Safety is largely an illusion, and panic knows this.

People say, 'Are you insane?' But the most successful climbers are the most calculating, with the most refined sense of risk. They're hyper-conscious of safety. They're the least insane people I know.

...at such moments of extreme panic and anguish you do manage that trick with time: you are at last free from the illusion that time is linear.

In panic, time stops: past, present and future exist as a single overwhelming force. You then, perversely, want time to appear to run forwards because the 'future' is the only place you can see an escape from this intolerable overload of feeling. But at such moments time doesn't move. And if time isn't running, then all events that we think of as past or future are actually happening simultaneously. That is the really terrifying thing. And you are subsumed. You're buried, as beneath an avalanche, by the weight of simultaneous events.

Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

You lost your way in the darkness? Don’t panic; that will be your best light!

I panicked when I tried to follow her movements with my eyes, just to be blocked by a horde of ghostly old people grinning at dirty babies whose faces screamed without making a sound.