She is awake. Again she thinks about fear. Until then, she had not been aware of fear, she had been convinced that she did not feel fear, not even when they had taken the group of men out from the gym, or when she had heard the burst of gunfire. She listens. She knows now that fear is the absence of all emotion, it is emptiness, it is as if your whole body is drained of blood all at once.
Slavenka Drakulić, S. A Novel About the Balkans