“I wish someone had told me this simple but confusing truth: Even when everything’s going your way you can still be sad. Or anxious. Or uncomfortably numb. Because you can’t always control your brain or your emotions even when things are perfect.”
“When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors.”
“Be not anxious! Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of all anxiety.”
“... the psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.”
“Mrs. Ramsay saw, realizing his extreme anxiety about himself, would, in her own way, see that he was taken care of, and praise him, somehow or other. But she wished it was not necessary: perhaps it was her fault that it was necessary.”
“I’ll be ready for it to happen and that way it won’t happen. It’s a burden, being able to control situations with my hyper-vigilance, but it’s my lot in life.”
“There is no birth and death; everything dies and renews itself all the time. When you get that kind of insight, you no longer tire yourself out with anxiety and aversion.”
“We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.′
‘What is that, grandmother?’
‘To understand other people.‘”
“Cath could already feel the anxiety starting to tear her stomach into nervous little pieces. ‘It’s not just that…. I don’t like new places. New situations. There’ll be all those people, and I won’t know where to sit—I don’t want to go.’”
“Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than ‘laziness,’ is the real reason you find it hard to get started.”
“A drama has a progressive thought, an emotional climax and a resolution, but our lives aren’t like that. All we get day after day, are a bunch of vague anxieties that are never really resolved.”
“It was the kind of separation anxiety that made my skin crawl and my head pound from the inside out. I immediately tried to shake it away, forcing myself to stay focused on what was most important.”
“We must never forget to pray, and to ask God to remember us when He is arranging things, so that we too may feel safe and have no anxiety about what is going to happen.”
There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
“With Nick, however, Colin had the freedom to be his true self. Nick, who had known him since childhood, was probably the only person on the planet who didn’t give a damn about his money, and more important, the only one who was there during what they both referred to as ‘the war years.’ For beneath the wide grin and the charismatic personality, Colin struggled with a severe anxiety disorder and crippling depression, and Nick was one of the few people allowed to witness this side of him.”
“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free.”
“The enemy uses lies to confuse people and fill them with anxiety and fear. The apostle John said, “We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one” (1 John 5:19).”
Honor doesn’t like going to school and uses her vivid imagination to describe all the reasons she doesn’t like it. At the end of the book Honor is sad because although she doesn’t have to go to school anymore, she still says she’ll miss it.
“Anxiety and apprehension should have been the furthest things from my mind. But because I am a pessimist and must always keep sticking my tongue in pessimism the way you do a sore tooth I couldn’t help thinking that it was all too easy. Things just aren’t this easy for people...Something or somebody is bound to come and spoil it...so you can just get yourself ready for it.”
“Fear is a real, present, right-in-your-face threat. Anxiety comes from a potential—or in this case, future—threat. Fear can be conquered. Anxiety has to be endured.”
“He fought a rising hysteria that was not merely anxiety to free his aching feet his very life depended on the release of the knots. Suddenly without raising his eyelids, he began to cry.”
“Around this time, it became clear to me that I was developing some emotional issues. So I did what every ‘sensible’ adolescent would do: I ignored them.”
“To stay calm is to be so aware of yourself that your response to the situation is not to the anxiety of the people around you but to the actual issue at hand.”
“Anxiety is one of the worst things you can experience in your whole life. The more you resist, the more it persists. I learned pretty quickly that I had to lean in to my anxiety. And accept it. Or try to. I had a much-needed conversation with myself.”
“The truth is that our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of high assurance and desperate anxiety, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.”