Quotes About Fear

You aren't worried about tomorrow, are you?" "What do you think?" He propped himself up on his elbows and studied my face. "You told me last spring it was the easiest thing in the whole wide world. You could hardly wait to jump. Why, even when you got sick you worried you'd die without having a chance to do it." "I must have been a raving lunatic," I muttered.

Sometimes nothing is the scariest thing of all

A prominent Christian journalist has confided that his biggest fear in life is that his own children will grow up to hate him, because they will believe the terrible things said about the faith in public these days. He

Eleanor Roosevelt: I gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which I must stop and look fear in the face—I say to myself, I've lived through this and can take the next thing that comes along. We must do the things we think we cannot do.

SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate.

Exposed to the world for what she was; numbed with worry and fear; trying to answer the question... The same question the police had thrown at her over and over seven years ago.....Where are the Children?

every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish.

I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.

But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish.

As with everything I've ever written, I start out paralyzed by fear of failure. The tarantula ego—starving to be shored up by praise—tries to scare me away from saying simply whatever small, true thing is standing in line for me to say.

Later, Mother patted my back as I threw up into the toilet. I remember the smell of Jergen's lotion from her hands, and how the tenderness of her gesture repelled me even as part of me hungered for it. I passed out sending prayers up at machine-gun speed, like a soldier in a foxhole to a god not believed in, Don't let me be her, don't let me be her. For however she'd pulled herself together for this trip, she could blow at any second.

But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.

I was only precocious mentally and lived in deadly fear of losing my virtue, not for moral reasons, but from the dread of being thought "easy.

This is my body, and I am terrified of the space it takes up.

And now I understand something so frightening &wonderful- how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.

What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

EVERY DOG'S STORY I have a bed, my very own. It's just my size. And sometimes I like to sleep alone with dreams inside my eyes. But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepy and I wake and am afraid, though I don't know why. But I'm no longer sleepy and too slowly the hours go by. So I climb on the bed where the light of the moon is shining on your face and I know it will be morning soon. Everybody needs a safe place.

I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.

what I wanted was to be willing to be afraid

Listen, the heart-shackles are not, as you think, death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, selfishness

Fear defeated me. And yet, not in faith and not in madness but with the courage I thought my dream deserved, I stepped outside.

Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields— and then there is the long, deep trough of silence when he stops singing, and steps into the air.

When I think of death it is a bright enough city