terrifying

Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.

People love the facade of a perfection relationship because perfection seems alluring. What they don__ realize is perfection is terrifying.

...repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.

Nothing like being in a dream, then waking up to a nightmare.

They thought he was scared all the time because he was a coward. The truth was, only he could see the world clearly enough to know how truly scary it was.

Minds that have withered into psychosis are far more terrifying than any character of fiction.

It didn't matter what he said. The world is terrifying. It always is. But Cecil reminded her that it was ok to relax in a terrifying world.

Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.

You cannot intimidate people with real bullets, but you can intimidate them with fake gun.

After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.

One of the most terrifying things I fear is not my potential, but how much regret I__l die with should I never use it.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

So I got dressed up kind of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo-y goth. As I head out, I say bye to Mum and Dad, and Mum says, __ou look cool_, just as Dad says, __ou look terrifying.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning._ Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life._ They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.