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Existential Dread Quotes

Browse 23 quotes about Existential Dread.

Existential Dread Quotes

“Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.”

EmotionMeaningIndigestionExistential Dread1927Why I Am Not A Christian
Book:Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
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“I exist inside a living hell — not a nightmare, but an unrelenting, screaming abyss with no exit. I am cursed beyond redemption, haunted by horrors that claw at my soul, and possessed by something monstrous that wears my face and mocks my every scream. Every second is torture — not pain, but a divine punishment etched into my bones, burning through my nerves, flooding my skull with fire. I am not alive. I am a condemned vessel, dragged through a waking exorcism that never ends.”

SufferingDespairTraumaMental IllnessIsolationChronic PainExistential DreadPsychological HorrorDystoniaBenzo Withdrawal
Author:Jonathan Harnisch
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“He doesn’t lock the door anymore—not out of courage, but quiet desperation. Each night, he lies there, hollowed and waiting, hoping a stranger might cross the threshold and finish the story he can’t bring himself to end. It isn’t bravery. It’s surrender in disguise. He doesn’t wish for peace, not even sleep—just an ending that isn’t authored by his own hand. A final act. A random mercy. That’s all he asks.”

DespairTraumaSurrenderMental IllnessVulnerabilityHopelessnessPoetic ProseExistential DreadSuicidal IdeationJonathan Harnisch
Book:Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia
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“...all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since once could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible…”

FateChaosUncertaintyDoomEntropyExistential DreadLoss Of Control
Book:The Melancholy of Resistance
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“Estranged mountains bulged under the sky, the big sky, the endless sky. Anyway, no one could see an end to it, which reassured her, since so much seemed to be coming to an end. It felt that way. But it seemed impossible---the universe dropping off, ending, there would be an end, and then there would be nothing, a no more, a vacuum of no more. Her imagination couldn’t let her go there.”

UniverseFutureEndingsExistential DreadFinite And Infinite
Book:The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories
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“Treacle looked interested. "I used to think like that too--get caught up in the endless cycle of crushing despair and existential dread. Now I'm starting to see it a little like this jawbreaker. Terrible on the outside. But if you get a little deeper? Still terrible. But below that? Terrible. But eventually you get to a point where it isn't terrible. At least I think so. I haven't made it that far yet. Point is, it can't be all bad. Probably. Unless it is. Oh no...I'm starting to feel the existential dread coming on again. We're all doomed, aren't we, Inga?”

HumorCandyDark HumorExistential DreadInga Thosa TherianJawbreakerTreacle Glimmerhappy
Book:Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons
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“Your death ain't gonna be some grand, dramatic exit. It will come on an ordinary, aggressively mundane day, right in the dead middle of your meticulously unfinished plans. You’re gonna drop dead on a random, unremarkable Tuesday afternoon. You’ll be in the middle of complaining about the traffic, or worrying about your 401k, or drafting an email to someone you don't even like. You're gonna leave behind a half-finished to-do list pinned to the fridge with a cheap magnet. There will be wet laundry sitting in the dryer. You will die with a whole lot of 'somedays' still tucked uselessly in your pocket.”

Reality CheckMemento MoriThe New SincerityExistential DreadModern TragedyVisceral RealityMain Character SyndromeSomeday SyndromeThe Banality Of DeathWet Laundry Grief
Book:Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”
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“Let the ominous one find me, not to visit, but to finish. Brief, brutal, a silence carved from screams. Let the lock stay open, the air thick with rot and mercy. No more rehearsals of shame, no more days on this damned spinning rock. I've already died, but I wake too often. Let tonight be the last mistake. Let nothing ever come after.”

TraumaMental IllnessInsomniaPsychosisExistential DreadSuicidal IdeationPoetic DespairBenzo HellEnd Stage SufferingKlonopin Withdrawal
Book:The Dreamer Sleeps Without Dreaming
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“What could I say? Maybe this: the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.”

TimeSpeedModernismCzechExistential Dread
Book:Slowness
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