Quotes About Fear

Wonder, fear, discovery, suspicion, hesitation, fascination, curiosity—all were crammed into his little eyes...

If I'm to be forever stared at like that, I really will end up a monster! At length, unable to stand it, I brushed aside the forest of humanity and, as if taking shelter in some cave, rushed headlong into a nearby movie house, a "market place of darkness"—the only safe place for a monster.

When he saw the vista of the street reflected in the mirror in which he was looking, he was terror stricken. He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him.

my premonitions, darker than the inside of a monster's throat, spewed out ominous vapor.

I was afraid of my own shadow as long as I imagined others to be looking at me, but when I was actually looked at, I seemed to become aware of my real character. Perhaps in my imagination the mask was something that exposed me, but in actuality it was an opaque means of concealment.

Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.

For no apparent reason, Mai found herself thinking of a pretty girl rotting at the bottom of a well.

It wasn't that people refrained from saying anything out of fear of being laughed at for being unscientific. It was that they felt they'd be drawing unto themselves some unimaginable horror by admitting it. It was more conves indulge in the scientific explanation, no matter how unconvincing it was.

In her elementary school days, she'd experienced something so terrifying that it was too much to remember.

they had a power far beyond their numbers. That was also what made a girls' high school so frightening.

Mi verdadero miedo consiste en que jamás podré poseerte. Que en el mejor de los casos me veré limitado, como un perro inconscientemente fiel, a besar a tu mano que, distraídamente, habrás dejado a mi alcance, lo cual no será, por mi parte, una señal de amor, sino un signo de la desesperación del animal eternamente condenado al mutismo y a la distancia. Kafka a Felice Bauer (p.117)

Hush," I said. "I'm here, and I'm not letting you out of my sight anytime soon so keep holding me tight." I looked down, a little more than afraid of plummeting hundreds of feet down.- Breena to Kian, Silver Frost

When trouble came, as the sisters feared it would, it didn't knock at the mahogany doors. Instead it waited, lying dormant inside heads and silent inside mouths until it passed, undetected, into the Club. And then it was too late.

When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is really there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again. from Coleridge: Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread

Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression.

In fact Hell seemed a more potent reality than God, because it was something that I could grasp imaginatively.

In a theologian such as Lessius we can see that as Europe approached modernity, the theologians themselves were handing the future atheists the ammunition for their rejection of a God who had little religious value and who filled many people with fear rather than with hope and faith.

Yet despite my depression and my fear for the future, I could not quite succumb to the prevailing despair. The worst had happened, but that meant that I no longer had anything much to lose, and increasingly I found that quite liberating.

Fundamentalist faith was rooted in deep fear and anxiety that could not be assuaged by a purely rational argument.

we sometimes fail to recognize the signs of poverty, loneliness, grief, fear, and desolation in our own city, our own village, or our own family.

One of the questions that I am almost in aria of asked about backpacking is, Aren't you afraid? Generally, people have something specific in mind when they ask the question, and generally, it's something on the order of snakes, bears, or criminals. I'm not particularly afraid of snakes; in most parts of the United States, bears are more of a nuisance than a threat; and I've never met a criminal in the woods.

Why the Kikuyu, who personally have so little fear of death, should be so terrified to touch a corpse, while the white people, who are afraid to die, handle the dead easily, I do not know. Here once more you feel their reality to be different from our realities.

Come now,' I said to him, 'and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they have got none. Frei lebt wer sterben kann.

All my life I have known fear. But I have acted in spite of it. I urge you to do the same. Your father used to say that it is preferable to die rather than to live fearing death.