“Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you’re breathing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. But you have to breathe to scream. Panic.”
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Tagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, just breathe, Panic, Feelings, feels, Life
Appears In: Quotes About Life
Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Read:
The Kite Runner

Explore more quotes:

Beach Quotes (42)
Deep Quotes (500)
Encouraging Quotes (30)
Funny Quotes (120)
Inspirational Quotes (501)
Quotes about Love (854)
TV Quotes (1,000+)
Movie Quotes (1,000+)

About the author

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.