Claustrophobic Quotes

Bridget wondered whether it all came down to the claustrophobic choice between dying beautiful or living ugly. ~ Ann Brashares

I'm not a claustrophobe, but you don't need to be to feel claustrophobic inside an MRI. It's like being buried alive. ~ Billy Collins

The winters are too long, and there's only one airline, so it's difficult to escape when you feel frustrated or claustrophobic. The audience for our films isn't very large, so it's difficult to support an industry. But, Iceland is beautiful. Sometimes it's hard to imagine living anywhere else. ~ Baltasar Kormakur

I'm a bit claustrophobic, I know that now. ~ David Hockney

I find my room claustrophobic. It is small, but that's not what I mean. It's claustrophobic because I feel like I've been trapped here for so long, this floor forming the centre stage from where my life story is playing out. ~ Ali Pantony

She once complained that her stories were like 'birds bred in cages,' but that concentrated atmosphere, that claustrophobic hothouse of emotion, was her talent. Her stories were little masterpieces of compression: she succinctly contained whole lifetimes in a few pages, every moment loaded with as much as it could bear. ~ Katie Roiphe

I'm very claustrophobic. ~ Brittany Snow

I enjoy a four-seasonal climate and wide-open spaces, so being on an island 2,500 miles into the South Pacific made me feel a little claustrophobic. ~ Matthew Fox

Celebrate those who have the courage to be second, because I do think that often there really is this claustrophobic pressure to innovate instead of to adapt. ~ Chelsea Clinton

Space is something that you have to define. Otherwise, it is like anxiety, which is too vague. A fear is something specific. I like claustrophobic spaces, because at least then you know your limits. ~ Louise Bourgeois

I need relationships, but sometimes when I am in one I feel claustrophobic. It is about feeling that I still have my freedom, that I have choices. I don't look back on the past because I like to live in the present. I know this makes some people think I probably never cared, but I need my freedom and I like to keep moving. ~ Juliette Binoche

So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail - the endlessly repeated shouts of "why," the rebuttals, calls for "evidence," qualifications and quibbles - stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole. I suffer from recurrent bouts of nausea in the face of this densely woven tissue of "arguments," most of which are nothing but blinds for something else altogether, generally something unsavory; and I feel an urgent need to exit from it altogether. ~ Raymond Geuss

The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio's chiaroscuro with Renoir's impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment. ~ Ella Leya

'The Oath' seems like the perfect project for me, coming off the back of a big-scale adventure film like 'Everest.' I want to delve into an intimate, dark and psychological world where the characters are claustrophobic. ~ Baltasar Kormakur

We spent a century closed up within four walls
and a roof.
We are claustrophobic.
We prefer the sun and the wind and the sea
though it bites some of us
who are made of metal, and tears papery hearts. ~ Catherynne M Valente

That image - of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought the whole thing was a game - melded with the furtive nocturnal slugs, and my solitary pacing and singing, and the separate, claustrophobic stairway, and the charmless abstract painting, and the gold-framed mirror, and the slithery green satin bedspread, and became inseperable from them. It wasn't a cheerful composite. As a memory, it is more like a fog bank than a sunlit meadow.
Yet I think of that period as having been a happy time in my life.
Happy is the wrong word. Important. ~ Margaret Atwood

I'm a bit claustrophobic, I don't like crowds, I live by the sea - that's what I see when I come out of my house in Bridlington. ~ David Hockney

Though Beckett remained confined to the same claustrophobic hotel room that had housed him for weeks now, he'd attended the wedding in every sense but literally.
He dressed for the occasion, and Eve helped him get his bow tie just right before she left, promising once again that her hummingbird pin would send him every detail it could.
Riveted to the live feed from Eve's transmitter on his hotel room TV, Beckett stood when the congregation stood, and he sat when they sat. And when he noticed that the camera had bounced even lower, Beckett knelt.
As Kyle came fluttering down the aisle in her simple blue dress, Beckett swore aloud in the empty room. Shit, Fairy Princess, you're an angel. ~ Debra Anastasia

The idea of playing a character for even two years, to me feels claustrophobic - only because I want to play a lot of different people. ~ Hilary Swank

I'm kind of claustrophobic ... It's not even like enclosed spaces. It's like I hate being stuck in one band, you know? Just being stuck is the biggest drag, for fear that, you know, just that you can't get out. ~ Dave Grohl

In the cocoon, there is no idea of light at all, until we experience some longing for openness, some longing for something other than the smell of our own sweat. When we examine that comfortable darkness - look at it, smell it, feel it - we find it is claustrophobic. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

In certain areas I don't function well and in other areas I function very well. I'm very good professionally. I have good discipline, I'm able to write every day and do films and not go six times over the budget. I mean I'm a coherent person, but I also don't like to go through tunnels when I travel. I'm claustrophobic. ~ Woody Allen

After my dad leaves, I look over and realize Tobin's eyes are open, and he's watching me.
:Hey over there.: I smile at him.
:Hey yourself. Getting claustrophobic in here yet?:
:Nah, not really. I had a friend who helped me face my phobia, and I think it's a lot better now. In the end, all he got for his trouble was some really nasty sea wasp stings.:
:I think he got more than that.: Tobin sends me a quizzical smile, and I blush when I think how he helped me in our tiny prison. :That's good news, though, about your claustrophobia being better.: He closes his eyes. :I don't want to have to hum that many lullabies to you ever again.: ~ Polly Holyoke

These girls aren't wounded so much as post-wounded, and I see their sisters everywhere. They're over it. *I am not a melodramatic person.* God help the woman who is. What I'll call "post-wounded" isn't a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect---these women are aware that "woundedness" is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much. The post-wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: don't cry too loud, don't play victim, don't act the old role all over again. Don't ask for pain meds you don't need, don't give those doctors another reason to doubt the other women on their examination tables. Post-wounded women fuck men who don't love them and then they feel mildly sad about it, or just blase about it, more than anything they refuse to care about it, refuse to hurt about it---or else they are endlessly self-aware about the posture they have adopted if they allow themselves this hurting.

The post-wounded posture is claustrophobic. It's full of jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick-on-the-heels of anything that might look like self-pity. I see it in female writers and their female narrators, troves of stories about vaguely dissatisfied women who no longer fully own their feelings. Pain is everywhere and nowhere. Post-wounded women know tha ~ Leslie Jamison

I get claustrophobic in a harness. I'd be a terrible superhero. ~ Kelly Macdonald

I became super claustrophobic with Hollywood. I don't like Hollywood. I don't like what it represents. I think that Hollywood is great if you're an actor, actress, established. But for reality people or what people perceive as reality, it's tough. People are constantly discrediting everything you put on camera. ~ Brody Jenner

I've got to be by trees, otherwise I get claustrophobic. ~ Liam Gallagher

I have crazy claustrophobic dreams, weird elevator dreams where the elevator closes in and all of a sudden I am lying down - oh my God, it's a casket. Just freaky stuff like that. ~ Dave Grohl

The first category comprised those for whom books were the only breath of fresh air in their claustrophobic daily lives. His favorite customers. They ~ Nina George

I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn't just looking back at you. ~ Annie Leibovitz

I'm unbelievably claustrophobic, and I have really bad anxiety. There were a few moment when I was very dramatic and thought, 'I'm not going to live through this. I'm going to hyperventilate and just die. Right here in jail.' ~ Shannen Doherty

I'm not very good at being domesticated. I've tried. The domestic life I find claustrophobic - the rituals and habits and patterns. ~ Ralph Fiennes

The old adage is, 'Write what you know.' But if you only do that, your work becomes claustrophobic. I say, 'Write what you want to know.' ~ Julia Glass

I'm claustrophobic. ~ Michael Keaton

In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her. ~ Nancy Willard

I think about dying but I dont want to die. Not even close. In fact my problem is the complete opposite. I want to live, I want to escape. I feel trapped and bored and claustrophobic. There's so much to see and so much to do but I somehow still find myself doing nothing at all. I'm still here in this metaphorical bubble of existence and I can't quite figure out what the hell I'm doing or how to get out of it. ~ Matty Healy

Images of broken light dance behind my eyelids. How could this giant lamp compare to the sun?
Everything is wrong here. Shattered. Broken.
Like the light.
Like me.
I never thought about how important the sky was until I didn't have one.
I am surrounded by walls.
I have just replaced one box for another. ~ Beth Revis

It started off really ... claustrophobic. I feel like I was really really protected. Really guarded with myself. I feel like they [Def Jam] were giving me the blueprint and I couldn't get with that ~ Rihanna

I'm claustrophobic. I can't go into haunted houses. They have these tight, dark, enclosed space. I freak out. That's my phobia. It gets me out of stuff. Someone asks me to do something and I tell them I can't because I'm claustrophobic. ~ Mark Consuelos

If I had to model clothes in a time period other than the 21st century, I think I'd like to model way back when they just wore skin loincloths. That would be best suited for me - better than corsets. I'm quite claustrophobic. ~ Lara Stone

The kinds of roles dogs fill can be hard to come by in human relationships. We touch the dog or the pet at whim. There is a lack of self-consciousness and a fluidity to it that is absent from most human relationships. If someone acted that way to you, you'd feel claustrophobic pretty quickly. It's a boundary violation. ~ Caroline Knapp

Entering the rain forest was like passing through a green curtain into a massive haunted room. It was as claustrophobic as I feared. We could only see a few feet in front of us, like a bank of fog, except it was trees and vines: trees that soared well into the sky, vines that grew at impossible angles and thick waxy leaves the blotted out the sun. ~ James Morris

I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic, and the others either give me a stiff neck or lockjaw. ~ Tallulah Bankhead

Goodness knows I have spent more than my fair share of days with a naked face and rat's nest hair while still feeling good about life, but tonight I am claustrophobic in my own skin. ~ Angie Martin

They had ganged up on her, in the claustrophobic, loving way of families, and she wanted no more of it. ~ Gregory Maguire

New York is a nice place." "If you like concrete, crowds, and that claustrophobic, closed-in feeling. ~ Janette Rallison

Our life together was filled with contrasts. One week we were croc hunting with Dateline in Cape York. Only a short time after that, Steve and I found ourselves out of our element entirely, at the CableACE Award banquet in Los Angeles.
Steve was up for an award as host of the documentary Ten Deadliest Snakes in the World. He lost out to the legendary Walter Cronkite. Any time you lose to Walter Cronkite, you can't complain too much. After the awards ceremony, we got roped into an after-party that was not our cup of tea.
Everyone wore tuxedos. Steve wore khaki. Everyone drank, smoked, and made small talk, none of which Steve did at all. We got separated, and I saw him across the room looking quite claustrophobic. I sidled over.
"Why don't we just go back up to our room?" I whispered into his ear. This proved to be a terrific idea. It fit in nicely with our plans for starting a family, and it was quite possibly the best seven minutes of my life!
After our stay in Los Angeles, Steve flew directly back to the zoo, while I went home by way of one my favorite places in the world, Fiji. We were very interested in working there with crested iguanas, a species under threat. I did some filming for the local TV station and checked out a population of the brilliantly patterned lizards on the Fijian island of Yadua Taba.
When I got back to Queensland, I discovered that I was, in fact, expecting. Steve and I were over the moon. I couldn't believe how thrilled he w ~ Terri Irwin

merrymaking. Yes, Katie would enjoy America, Frances thought as she put on her coat and her hat; in fact, America would enjoy Katie. She left her apartment block and, crossing the road, walked the short distance to the Ninth Avenue Elevated line at South Ferry. Although the elevated line took longer, she preferred not to take the subway system, being slightly claustrophobic. The idea of speeding along in a small underground train made her feel dizzy, so she preferred to travel aboveground by the El for her day of work as a domestic at the Walker-Browns' residence. As she took her familiar journey north that morning, along Greenwich Street and Battery Place to Gansevoort Street in lower Manhattan and on to Ninth Avenue ~ Hazel Gaynor

'The Black Magician Trilogy' was about a conflict between countries and was very limited and almost claustrophobic in its range of settings, while 'The Age of the Five' was about a conflict between continents. ~ Trudi Canavan

I'm quite claustrophobic, and I don't like everyone crowding around and shouting the same questions. ~ Niall Horan

You're just selfish," she says.
"Go fuck yourself," he says quietly.
"You said you'd be nice."
"I'm not selfish."
"Sure you are. You love everything for as long as it's easy then as soon as you have to actually empathise with another human being you get claustrophobic. ~ Exurb1a

At first it was exhilarating but when I realized it wasn't going away, it became scary and claustrophobic. Fame is a weird thing. ~ Sharon Stone

I've usually never felt comfortable shooting until things were kind of claustrophobic, but ballet dancers need a lot of space, so the sets that I designed had to be big. Normally, I'd design a kitchen that was half the size of a normal kitchen, just to make everything feel kind of womb-like, but the kitchen in a ballet would have to be like 100 feet wide and just as long. ~ Guy Maddin

I don't get claustrophobic. ~ Ian Ziering

Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet. ~ Jonathan Franzen

The thought of being in space, and kind of enclosed, I find would be very claustrophobic. I think I would panic in that situation. ~ Sean Bean

I don't know if it's irrational, and I would never say this before, but I think I'm a little bit agoraphobic when I'm in huge crowds of people. I mean, it's claustrophobic, probably - small spaces and large groups of people, anxiety rises for me. ~ Taylor Hanson

Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work. ~ Nancy Kress

British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography. ~ Lee Child

It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Lives that are so conspicuous have a claustrophobic feeling. Once you're in charge of running a country, you're under scrutiny all the time. That's a trap. ~ Kathryn Harrison

It's temporary, Maddie. This is all very temporary.
Great, I thought. My life will suck, temporarily. For the time being, my life is going to be claustrophobic and awful and lonely and desolate and depressing. Temporarily. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

Evil should not be, Detective Vera. Truly never can be. But in defining it as such, an inherent human bond with negativity confirms its very existence. Its mere acknowledgement cancels its credibility. Evil is nothing - the lack of anything of substance - made concrete as a balance to everything else. Evil is not, yet it is a part of
each human, because humans welcome its participation in their lives. They speak of it in anger or disgust, fear or even wonder - the most appropriate response - giving it a stronger foundation with every passing thought it distorts. Though within their pliable minds, they welcome it with the glee of the ignorant, nurturing the unthinkable, thinking the unimaginable, imagining the most horrid, abysmal designs, embellishing them with an insidious veracity until evil is as substantial a reality as their next breath. I strive for something else, beyond evil's claustrophobic clutches. I strive to transcend evil by becoming pure nothing. I strive as my followers strived." He paused, his ideology a cancer, spreading… "I am, yet I strive to not be. Do you understand, comrade?" His tone suggested fellowship, disciples of the same obscene religion. ... ~ John Claude Smith

I've never been to the Oscars, but if I was ever invited to the Oscars, I would have this weird paranoia of terrorism. It just feels like The Poseidon Adventure, everyone in their tuxes. Somehow, I feel like the whole time I would be looking for where the nearest exit was, and in a cold sweat about some kind of man-made disaster, like a terrorist strike or something. It seems like such a scary, claustrophobic proposition. ~ Mike White

I'm a really claustrophobic person to begin with. I hate elevators, especially crammed elevators. I get really scared. So I think that it's very definitely scary when girls are all around me and I can't go anywhere. At the same time, I guess I got to get used to it, you know what I mean? ~ Justin Bieber

When I look outside, I feel nothing,
When I look inside, I feel Nothing!
Lockdown of Emotions!
Completely Blank, its Black everywhere...
Suffocating, claustrophobic, saturation point is crossed!
Yet..

My Happiness is due...
I Will Live for that!

- SustainCovidTimes ~ Somya Kedia

The chowdry, or burqa
the Saudi, North African, and Central Asian version of the head, face, and body shroud
is a sensory deprivation isolation chamber. It is claustrophobic, may lead to anxiety and depression, and reinforces a woman's already low self-esteem. It may also lead to vitamin D deficiency diseases such as osteoporosis and heart disease. Sensory deprivation officially constitutes torture and is practiced as such in the world's prisons. ~ Phyllis Chesler

I always think that the exceptional people are those who remain outsiders but still communicate on a grand scale. I think I want everyone to feel more free, and so I feel really claustrophobic on behalf of lots of people. ~ Bat For Lashes

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience. ~ Ian McEwan

There are still too many people out there who are claustrophobic. On easyCruise, we are going to open up as many cabins as we can. ~ Stelios Haji-Ioannou

Doing some of the 'Lord Of The Rings' press junkets got a bit claustrophobic. ~ Ian McKellen

Her work failed her. She had reached a desperate, claustrophobic stage of being imprisoned halfway in a novel: there was too much behind her for her to retreat and not a glimmer of light ahead. She sat for hours without writing, staring at the last few wrods on the page, seeing no significance in them. Her characters fell into frozen poses, speech died on their lips: they had sat at a banquet for weeks and she had not the power to bring them to their feet again. ~ Elizabeth Taylor

I like stripper shoes. I like being tall because I'm claustrophobic. ~ Jessie J.

When you're reading, you're laughing and not quite noticing what's happening. One second you're still kind of chuckling, and then all of sudden you're in the third act of the book and in this very dark and claustrophobic place. ~ Moshe Kasher

I have a fear of heights and I'm claustrophobic. ~ Kunal Nayyar

If you've ever thought, 'The new Times Square is delightful but would be even better if it were more claustrophobic and nearly impossible to leave', the Aguas Calientes is calling your name ~ Mark Adams

The night following the reading, Gansey woke up to a completely unfamiliar sound and fumbled for his glasses. It sounded a little like one of his roommates was being killed by a possum, or possibly the final moments of a fatal cat fight. He wasn't certain of the specifics, but he was sure death was involved.
Noah stood in the doorway to his room, his face pathetic and long-suffering. "Make it stop," he said.
Ronan's room was sacred, and yet here Gansey was, twice in the same weak, pushing the door open. He found the lamp on and Ronan hunched on the bed, wearing only boxers. Six months before, Ronan had gotten the intricate black tattoo that covered most of his back and snaked up his neck, and now the monochromatic lines of it were stark in the claustrophobic lamplight, more real than anything else in the room. It was a peculiar tattoo, both vicious and lovely, and every time Gansey saw it, he saw something different in the pattern. Tonight, nestled in an inked glen of wicked, beautiful flowers, was a beak where before he'd seen a scythe.
The ragged sound cut through the apartment again.
"What fresh hell is this?" Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air.
Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted bac ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended. ~ Eric Maisel

Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic. ~ Anne Waldman

It was an intensely lonely moment, like all of eighth grade condensed into one claustrophobic second. ~ Lisa Rowe Fraustino

I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn't like being a barrister's wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It seemed claustrophobic. ~ Caryl Churchill

The woods were definitely changing. Aurora and Phillip could no longer see the sky at all because of the ancient tall trees that stretched far overhead. Pines and other shaggy-barked species shot a hundred feet straight up on massive trunks, some of which were as thick around as a small house. The canopies that spread out at their tops blocked out most of the sun; only a rare dappled shaft made it through. But it didn't feel claustrophobic. The absence of light kept the underbrush low: moss on ancient fallen logs, puddles of shade flowers, mushrooms and tiny lilies. It was airy and endless like the largest cathedral ever imagined. ~ Liz Braswell

As long as I'm in your heart, I'll never truly die.' Ha! Please don't keep me trapped in your heart after I die, girl. I get claustrophobic. ~ Brent Weeks

There are probably a few things worse than climbing into a hole that is actually underneath a creepy basement, but at that moment, it was hard to think of any of them.
I was only a few steps down the ladder before I was plunged into darkness. The dim light in the cellar wasn't strong enough to penetrate the gloom. I was also pretty sure that the tunnel was narrower now, and as I took another step down, both my shoulders brushed the walls.
The metallic taste of fear flooded my mouth as my suddenly sweaty hands slid on the iron rungs.
"Mercer?" Archer called from above me. "You okay?"
I rested my forehead on the back of my hands, and tried to keep the panic out of my voice as I replied, "Yeah, fine. Why do you ask?"
"Because you're gasping."
Oh. Now that he mentioned it, my breath was heaving in and out of my lungs pretty quickly. I made an effort to slow it down as he asked, "Is it the dark, or-" He grunted a little and shifted. Dirt rained down on me, and I shut my eyes.
"Both," I choked out. "Apparently I'm claustrophobic now. That's, uh, new. Probably a side effect of fleeing a burning building through an underground tunnel." I took another shaky breath. "Yay for psychological trauma."
"Come back up," Archer said automatically, and I kind of loved him for that.
"No," I said, willing my feet to keep moving. "We're trying to save the world here, Cross. No time for panic attacks. ~ Rachel Hawkins

When I first traveled around the globe, it took over a year, on a boat full of men, who were lucky if they made it. Now, the world is just there. All of it. In an hour I will be on a flight to Sydney, and by lunchtime I will have arrived. It makes me feel claustrophobic, as if the world is literally shrinking, like a balloon losing air. ~ Matt Haig

Los Angeles is more hospitable to writers [Than NY]. It's less claustrophobic. It feels more unpredictable and dangerous, and the landscape is less structured. You see coyotes lurking all over the place. It just feels wilder and more dangerous. ~ Nick Antosca

I really wouldn't want to live in America. I found New York claustrophobic and dirty. I missed England when I was there, simple things like smells and the British sense of humor. ~ Jonny Lee Miller

I hate elevators. I'm claustrophobic so for me to be in an elevator or small spaces is probably the worst thing on earth. ~ Aino Jawo