An Illustrated History From Dracula To Tolkien

As has already been noted, fantastic literature developed at precisely the moment when genuine belief in the supernatural was on the wane, and when the sources provided by folklore could safely be used as literary material. It is almost a necessity, for the writer as well as for the reader of fantastic literature, that he or she should not believe in the literal truth of the beings and objects described, although the preferred mode of literary expression is a naive realism. Authors of fantastic

The Pogues -

(Streets of Sorrow)Oh, farewell you streets of sorrowOh, farewell you streets of painI'll not return to feel more sorrowThrough the years I've lived through terrorAnd in the darkened streets, the painOh, how I long to find some solaceIn my mind, I curse the strainSo, farewell, you streets of sorrowAnd, farewell, you streets of pain

Najwa bin Laden - Growing Up bin Laden: Osama's Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World

For that entire journey across the rough terrain of Afghanistan, I never stopped praying that everything of the world could be peaceful, that all lives might return to normal. I believe that wish is universal for every woman who is a mother.For all the horrible happenings that have occurred since I left Afghanistan, I can only think and feel with my mother's heart. For every child lost, a mother's heart harbors the deepest pain. None can see our sons grow to men. None can see our daughters becom

Jean Lorrain -

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

Nenia Campbell - Fearscape

She had come into the garden expecting summer roses and had instead been caught in a bank of twisted, thorny, frostbitten vines.

Thomas Ligotti - Grimscribe: His Lives and Works

The worst fear of the race yes, the world suddenly transformed into a senseless nightmare, horrible dissolution of things. Nothing compares, even oblivion is a sweet dream. You understand why, of course. Why this peculiar threat. These brooding psyches, all the busy minds everywhere. I hear them buzzing like flies in the blackness. I see them as glow worms flitting in the blackness. They are struggling, straining every second to keep the sky above them, to keep the sun in the sky, to keep the de

Rainer Maria Rilke - Duino Elegies

But not you, O girl, nor yet his mother,stretched his eyebrows so fierce with expectation.Not for your mouth, you who hold him now,did his lips ripen into these fervent contours.Do you really think your quiet footstepscould have so convulsed him, you who move like dawn wind?True, you startled his heart; but older terrorsrushed into him with that first jolt to his emotions.Call him . . . you'll never quite retrieve him from those dark consorts.Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved, he makes a

Pascal Quignard -

The Romans’ ideal was torn between heroism and glory. Both are epitomized in the instant of death. To die ‘fine death’ was their obsession: to snatch that moment, to gather - carpere - the instant of death. Tiberius died from the effort he had expended at the age of seventy-three by throwing the javelin at a boar in the arena at Circeii. The moment of death isn’t just a subject for painters. It isn’t simply the stuff of the odes and annals. The moment of death exists in the amphitheatre: human s

Alan Wake -

Stephen King once wrote, “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why - but there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.

Sophie Scholl -

An end in terror is preferable to terror without end.

Teresa Toten - The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B

I sweat terror, Robyn! I'm scared every single second about every single goddamned thing. I worry obsessively about being buried under an avalanche of fear. Jesus, Robyn, I'm scared like only the truly crazy ca

Jennifer Lane - Spiked

Takin’ it to ISIS, man!” Blue Jacket thumped his chest twice, and I read the saying on his shirt: Turning ISIS into WASWAS.

Martin Bell - Through Gates of Fire: A Journey into World Disorder

Terrorism is the war of the weak and war is the terrorism of the strong.

Ian McEwan -

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quic

George Packer -

The attacks of 9/11 were the biggest surprise in American history, and for the past ten years we haven't stopped being surprised. The war on terror has had no discernible trajectory, and, unlike other military conflicts, it's almost impossible to define victory. You can't document the war's progress on a world map or chart it on a historical timetable in a way that makes any sense. A country used to a feeling of being in command and control has been whipsawed into a state of perpetual reaction,

Eyden I. - Kiss Friendzone Goodbye

Hello PeopleAfter having trouble from suffer and hatredI'd like the world to know the charm of sadnessI will never be far away, but always among youA deadly game and the rules are very simpleYou need only to follow the simplicityDie or Suffer Make your choice

Arundhati Roy -

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?

Guy Sajer - The Forgotten Soldier

War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.

David Levithan - Two Boys Kissing

Truces may stop the battles, but part of you will always feel like you're at war.

Tahir Shah - In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams

Real terror is a crippling experience. You sweat so much that your skin goes all wrinkly like when you've been in the bath all afternoon. And then the scent of your sweat changes. It smells like cat pee, no doubt from the adrenalin. However hard you wash, it won't come off. It smothers you, as your muscles become frozen with acid and your mind paralysed by despair.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov

...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.

Henryk Sienkiewicz - In Desert and Wilderness

In the presence of the storm, thunderbolts, hurricane, rain, darkness, and the lions, which might be concealed but a few paces away, he felt disarmed and helpless.

Henryk Sienkiewicz - In Desert and Wilderness

In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading.

Diet Eman - Things We Couldn't Say

Her face expressed suffering so deep that I will never forget it; her eyes radiated a deep sadness...Mrs. Folmer was oppressed by that special sadness, perhaps the most horrible torture, of those who had no idea what happened to their loved ones.

Donald G. Firesmith - Demons on the Dalton

As long as we’re comparing analogies,” Jack added, “how about this one? A person being chased by a bear doesn’t have to be able to run faster than the bear. He only has to be faster than his slowest companion. Driver picks. I’m going to catch up with the convoy, find a way to pass several of the cars, and not be last in line.

Tim LaHaye - Transforming Your Temperament

Fear is the paralyzing emotion that inhibits or restricts normal feelings of love, confidence, and well-being.

Darren Shan - Bec

Her fear was infectious, and though I was too young to truly know terror, I felt it in my heart and trembled.

James S.A. Corey - Cibola Burn

A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.

Padma Viswanathan - The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

Perhaps terror and peace became the same thing when life's mysteries were unveiled. In the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna reveals his divine form at Arjuna's request, Arjuna is terrified at seeing what no mortal can stand to see. But the end to human doubt surely must also bring with it a definite, final peace.

Jessica Stern - Denial: A Memoir of Terror

This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love. (292)

Nenia Campbell - Black Beast

Only the cruelest hunters set their traps with terror and trepidation.

Peter Høeg - Smilla's Sense of Snow

We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.

Bertrand Russell - Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.

Bram Stoker - Dracula

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.

Michael Meade - Why the World Doesn't End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss

Many people believe that eliminating the apparent causes of fear will eliminate it, but fear, like beauty, is part of the world. The fear of fear results in the growth of terror as well as a loss of the beauty and wonder of the world. By fearing fear, we create the room for terror and panic to grow. People become blinded by fear, driven by anxieties, and increasingly ruled by phobias and obsessions. When we fail to recognize how fear works in the world, we become ruled by it. The point is not to

Richard Matheson - The Shrinking Man

It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form.

Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

All bombing is terrorism.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Demons

Then this God does exist according to you?""He does not exist, but He is. In the stone there is no pain, but in the fear of the stone is the pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. He who will conquer pain and terror will become himself a god.

Albert Camus - The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm," is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the resp

Grace Willows -

You play those dimples like an exquisite orchestra, Mr. Boomer.

Meg Cabot - Abandon

And in what fairy tale would John ever be any sane person's idea of Prince Charming anyway? He was the opposite of charming. More like Prince Terrifying.

Anthony T. Hincks -

We go from one war to another; we go from one terrorist group to another and we go from one calamity to another, but there is a pattern there if you know where to look.It's amazing how when one war is about to end, another miraculously pops its head up.Coincidence? Hmmm...I'm highly skeptical.However, a lot of money seems to go into these 'wars' and there always seems to be little change left at the end of it.Like I said in my other quote..."War! Someone's making a hell of a lot of money!

Anthony T. Hincks -

We go from one war to another; we go from one terrorist group to another and we go from one calamity to another, but there is a pattern there if you know where to look.It's amazing how one when one war is about to end, another miraculously pops its head up.Coincidence? Hmmm...I'm highly skeptical.However, a lot of money seems to go into these 'wars' and there always seems to be little change left at the end of it.Like I said in my other quote..."War! Someone's making a hell of a lot of money!

Neil Gaiman - Witch

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.

Grace Willows - Don't Look Back: And Other Stories of the Paranormal

It waited for her. Standing resolute in the moonlight, it had stood for a hundred years. Yet it waited just for her. Shadows passed across the moon, a cool breeze ruffled the leaves around it. Yet still it waited for her. Ancient tombs glowed in shimmery moonlight,row upon row of cold silent witnesses.

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Draco, do it, or stand aside so one of us -" screeched the woman, but at that precise moment the door to the ramparts burst open once more and there stood Snape, his wand clutched in his hand as his black eyes swept the scene, from Dumbledore slumped against the wall, to the four Death Eaters, including the enraged werewolf, and Malfoy."We've got a problem, Snape," said the lumpy Amycus, whose eyes and wand were fixed alike upon Dumbledore, "the boy doesn't seem able -"But somebody else had spok

Suman Pokhrel -

Thank God,my name isn’t in the list of thosewho died or werekilled yesterday!

Paulo Coelho - The Devil and Miss Prym

Then the voice - which identified itself as the prince of this world, the only being who really knows what happens on Earth - began to show him the people around him on the beach. The wonderful father who was busy packing things up and helping his children put on some warm clothes and who would love to have an affair with his secretary, but was terrified on his wife's response. His wife who would like to work and have her independence, but who was terrified of her husband's response. The childre

Tahir Shah - House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City

There comes a stage at which a man would rather die cleanly by a bullet than by the unknown terror of the phantom in the forest.

Greg Mortenson - Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

I don't do what I'm doing to fight terror. ... I do it because I care about kids. Fighting terror is maybe seventh or eighth on my list of priorities. But working over there, I've learned a few things. I've learned that terror doesn't happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us. It happens because children aren't being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.

Janvier Chouteu-Chando - The Union Moujik

These quasi-faithful are growing in strength. They are the fundamentalists today, and they abound in all the religions.

Janvier Chouteu-Chando - The Union Moujik

Politicians like the effect of alcohol because it makes them feel important.

Janvier Chouteu-Chando - The Union Moujik

Grief, my friend, forces us to search our souls and find answers to issues that constrain us from becoming better human beings.

Janvier Chouteu-Chando - The Union Moujik

Faith goes hand in hand with the belief in a supreme purpose that includes everybody, a purpose that is for mankind’s ultimate peace, harmony and happiness.

Ankita Singhal -

the flames are silent,Peace is violent,Tears are frozen’cause massacre was chosen.~~ 26/11– Mumbai terror attack memories

Jim Corbett -

The word 'Terror' is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning.

Clarice Lispector -

What would a person say to himself in the madness of sincerity? But it would be salvation. Thought the terror of sincerity comes from the part of the shadows that connect me to the world and to the creating unconscious of the world. Today is a night with many stars in the sky. It stopped raining.

Don DeLillo - Americana

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.

Don DeLillo - Point Omega

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.

Saroo Brierley -

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.

Haruki Murakami - After the Quake

I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)

Fredrik Backman - My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination[.]

Widad Akreyi -

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONEAND TELL EVERYONEABOUT...THE REAL WAR ON WOMENON YAZIDI GIRLS & WOMEN

Widad Akreyi -

WHILE THE WORLD'S ASLEEP, ANGELS REFUSE TO SLEEP!

Kenneth Eade - Russian Holiday

When it came to life or death, or anything else important, the only one you could count on was yourself.

Pier Paolo Pasolini - Roman Poems

Every day my anxiety is higher,every day the grief more mortal.Today more than yesterday terror exalts me…

Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.

Michael Bassey Johnson -

Nightmares are not dreams. A good dream does not leave the dreamer in darkness, confusion and terror. Start having dreams, not nightmares!

Christopher Riche Evans - Mind In Chains

The terrors of the future will not come from the drab repressions of an encroaching bureaucracy, but from the neon lights of a thousand supermarkets, the sounds of a million automobile accidents and from the public cremation of the dead astronauts as they return to earth.

Sarah Waters -

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help

Lydia Davis -

If you think of something, do it.Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.

Ramesh Lohia -

Export of terror by any country (eventho a low cost operation) always undermines strategic balance.

Mihail Sebastian - For Two Thousand Years

You will face yourself again in a moment of terror and will learn once again that old lesson you keep forgetting: that you can escape from anywhere, but you cannot flee your own self.

Manel Loureiro - Apocalipsis Z: Los días oscuros

My balls shrank in terror. I was convinced we were going to die.

Suman Pokhrel -

Every morningI wake up with the newsof bloodshed.I feel my body,desperate to know whetherI’m still alive.

Kenneth Eade - vigilante justice and terrorism thrill

Terrorism was like heroin – once a lonely, desperate soul was hooked on it, he or she became a fanatic – radicalized they call it – ready to die for a paradise in heaven that didn’t exist by helping to rain down a hell on earth for all who didn’t believe in it.

Steven Magee -

The greatest domestic terrorists in the USA are either working for the corporate government or are funding it.

Widad Akreyi -

Our values were under attacks, in ParisTell them:We stand UNITEDWe'll defend our valuesWe'll NOT be DIVIDED

Widad Akreyi -

Generalization is the biggest challenge that must be dealt with if we are to create spaces for constructive dialogue where muslims feel they are welcomed. This is equally true with regards to Westerners! Not all Westerners are against muslims, and not all terrorist attacks in the West are linked to Islamic jihadists.