Van Gogh One of the things people generally admired about Van Gogh, even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it. Or a pair of boots. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress anxietyobjects
The illusion of anxiety Or because of hormones. And so which would not really have been anxiety at all, but only an illusion. Even if one would certainly be hard put to explain the difference between an illusion of anxiety and anxiety itself. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress anxiety
Chilled-out anxiety Working in the typical dot-com office was an admixture of frenetic pace and a relaxed overall atmosphere, exemplifying that chilled-out anxiety which was the general mood of the 1990’s. Nikil Saval, Cubed technologyanxiety
Paranoia What's worse? Thinking you're being paranoid, or knowing you should be? Shane Carruth, Primer anxiety
What's wrong? Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King anxietylife
Distraction To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King boredommelancholyanxietyattentionpain
Test anxiety It was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. Shackleford's observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in 'test anxiety' might well be a fear of the tests' associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread—and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King anxietyattention
The Waiting Place A Poem by Dr. Seuss silverbirchpress.wordpress.com Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting. waitinganxietytimemelancholy
No kind No kind of shape, no kind of design or kind of picture or other work of art can be beautiful. No kind of color is beautiful. Beauty comes always from the singularity of things. Two things which happen to be closely similar in size, color, insurance value, smell, weight, or shape, may both seem equally beautiful. It is not therefore to be deduced that, say, a smell of turpentine is a necessary prerequisite of beauty; and nor is the fact that the two things' shapes are measurably within a millimeter of each other. They might still be as different as chalk and cheese: they might differ hugely in surface quality so that one lived and the other was dead. One judges a man by what he is, by his individuality, his idiosyncrasy; not by his measurable properties or measurable behavior or by the shape of his nose or the description in his passport. So with a work of art. David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design The Timeless Way of Building beauty