Chapter Forty Five: Hostages

HELD HOSTAGE BY THE QUOTES

FROM THE VERY BEGINNING [...]

TO WIT,

True terror is to wake up one morning

and discover that your high school class

is running the country.

Kurt Vonnegut

Kindness. The only possible method when

dealing with a living creature. You'll get

nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no

matter what its level of development may be.

That I have maintained, do maintain, and

always will maintain. People who think you

can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror

is useless, whatever its colour -- white, red,

or even brown! Terror completely paralyzes

the nervous system.

Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog

We all practice self-deception to a degree:

no man can handle honesty without being cut

at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's

head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry,

each terror that he owns. I'm well used to

burying such things in the cellar and moving on.

Mark Lawrence, Prince of Fools

There are some dogs whivh, when you meet

them, remind you that, despite thousands of

years of man-made evolution, every dog is

still only two meals away from being a wolf.

These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully,

the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow,

their breath a-stink, while in the distance

their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really,

just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the

green of their eyes the red campfires

of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.

Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and

Accurate Prophecies of Aagnes Nutter, Witch

Society was cut in two:

those who had nothing united in common envy;

those who had nothing united in common terror.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections

on the French Revolution

Contrary to popular belief and hope,

people don't usually come running when they

hear a scream. That's not how humans work.

Humans look at other humans and say, "Did you

hear a scream?" because the first scream

might have been you screaming in your head,

or a horse backfiring.

Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on

the chariot of the storm," is the motivating

principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice

seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind.

There comes a time, however, when justice

demands the suspension of freedom. Then, terror,

on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance

to consummate the revolution. Every act of

rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence

and an appeal to the essence of being. But one

day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes

the responsibility of total guilt; in other words,

adopts murder and violence.

Albert Camus, The Rebel

This book is a memoir -- not of specific

life events, but of the processes of dissociation,

and of re-enlivening emotions that are too

shameful to admit or even feel. It is an account

of the altered states that trauma induces,

which make it possible to survive a

life-threatening event but impair the capacity

to feel fear, and worse still, impair

the ability to love.

Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

It is time, therefore, that you should apply

for aid to such helpful Spirits. But will you have

the strength of mind, the courage to endure

the approach of Beings so different from

mankind? I know that their coming produces

certain inevitable effects, an internal tremors,

the revulsion of the blood from its ordinary

course; but also I know that these terrors,

these revulsions, painful as they undoubtedly

are, must appear as nothing compared with

the mortal pain of separation from an object

loved gteatly and exclusively.

William Beckford, The Episodes of Vathek

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