#paranoia

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

#contemplation #control-issues #paranoia #thoughts #anxiety

God is always trying to give blessings to us, but our minds are usually too full to receive them. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#blessings #clouded-thoughts #confusion #delusions #doubt

[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia. ↗

— Adam Gopnik

#fear #hysteria #overreaction #panic #paranoia

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both partners run out of goods. But if the seed of a genuine disinterested love, which is often present, is ever to develop, it is essential that we pretend to ourselves and to others that it is stronger and more developed than it is, that we are less selfish than we are. Hence the social havoc wrought by the paranoid to whom the thought of indifference is so intolerable that he divides others into two classes, those who love him for himself alone and those who hate him for the same reason. Do a paranoid a favor, like paying his hotel bill in a foreign city when his monthly check has not yet arrived, and he will take this as an expression of personal affection – the thought that you might have done it from a general sense of duty towards a fellow countryman in distress will never occur to him. So back he comes for more until your patience is exhausted, there is a row, and he departs convinced that you are his personal enemy. In this he is right to the extent that it is difficult not to hate a person who reveals to you so clearly how little you love others. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#paranoia #relationships #love

Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials. ↗

— Mordecai Richler

#canada #coming #credentials #i #impeccable

A huge part of what animates homophobia among young people is paranoia and fear of their own capacity to be gay themselves. ↗

— Dan Savage

#animates #capacity #fear #gay #huge

People can get obsessed with romance, they can get obsessed with political paranoia, they can get obsessed with horror. It's isn't the fault of the subject matter that creates the obsession, I don't think. ↗

— Adam Arkin

#fault #get #horror #i #matter

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not. ↗

— Thomas Pynchon

#writers-on-writing #art

Paranoia is transmissible from mind to mind, but it does not go by the route of reason. It can therefore change its rationalization while remaining essentially the same. ↗

— William Nicholls

#paranoia #racism #change

This is a do-it-yourself test for paranoia: you know you've got it when you can't think of anything that's your fault. ↗

— Robert M. Hutchins

#do-it-yourself #fault #got #know #paranoia