Jacqueline Taylor

“What, in all the world, could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated.”
― Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table: The Complete Autobiography

“Someone asked them to be quiet, so it's just a matter of a time before all hell breaks loose.”
― Brian Andreas

“...at such moments of extreme panic and anguish you do manage that trick with time: you are at last free from the illusion that time is linear.

In panic, time stops: past, present and future exist as a single overwhelming force. You then, perversely, want time to appear to run forwards because the 'future' is the only place you can see an escape from this intolerable overload of feeling. But at such moments time doesn't move. And if time isn't running, then all events that we think of as past or future are actually happening simultaneously. That is the really terrifying thing. And you are subsumed. You're buried, as beneath an avalanche, by the weight of simultaneous events.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“...Anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against a backdrop of normal, everyday experience. This, of course, is one of the features of anxiety and panic that make them suck so bad.”
― Daniel B. Smith, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety