Daily Inspiration Quote by Russell Hoban

Hoban turns a private panic into a bureaucratic beatdown. The line is funny in that dry, bleak way: of course an “attack of nerves” is an attack by the nervous system, but saying it out loud exposes how absurd the phrase is. We talk about anxiety as if it’s an external event, a weather front passing through. Hoban literalizes the metaphor and suddenly the sufferer isn’t weak-willed or melodramatic; he’s outgunned.

The real punch is in “system.” Hoban isn’t describing a mood, he’s describing an institution that lives inside you. A system has rules, redundancies, feedback loops, and the unshakeable advantage of being always on. That’s the subtext: modern life trains us to respect systems (legal, medical, economic) as impersonal and therefore unquestionable. By casting the nervous system in the same register, Hoban hints at the particular humiliation of anxiety: you can’t argue with it, can’t appeal to its better nature, can’t resign from it. You’re forced into a kind of internal class war where the state and the citizen share the same body.

As a novelist, Hoban’s intent isn’t clinical precision; it’s moral reframing. He offers an alibi that’s also an indictment. If the “system” is the one doing the attacking, then the cultural demand to simply “calm down” starts to sound like telling someone to outvote an autocracy. The wit softens the despair just enough to make it sayable, which is often the first real counterattack.