3 Tips On Managing Anxiety

In today's fast-paced world, it's not uncommon to feel overwhelmed by the challenges life throws our way. Anxiety, a mental health condition that affects millions, can creep in when we least expect it, making it crucial to find effective strategies for managing it. Whether you're dealing with a high-pressure job, personal stressors, or just the unpredictability of daily life, having a few reliable methods to calm your mind is essential. In this post, we've curated a collection of three top tips to help you navigate and manage anxiety, empowering you to regain control and find peace amidst the chaos.

1. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” - Søren Kierkegaard

2. “The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.” - Wilhelm Reich

3. “…there is also an underlying, less specific fear - what some might call an ontological or existential anxiety - that shrouds our days and seeps into our dreams. We feel empty and seek meaning. We feel empty and seek meaning. We yearn and know not what we yearn for. There is a black hole at the center of our understanding that engulfs and crushes our every attempt to explore it. Something is missing. ” - Jesse Browner

4. “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.” - Anais Nin

5. “Our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strengths.” - C. H. Spurgeon

6. “But if we define the Megaphone as the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don't know, via high-tech sources, it's clear that a significant and ascendant component of that voice has become bottom-dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda-driven. It strives to antagonize us, make us feel anxious, ineffective, and alone; convince us that the world is full of enemies and of people stupider and less agreeable than ourselves; is dedicated to the idea that, outside the sphere of our immediate experience, the world works in a different, more hostile, less knowable manner. This braindead tendency is viral and manifests intermittently; while it is the blood in the veins of some of our media figures, it flickers on and off in others.” - George Saunders

7. “Worrying is carrying tomorrow's load with today's strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn't empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.” - Corrie Ten Boom

8. “Some part of me can't wait to see what life's going to come up with next! Anticipation without the usual anxiety. And underneath it all is the feeling that we both belong here, just as we are, right now.” - Alexander Shulgin

9. “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems” - Epictetus

10. “He was agitated for some reason that he could not name. (page 35)” - kate dicamillo

11. “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

12. “The more you pray, the less you'll panic. The more you worship, the less you worry. You'll feel more patient and less pressured.” - Rick Warren

13. “The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people--including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh--struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124)” - David N. Elkins

14. “After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.” - Paulo Coelho

15. “The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.” - Oscar Wilde

16. “I never do enjoy my breaks, long or short...I look forward to them intensely, but as soon as they begin, I can feel them starting to end. I feel the temporariness of my freedom, and find it hard to concentrate on anything other than the sensation of it trickling away.” - Sophie Hannah

17. “We live in the hope that life will be different. Just a little more substance perhaps in the intrinsic frailty of the days. Such resignation frightens me. Between gunshots I get drunk. In secret, all knowledge becomes anxiety.” - Floriano Martins

18. “Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.” - Albert Camus

19. “To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.” - Søren Kierkegaard

20. “So why do we worry? Why do we worry about food and clothing About finances and money? About security and the needs of life? We have Jehovah-Rohi! We have the Lord as our caring Shepherd. When fears regarding the cares of this world set in, we need to confidently lean on God's promise to care for us. Then we can declare to God, "Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You" (Psalm 56:3)” - Elizabeth George

21. “Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.” - Lorrie Moore

22. “Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.” - Ralph Keyes

23. “How can a person deal with anxiety? You might try what one fellow did. He worried so much that he decided to hire someone to do his worrying for him. He found a man who agreed to be his hired worrier for a salary of $200,000 per year. After the man accepted the job, his first question to his boss was, "Where are you going to get $200,000 per year?" To which the man responded, "That's your worry.” - Max Lucado

24. “We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.” - Christopher Hitchens

25. “Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying motivated, period, because their intense focus on their worries distracts them from their goals.” - Winifred Gallagher

26. “People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge.” - Winifred Gallagher

27. “But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?"So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good. ” - Brenda Ueland

28. “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” - Amit Ray

29. “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 accomplished.” - Charlotte Brontë

30. “Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: 'Better an end with terror than a terror without end.” - Robert E. Neale

31. “Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.” - William Shakespeare

32. “Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ” - C.S. Lewis

33. “In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.” - Alan Moore

34. “Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far.” - Jodi Picoult

35. “I promise you nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.” - Steve Maraboli

36. “It is our work to cast care, and it is God's work to take care.” - Thomas Watson

37. “It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.” - David Foster Wallace

38. “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 desperate anxiety to be doing something to relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these; what reflections of endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay them!” - Charles Dickens

39. “A bitter man needs to place his troubles on the front of his tongue so that they taste sweeter.” - Jay Wickre

40. “Se tudo o resto não me basta por que hei-de impedir o efeito paliativo das benzodiazepinas e a volúpia desta evocação alucinatória?If everything else is not enough for me why should I stop the palliative effect of benzodiazepines and the lust of this hallucinatory evocation?” - Victor Eustáquio

41. “Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.” - Tana French

42. “A lady should never feel anxious about her behavior. The status is bred in the bone. To show anxiety is to lower oneself. Anxiety is vulgar.” - Eloisa James

43. “Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.” - Mark Epstein

44. “What does your anxiety do? It does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, but it empties today of its strength. It does not make you escape the evil; it makes you unfit to cope with it if it comes.” - Raymond L. Cramer

45. “While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.” - Tiffany Madison

46. “The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.” - Virginia Woolf

47. “Each moment of worry, anxiety or stress represents lack of faith in miracles, for they never cease.” - T.F. Hodge

48. “The novice in the military art flew from point to point, retarding his own preparations by the excess of his violent and somewhat distempered zeal; while the more practiced veteran made his arrangements with a deliberation that scorned every appearance of haste” - James Fenimore Cooper

49. “While fear depletes power, faith gives wings for the soul’s elevation.” - T.F. Hodge

50. “The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.” - St. Augustine of Hippo

51. “Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.” - St. Augustine of Hippo

52. “Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.” - Bram Stoker

53. “I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.” - St. Augustine of Hippo

54. “A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.” - Alain De Botton

55. “Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.” - Alain De Botton

56. “The soul is "torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.” - St. Augustine of Hippo

57. “He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.” - Shannon L. Alder

58. “It was one of those days when I was thinking too much, too fast. Only it was more like the thoughts had a mind of their own and going all by themselves at a hundred miles a second, and I was just sitting back, feeling the growing paranoia inside of me.” - Sasha Mizaree

59. “Good God, but life could be less than easy, not that he was unaware that it could certainly be a lot worse, but to go about in such a state, pulse high, face red, worried sick that someone would notice how nervous one was, was certainly less than ideal, and he felt sure that his body was secreting all kinds of harmful chemicals and that the more he worried about the harmful chemicals the faster they were pouring out of wherever it was they came from.” - George Saunders

60. “his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety. But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson's Bank were principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.” - Charles Dickens

61. “It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.” - Kim Stanley Robinson

62. “When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run. . . .” - Russell D. Moore

63. “I was moving in a narrow range between busy distractedness and a pervasive sadness whose granules seemed to enter each cell, weighing it down... I ghosted between islands of anxiety... a fatigue that dulled my zest, decanted it. Sorrow felt like a marble coat I couldn’t shed.” - Diane Ackerman

64. “It is a promise which eminently deserves our observation that all who are united to Christ and acknowledge Him to be Christ and Mediator will remain to the end safe from all danger, for what is said of the body of the Church belongs to each of its members since they are one in Christ.” - John Calvin

65. “Behind every flinch is a fear or an anxiety - sometimes rational, sometimes not. Without the fear, there is no flinch. But wiping out the fear isn't what's important - facing it is.” - Julien Smith

66. “Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.” - Barbara W. Tuchman

67. “I've spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough they won't leave, and fearing that it's a matter of time before they figure me out and go.” - Shauna Niequist

68. “What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.” - George Dennison Prentice

69. “It ain't no use putting up your umbrella till it rains!” - Alice Caldwell Rice

70. “The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".” - Alain De Botton

71. “The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.” - Christopher Hitchens

72. “Self-observation is the first step of inner unfolding.” - Amit Ray

73. “When your past shows up to haunt you, make sure it comes after supper so it doesn't ruin your whole day.” - Jay Wickre

74. “When I don't have something to worry about, I worry. Nothing comes so naturally to a human being as anxiety and worry.” - Brian Richardson

75. “I watch worry and anxiety being pandered to through technology which is neutral.” - Brian Richardson

76. “If your body is screaming in pain, whether the pain is muscular contractions, anxiety, depression, asthma or arthritis, a first step in releasing the pain may be making the connection between your body pain and the cause. “Beliefs are physical. A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief. The belief then becomes biology.” - Marilyn Van M. Derbur

77. “It's like I have a sensor in my head, but she works on a seven-second delay... well-meaning, but perpetually about seven seconds too late to actually do anything to stop the horrific avalanche of shit-you-shouldn't- say-out-loud-but-I-just-did.” - Jenny Lawson

78. “Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.” - Wendell Berry

79. “In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.” - George Eliot

80. “One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and whatpeople can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities,the result is boredom. But when thematch is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.” - Daniel H. Pink

81. “It's true, I did say I wanted girlfriends," I capitulated hesitantly, "but couldn't we start with something smaller and less terrifying? Like maybe spend a weekend at a crack house? I heard those people are very nonjudgmental, and if you accidentally say something offensive you can just blame it on their hallucinations.” - Jenny Lawson

82. “Magnesium deficiency can produce symptoms of anxiety or depression, including muscle weakness, fatigue, eye twitches, insomnia, anorexia, apathy, apprehension, poor memory, confusion, anger, nervousness, and rapid pulse.” - Carolyn Dean

83. “There are times when I'm caught up in everything and I have to say to myself, "Please feel good; please feel better; everything's okay; you're fine; things aren't falling apart; take a second; get back to a place where you realize that you don't actually have real problems." That happens. You never know when those tables are gonna turn... For me, confidence is something that can come crashing down in one second.” - Taylor Swift

84. “He meant everything he said, when he said it. But this is his default. And it won out. Right now you're depressed about one thing. Before you were depressed about everything. These are good times for you.""I'm afraid of loving again. I'm afraid I've lost my faith.""You haven't.""The trapdoor I have in my mind? That can go to those bad places? It's almost gave way again.""You know the ways to keep it nailed shut.” - Emma Forrest

85. “Often people that tell others they are "extremely polite" when the situation calls for tact and bluntness are not actually polite people. Instead, they hide behind the word “polite” because they have low self esteem or hidden agendas. Sadly, they impolitely confuse the hell out of everyone, send mixed signals, which then makes people question their sanity and motives.” - Shannon L. Alder

86. “But the Christian also knows that he not only cannot and dare not be anxious, but that there is no need for him to be so. Neither anxiety now work can secure his daily bread, for bread is the gift of the Father.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

87. “Freedom is anxiety's petri dish. If routine blunts anxiety, freedom incubates it. Freedom says, "Even if you don't want to make choices, you have to, and you can never be sure you have chosen correctly." Freedom says, "Even not to choose is to choose." Freedom says, "So long as you are aware of your freedom, you are going to experience the discomfort that freedom brings." Freedom says, "You're on your own. Deal with it.” - Daniel B. Smith

88. “Arrogance is someone claiming to have come to Christ, but they won't spend more than five minutes listening to your journey because they are more concerned about their own well being, rather than being a true disciple of Christ. Blessed is the person that takes the time to heal and hear another person so they can move on.” - Shannon L. Alder

89. “When someone is stalking you because they think you are stalking them, it makes you wonder who really is the true stalker?” - Shannon L. Alder

90. “We are faced with choices every moment of our lives. Whatever choice we exercise must make us comfortable and at peace. Choices that are made out of fear and anxiety often do not lead to right action---Sasha Samy, Transcending Abuse & Betrayal.” - Sasha Samy

91. “The most incredible architectureIs the architecture of Self,which is ever changing, evolving, revolving and has unlimited beauty and light inside which radiates outwards for everyone to see and feel. With every in breatheyou are adding to your lifeand every out breathe you are releasing what is not contributing to your life.Every breathe is a re-birth.” - Allan Rufus

92. “All the greatest blessings are a source of anxiety, and at no time should fortune be less trusted than when it is best; to maintain prosperity there is need of other prosperity, and in behalf of the prayers that have turned out well we must make still other prayers. For everything that comes to us from chance is unstable, and the higher it rises, the more liable it is to fall. Moreover, what is doomed to perish brings pleasure to no one; very wretched, therefore, and not merely short, must the life of those be who work hard to gain what they must work harder to keep. By great toil they attain what they wish, and with anxiety hold what they have attained; meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return.” - seneca

93. “The other day in prayer I said to God, "Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?".” - Elizabeth Gilbert

94. “Perfect prayer does not consist in many words, silent remembering and pure intention raises the heart to that supreme Power.” - Amit Ray

95. “Whenever he was in company he wanted to get away, and whenever he was alone he wanted company.” - J.K. Rowling

96. “Keep making noise, I prayed, laughing. Bang drums. Clamor and ring bells for I cannot stand to hear the tired beating of this almost heart.” - Meg Howrey

97. “I like to read and write because it is the ONLY thing that takes my mind off of the real world and my spinning worries. It is a time I can be free of anxiety, worry, and stress. When my life gets hectic I HAVE to read and write or I'll drown.” - Shandy L. Kurth

98. “Essentially, almost all humans are born with a fear of the unknown. It casts a pall of anxiety which pushes us into the arms of religions and soothsayers and their made-up answers.” - Mario Stinger

99. “Life is like a game of chess.To win you have to make a move.Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHTand knowledge, and by learning the lessons that areacculated along the way.We become each and every piece within the game called life!” - Allan Rufus

100. “I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.” - Anna Funder

101. “Do you remember what I forgot?” - Erica Goros

102. “The way to misuse our possessions is to use them as an insurance against the morrow. Anxiety is always directed to the morrow, whereas goods are in the strictest sense meant to be used only for to-day.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

103. “It felt like this was never going to end. The world wasn't going to stop crashing down until there was nothing left of me but dust.” - Keary Taylor

104. “Let pressure pass over and through you. That way you can't be harmed by it.” - Brian Herbert

105. “The apprehension of this blessed truth (God's faithfulness) will check our murmurings. The Lord knows what is best for each of us, and one effect or resting on this truth will be the silencing of our petulant complainings. God is greatly honored when, under trial and chastening, we have good thoughts of Him, vindicate His wisdom and justice, and recognize His love in His very rebukes.” - A. W. Pink

106. “It’s been my experience that people always assume that generalized anxiety disorder is preferable to social anxiety disorder, because it sounds more vague and unthreatening, but those people are totally wrong. For me, having generalized anxiety disorder is basically like having all of the other anxiety disorders smooshed into one. Even the ones that aren’t recognized by modern science. Things like birds-will-probably-smother-me-in-my-sleep anxiety disorder and I-keep-crackers-in-my-pocket-in-case-I-get-trapped-in-an-elevator anxiety disorder. Basically I’m just generally anxious about f***ing everything. In fact, I suspect that’s how they came up with the name.” - Jenny Lawson

107. “My anxiety house a house and a fence and a deer in the yard. A zip code. A plague of starlings.” - Kristy Bowen

108. “So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.” - Edith Wharton

109. “We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.” - Alain De Botton

110. “Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.” - Alain De Botton

111. “She felt happy these days, yet there was always an undercurrent of sadness just below the surface” - Diane Chamberlain

112. “Panic---a deep abiding, free-floating anxiety, often without any reason or logical basis.” - Nelson DeMille

113. “Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.” - Walter Brueggemann

114. “Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.” - George Eliot

115. “Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.” - Helen Humphreys

116. “Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.” - George Eliot

117. “Let your cares drive you to God. I shall not mind if you have many of them if each one leads you to prayer. If every fret makes you lean more on the Beloved, it will be a benefit.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

118. “Has someone or something pushed your anxiety button? Answer it with prayer!” - Evinda Lepins

119. “Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.” - Paulo Coelho

120. “He felt like normal. Filled with anxiety, dread, sure. But even that wasn't unusual...” - John Ajvide Lindqvist

121. “We imagine that a little anxiety and worry is an indication of how wise we really are; it may be an indication of how wicked we really are.” - Oswald Chambers

122. “Mary Lou suddenly realizes that Mack calls the temperature number because he is afraid to talk on the telephone, and by listening to a recording, he doesn’t have to reply. It’s his way of pretending that he’s involved. He wants it to snow so he won’t have to go outside. He is afraid of what might happen. But it occurs to her that what he must really be afraid of is women. Then Mary Lou feels so sick and heavy with her power over him that she wants to cry. She sees the way her husband is standing there in a frozen pose. Mack looks as though he could stand there all night with the telephone receiver against his ear.” - Bobbie Ann Mason

123. “A coward talks to everyone but YOU.” - Shannon L. Alder

124. “When Dad was in the middle of a description of the hotel’s laundry facility, I interrupted. “Why haven’t you told me today, like you do every day, that Mom’s going to be better soon?”He looked up then. His gaze locked with mine and held a promise that no matter what he said or didn’t say, he and I would ride this out together. “I haven’t told you that today, Meg, because I don’t know.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

125. “Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom’s voice came to me, repeating things she’d said for months. Like, “My skin is melting off my face, isn’t it?” And, “My whole body feels dead from the crap they’re pouring into me. Do I look green to you?” And, “When I’m naked, I can see my heart beating.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

126. “the demons that make a person afraid are the hardest to cast out.” - Elizabeth George Speare

127. “I felt so weak and unhappy that I buried my face in the ground: I could not bear the strain of seeing around me the things of the earth. I felt convinced that every movement and every thought was forced, and that one had to be on one's guard against them.” - Franz Kafka

128. “Excessive caution destroys the soul and the heart, because living is an act of courage, and an act of courage is always an act of love.” - Paulo Coelho

129. “God does not regret saving you. There is no sin which you commit which is beyond the cross of Christ.” - Matt Chandler

130. “Greater is Your care for me than all the care I am able to take from myself.” - Thomas A. Kempis

131. “Petunia only ever went to the doctor reluctantly, and her motive in doing so was always the same: she did it in order to feel less anxious about things. The doctor was supposed to make the worry go away; she did quite enough worrying without actually having something to worry about. When she came out feeling no less anxious, as this time, something had gone wrong. The basic contract had been broken.” - John Lanchester

132. “No one feels good at four in the morning.If ants feel good at four in the morning—three cheers for the ants.” - Wislawa Szymborska

133. “You were talking about the wind," the Fillyjonk said suddenly. "A wind that carries off your washing. But I'm speaking about cyclones. Typhoons, Gaffsie dear. Tornadoes, whirlwinds, sandstorms... Flood waves that carry houses away... But most of all I'm talking about myself and my fears, even if I know that's not done. I know everything will turn out badly. I think about that all the time. Even while I'm washing my carpet. Do you understand that? Do you feel the same way?” - Tove Jansson

134. “One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.” - Rollo May

135. “You're surrounded by people and voices and noises, but there you are, alone and trembling inside. And you want to be invisible. (thinking) Please, don't notice me.” - Kellie Elmore