William Manchester Quotes

Oh my God. My God. It’s all over.

Once you know how completely and suddenly the earth can open up at your feet and the worst can happen, it also, paradoxically, leaves you more afraid of everything else.

Once you've had a panic attack you live in fear that another one is going to come. From the second it's gone, every moment every day is about the next one.

Anxiety is practising failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It's fear about fear, fear that means nothing.

I'm familiar with that feeling of silence that comes with a very imminent catastrophe, when you know you have absolutely no control over a situation.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

In general, I think I'm quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.

There's horror in your life, believe me, whether it's coming, or you've just been lucky to miss it today.

We suddenly saw how people reacted in the event of massive social upheaval, and the way that the little problems in your life don't go away. You don't stop being frightened of spiders just because the world's blown up.

My wife had taken off on a plane. Two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I, of course, like any other person, felt potentially devastated, panicky a little bit.

He who fears is literally delivered to destruction.

I actually had an experience where I thought somebody was breaking into my house. That's got to be the most terrified I've ever been in my life. I don't know if that's saying much. The fear, especially as a female in a house by yourself, was horrible.

What I wasn't prepared for were the feelings of anxiety that it stirred in me. I wasn't prepared for the initial feeling of I don't want to have to do that again. I was scared.

The sky isn't falling.

I saw my hometown burning that day.

I told my therapist I was having nightmares about nuclear explosions. He said don't worry it's not the end of the world.

My mind shrank from the menace sweeping down on us, … vainly clinging to the fancy that great disasters only happen to other people.

When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape - I remember it all.

For like four or five months of my life I was too scared to like, move around and reach out for things because I was worried that I'd my hands would run into glass, like I could reach up and if I reached up and knocked on the air it would make a noise. I couldn't look at the sky because I was worried that I see a crack.

In grief we know the worst of what we feel but who can tell the end of what we fear?

Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster.

The fear's as bad as falling.

I have spent most of my life worrying about things that have never happened.

I've never been to the Oscars, but if I was ever invited to the Oscars, I would have this weird paranoia of terrorism. It just feels like The Poseidon Adventure, everyone in their tuxes. Somehow, I feel like the whole time I would be looking for where the nearest exit was, and in a cold sweat about some kind of man-made disaster, like a terrorist strike or something. It seems like such a scary, claustrophobic proposition.

Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday.