#paranoia

Who's they?" He wanted to know. "Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?" "Every one of them," Yossarian told him. "Every one of whom?" "Every one of whom do you think?" "I haven't any idea." "Then how do you know they aren't?" "Because..." Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration. Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all. ↗

— Joseph Heller

#murder #paranoia #funny

I got this idea about being afraid to let go of something and being afraid of sinking into a state of almost anesthesia, where you have to trust other people. Just the paranoia of it all. And it seemed to suit the frenetic track. So I just wrote it out and, you know, said it. ↗

— Nick Rhodes

#afraid #almost #anesthesia #being #being afraid

I don't believe in fate or destiny. I believe in various degrees of hatred, paranoia, and abandonment. However much of that gets heaped upon you doesn't matter - it's only a matter of how much you can take and what it does to you. ↗

— Henry Rollins

#believe #degrees #destiny #does #fate

There's a deep-seated paranoia that Americans have about not being Americans or something. ↗

— Billy Joel

#being #deep-seated #paranoia #something

My own reaction from a distance is that Pol Pot's demise as the leader of the Khmer Rouge was inevitable, and that his own paranoia did him in as much as anything else. ↗

— Sydney Schanberg

#demise #did #distance #else #him

I read 'Crime and Punishment' years ago and don't recall the details of it, but I do retain a strong sense of the creeping paranoia and panic. ↗

— Arthur Smith

#creeping #crime #details #i #i do

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control. ↗

— Jack Henry Abbott

#any #consume #control #could #daily

If you would know who controls you see who you may not criticise. ↗

— Tacitus

#authority #paranoia #anarchism

Some people think this is paranoia, but it isn't. Paranoids only think everyone is out to get them. Wizards know it. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#paranoia #humor

I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness? ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#fear #nihilism #paranoia #imagination