Steven Wright Quotes

It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.

Sure, it was nice now, but eventually there would be running and screaming and blood on the floor.

Blind terror drove me on, with my flying stirrups whipping me into a frenzy. With no rider to carry I reached the kneeling riflemen first and they scattered as I came upon them.

I was shot from the funny gun.

Bambi, to a kid, was scary.

Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.

I saw my hometown burning that day.

But when I came back into the city for the first time last November, I thought every truck, every building was going to blow up. It has truly changed me something fierce.

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.

Staring down the barrel of a gun is the scariest thing you could ever experience. It's not funny. It's not for the movies.

I was 10 years old when the Northridge quake happened, and I lived right in the area, so it was a traumatic thing for me. I'd never had anything like that happen before. It's always stuck with me.

Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.

I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd.

And then the screaming begins.

In fear I hurried this way and that. I had the taste of blood and chocolate in my mouth, the one as hateful as the other.

If I'd known how wrong I was - if I'd had any idea of the awful night that lay ahead - I'd have run after him and never returned to that disgusting circus of blood, that revolting circus of death.

Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn’t calculate my steps. I didn’t have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.

I don't know (if they were men or women running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads.

Without thinking, I grab Al's arm and squeeze it as tightly as I can. I just need something to hold on to. Blood runs down the side of Christina's face and splatters on the ground next to her cheek. This is the first time I have ever prayed for someone to fall unconscious.... Al frees his hand and pulls me tight to his side. I clench my teeth to keep from crying out.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

I was woundering what he would say, what word could sum me up right then, when i saw the lights come across his face, blaringly yellow, and suddenly he was brighter, and brighter, and i asked him what was happening, what was wrong. I remember only that light, so strong it spilled across my shoulders, and lit up his face, and how scared he looked as something big and loud hit my door, sending glass shattering across me, little sparks catching the light like diamonds, as they fell, with me, into the dark.

He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. ~Jose Aracadio Segundo Buendia After the second banana slaughter

Here there be monster." Bob whispered, half hysterically. "Run! Run already!

But he knew well enough that any man in the right circumstances could be dehumanised by panic.

Did you see the frightened ones, Did you hear the falling bombs, Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter in the promise of a brave new world unfurlled beaneath the clear blue skies. Good bye blue skies.