Quotes About Fear

Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them; each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and, once spoken, such a question - as Do you love me? - could never be answered or forgotten.

In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don't think I like reality very much. Principally, I don't understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do.

Passing through the outskirts of the city, she thought, it's as though everything were traveling so fast that the solid stuff couldn't stand it and were going to pieces under the strain, cornices blowing off and windows caving in. She knew she was afraid to say it truly, afraid to face the knowledge that it was a voluntary neck-breaking speed, a deliberate swirling faster and faster to end in destruction.

Fear', the doctor said, 'is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.

Not one of us, even after last night, can say the word ghost without a little involuntary smile. No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.

In the night, in the dark.

Her eyes hurt with tears against the screaming blackness of the path and the shuddering whiteness of the trees, and she thought, with a clear intelligent picture of the words in her mind, burning, Now I am really afraid.

I must say, John, I never expected to find you all so nervous," Mrs. Montague said. "I deplore fear in these matters." She tapped her foot irritably. "You know perfectly well, John, that those who have passed beyond expect to see us happy and smiling; they want to know that we are thinking of them lovingly. The spirits dwelling in this house may be actually suffering because they are aware that you are afraid of them.

Everything is worse," he said, looking at Eleanor, "if you think something is looking at you.

We never know where our courage is coming from.

When I am afraid, I can see perfectly the sensible, beautiful not-afraid side of the world, I can see chairs and tables and windows staying the same, not affected in the least, and I can see things like the careful woven texture of the carpet, not even moving. But when I am afraid I no longer exist in any relation to these things. I suppose because things are not afraid.

They are the children of the strangers,I told her. They have no faces. They have eyes. Pretend they are birds. They cant see us. They don't know it yet. they don't want to believe it, but they wont ever see us again.

Poor strangers, I said. They have so much to be afraid of.

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside. "No," she said aloud, and the one word echoed.

No ghost in all the long histories of ghosts has ever hurt anyone physically. The only damage done is by the victim to himself. […] No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.

Don't be so afraid all the time. We never know where our courage is coming from.

Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.

Qué frío hace, pensó Eleanor infantilmente; nunca seré capaz de volver a dormir con todo este ruido surgiendo de mi cabeza; ¿cómo pueden los demás oír el ruido, si está saliendo de mi cabeza? Estoy desapareciendo centímetro a centímetro en esta casa, me estoy desmoronando cada vez un poco más porque todo este ruido me está desgajando; ¿por qué están asustados los demás?

She forced herself to sit up primly on the edge of the marble bench, repressing firmly the nausea she felt at its warm pressure, and she smoothed the black linen of her dress across her lap, and tucked in her hair, which had somehow come loose, and crossed her ankles decently, and took her black-edged handkerchief from her bosom and dried her eyes and wiped away the dampness and grime from her face. Now, she thought; I may go mad, but at least I look like a lady.

I think that an atmosphere like this one can find out the flaws and faults and weaknesses in all of us, and break us apart in a matter of days. We have only one defense, and that is running away.

losing her temper, which she did rarely because she was so afraid of being ineffectual

Fear, is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishment of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.

Eleanor felt, as she had the day before, that the conversation was being skillfully guided away from the thought of fear, so very present in her own mind. Perhaps she was to be allowed to speak occasionally for all of them so that, quieting her, they quieted themselves and could leave the subject behind them;

Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield it or we fight it, but we cannot meet at half way.