Hysteria Quotes

“I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves.

"You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They
are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration
these last twenty years at least.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. (“The Medusa”)”
― Thomas Ligotti

“I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very ' bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so:...”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

“…madness is not hysteria. It can be very quiet…”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma.
But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information.
Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently.
p9-10”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest

“Wait.” Stefan’s voice was hard suddenly. Bonnie and Elena turned back and froze, embracing each other, trembling. “What is your—your father—going to do to you when he finds out that you allowed this?”

"He will not kill me,” Sage said brusquely, the wild tone back in his voice. “He may even find it as amusant as I do, and we will be sharing a belly laugh tomorrow.”
― L.J. Smith, Midnight

“The hysteric, whose body is transformed into a theatre for forgotten scenes, relives the past, bearing witness to a lost childhood that survived in suffering.”
― Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman

“[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.”
― Adam Gopnik

“The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric – a woman whose illness simulates the symptoms of other diseases – was transformed, through hypnosis, into an artificial hysteric who perfectly simulated the simulations of hysteria. The medical photograph becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, a representation so far removed from the original that all duplicitous traits, were easily erased, leaving the deranged and chaotic nature of the original far behind. The photograph succeeded in turning the hysteric into a wholly artificial being, literally a flat, framed, unmoving image.”
― Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France

“And I want you now
I want you now
I'll feel my heart implode
And I'm breaking out
Escaping now
Feeling my faith erode”
― Muse

“There followed a three-year spectacle during which [Senator Joseph] McCarthy captured enormous media attention by prophesying the imminent ruin of America and by making false charges that he then denied raising—only to invent new ones. He claimed to have identified subversives in the State Department, the army, think tanks, universities, labor unions, the press, and Hollywood. He cast doubt on the patriotism of all who criticized him, including fellow senators. McCarthy was profoundly careless about his sources of information and far too glib when connecting dots that had no logical link. In his view, you were guilty if you were or ever had been a Communist, had attended a gathering where a supposed Communist sympathizer was present, had read a book authored by someone soft on Communism, or subscribed to a magazine with liberal ideas. McCarthy, who was nicknamed Tailgunner Joe, though he had never been a tail gunner, was also fond of superlatives. By the middle of 1951, he was warning the Senate of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

McCarthy would neither have become a sensation, nor ruined the careers of so many innocent people, had he not received support from some of the nation’s leading newspapers and financing from right-wingers with deep pockets. He would have been exposed much sooner had his wild accusations not been met with silence by many mainstream political leaders from both parties who were uncomfortable with his bullying tactics but lacked the courage to call his bluff. By the time he self-destructed, a small number of people working in government had indeed been identified as security risks, but none because of the Wisconsin senator’s scattershot investigations.

McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties, liked his vituperative style, and enjoyed watching the powerful squirm. Whether his allegations were greeted with resignation or indignation didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were reported on and repeated. The more inflammatory the charge, the more coverage it received. Even skeptics subscribed to the idea that, though McCarthy might be exaggerating, there had to be some fire beneath the smoke he was spreading. This is the demagogue’s trick, the Fascist’s ploy, exemplified most outrageously by the spurious and anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.” McCarthy’s career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause. After all, if Communism was the ultimate evil, a lot could be hazarded—including objectivity and conventional morality—in opposing it.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“If I let the noise get out into the air it will be laughter, too loud, too much of it, someone is bound to hear, and then there will be hurrying footsteps and commands and who knows? Judgment: emotion inappropriate to the occasion. The wandering womb, they used to think. Hysteria. And then a needle, a pill. It could be fatal.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them." In the midst of two or three hundred, the divine presence becomes more problematical. And when the numbers run into thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the consciousness of every individual, declines almost to the vanishing point. For such is the nature of an excited crowd (and every crowd is automatically self-excited) that, where two or three thousand are gathered together, there is an absence not merely of deity, but even of common humanity.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun

“The brave man fears shame, the average man fears death, and the debased man fears life. The first is guided by the voice of conscience, the second by the will to survive, and the third by spasms of hysteria. The third is usually the one who, wanting to be the second, gives up on being the first.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“The rapid emergence of -woke- culture and the growing climate movement was giving rise to the call for a new, hyper-strict government that emerged from within the population itself.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Two entirely distinct state of consciousness were present which alternated very frequently and without warning and which became more and more differentiated in the course of the illness. In one of these states she recognized her normal surroundings; she was melancholy and anxious, but relatively normal. In the other state she hallucinated and was "naughty" —that is to say, she was abusive, used to throw the cushions at people, so far as the contractures at various times allowed, tore buttons off her bedclothes and linen with those of her fingers which she could move, and so on. At this stage of her illness if something had been moved in the room or someone had entered or left it (during her other state of consciousness) she would complain of having "lost" some time and would remark upon the gap in her train of conscious thoughts.”
― Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria

“Part of the way of the world was that women had a tendency to go crazy. Men could bring out this tendency. But to blame the men was to take sides, to lose logic, to enter the craziness of the women—because the very content of the women’s craziness was, in large part, the blameworthiness of the men.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“It will strike all countries. The global economic crisis could plunge 500 million people into poverty, so stated in a position paper by the UN (172).”
― Dr. Karina Reiss

“When the hysteria subsides, this video is destined to be another relic that we will never truly understand. A new tragedy presents itself before we can make sense of the last. Why does this keep happening, and who keeps doing this to us? I wish I could strangle their collective necks and be done with it, so we could hail our utopia in peace. Maybe some advanced being will sift through this junk when we’re gone, and wonder how siblings could be so cruel to each other.”
― Nick Drnaso, Sabrina

“Eugénie se souvient de ce fait divers qui remonte à une trentaine d’années : une prénommée Ernestine aspirait à s’émanciper de son rôle d’épouse en prenant des cours de cuisine auprès de son cousin chef cuisinier, espérant elle-même un jour être derrière les fourneaux d’une brasserie ; son mari, ébranlé dans son rôle dominant, l’avait fait interner à la Salpêtrière. Nombre d’histoires depuis le début du siècle font écho à celle-ci et se racontent dans les cafés parisiens ou les rubriques faits divers des journaux. Une femme s’emportant contre les infidélités de son mari, internée au même titre qu’une va-nu-pieds exposant son pubis aux passants ; une quarantenaire s’affichant au
bras d’un jeune homme de vingt ans son cadet, internée pour débauche, en même temps qu’une jeune veuve, internée par sa belle-mère, car trop mélancolique depuis la mort de son époux. Un dépotoir pour toutes celles nuisant à l’ordre public. Un asile pour toutes celles dont la sensibilité ne répondait pas aux attentes. Une prison pour toutes celles coupables d’avoir une opinion. Depuis l’arrivée de Charcot il y a vingt ans, il se dit que l’hôpital de la Salpêtrière a changé, que seules les véritables hystériques y sont internées.”
― Victoria Mas, Le Bal des folles

“The claim that hysteria ceased to exist can hardly be taken seriously for a simple reason. For both Charcot and Freud, the symptoms of hysteria were fabulously changeable. An anaesthesia could transform into a contracture, a paralysis into a neuralgia. What mattered was less the content of the symptom than what place it occupied for the sufferer and what it gave voice to. As anthropologists would soon demonstrate, culture contained ’symptom pools’ which could be borrowed from in order to articulate a discontent. Deprived of any other means to communicate their malaise or their pain, the subject would use the symptoms available in a culture as ’idioms of distress’.”
― Darian Leader

“In this hysterical phase, it was, so to speak, the femininity of man which projected itself on to woman and shaped her as an ideal figure in his image. In Romantic love, the aim was not now to conquer the woman, to seduce her, but to create her from the inside, to invent her, in some cases as achieved Utopian vision, as idealized woman , in others as femme fatale, as star - another hysterical, supernatural metaphor. The Romantic Eros can be credited with having invented this ideal of harmony, of loving fusion, this ideal of an almost incestuous form of twin beings — the woman as projective resurrection of the same, who assumes her supernatural form only as ideal of the same, an artefact doomed henceforth to l'amour or, in other words, to a pathos of the ideal resemblance of beings and sexes - a pathetic confusion which substitutes for the dual otherness of seduction. The whole mechanics of the erotic changes meaning, for the erotic attraction which previously arose out of otherness, out of the strangeness of the Other, now finds its stimulus in sameness - in similarity and resemblance. Auto-eroticism, incest? No . Rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same eyeing up the other, investing itself in the other, alienating itself in the other - but the other is only ever the ephemeral form of a difference which brings me closer to me. This indeed is why, with Romantic love and all its current spin-offs, sexuality becomes connected with death: it is because it becomes connected with incest and its destiny - even in banalized form (for we are no longer speaking of mythic, tragic incest here; with modern eroticism we are dealing with a secondary incestuous form - of the protection of the same in the image of the other - which amounts to a confusion and corruption of all images).
We have here then, in the end, the invention of a femininity which renders woman superfluous. The invention of a difference which is merely a roundabout copulation with its double. And which, at bottom, renders any encounter with otherness impossible (it would be interesting to know whether there was not any hysterical quid pro quo from the feminine in the construction of a virile, phallic mythology; feminism being one such example of the hystericization of the masculine in woman, of the hysterical projection of her masculinity in the exact image of the hysterical projection by man of his femininity into a mythical image of woman).”
― Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out

“Move beyond the traditional goal, habit, and strengths-management hysteria. Goals, habits and strengths are means, not ends. Don't turn means into ends unto themselves.”
― Richie Norton, Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping

“Sometimes I could still hear their phantom hysteria in the afternoons.”
― Ling Ma

“I couldn't read, and it had almost killed me. I hadn't even won properly. I sank to my knees, letting the platform carry me, and covered my face in my shaking hands.

Tears burned just before pain seared through my left arm. I would never beat the third task. I would never free Tamlin, or his people. The pain shot through my bones again, and through my increasing hysteria, I heard words inside my head that stopped me short.

Don't let her see you cry.

Put your hands at your sides and stand up.

I couldn't. I couldn't move.

Stand. Don't give her the satisfaction of seeing you break.

My knees and spine, not entirely of my own will, forced me upright, and when the ground at last stopped moving, I looked at Amarantha with tearless eyes.

Good, Rhysand told me. Stare her down. No tears- wait until you're back in your cell. Amarantha's face was drawn and white, her black eyes like onyx as she beheld me. I had won, but I should be dead. I should be squashed, my blood oozing everywhere.

Count to ten. Don't look at Tamlin. Just stare at her.

I obeyed. It was the only thing that kept me from giving in to the sobs trapped within my chest, thundering to get out.

I willed myself to meet Amarantha's gaze. It was cold and vast and full of ancient malice, but I held it. I counted to ten.

Good girl. Now walk away. Turn on your heel- good. Walk toward the door. Keep your chin high. Let the crowd part. One step after another.

I listened to him, let him keep me tethered to sanity as I was escorted back to my cell by the guards-who still kept their distance. Rhysand's words echoed through my mind, holding me together.

But when my cell door closed, he went silent, and I dropped to the floor and wept.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“they will reflexively demand that somebody do something. The worst among us always see this as an opportunity for political gain. The facts don’t matter to them. It is simple stimulus and response. There’s a tragedy, so they’re going to capitalize on it for their benefit. They’ll certainly offer a something. Unfortunately the thing they offer usually wouldn’t have prevented the crime, it punishes those who had nothing to do with it, and actually makes the problem worse by paving the way for more awful events in the future.”
― Larry Correia, In Defense of the Second Amendment

“When a London gay switchboard’s lines broke down because they were so overwhelmed with AIDS calls, telephone company employees refused to fix them because they were afraid of contracting AIDS through the wiring.”
― Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic