Quotes About Fear

The Root of War Is Fear AT the root of all war is fear: not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything. It is not merely that they do not trust one another; they do not even trust themselves. If they are not sure when someone else may turn around and kill them, they are still less sure when they may turn around and kill themselves. They cannot trust anything, because they have ceased to believe in God.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of heaven. And

The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.

There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it.

Flight usually intensifies the very thing one flees and establishes a special intimacy with it.

I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.

Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.

Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch!

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.

A weapon based on Time . . . mused Viktor Mulciber. Well, why not? The one force no one knows how to defeat, resist, or reverse. It kills all forms of life sooner or later. With a Time-weapon you could become the most feared person in history. I'd rather be loved, said Root. Mulciber shrugged. You're young.

She drove like one of the damned on holiday.

Shit now is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse inside the whiteman's warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That's what the toilet is for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet's the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white emblems the very emblem of Odorless and Official death.

part of me must have really wanted to believe--like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror--that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting. I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been. Can you imagine?

What happens to men sometimes,' his father wants to tell Charlie, 'is that one day all at once they'll understand how much they love their children, as absolutely as a child gives away its own love, and the terrible terms that come with that,— and it proves too much to bear, and they'll not want it, any of it, and they'll back away in fear.

There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.

It was the U.S.A., after all, and fear was in the air.

A pneumatic toy frog hops onto a lily pad, trembling. Beneath the surface, lies terror.

She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture.

writers, people you didn't even have to say hello to—and still be horribly murdered for your trouble. Once-overs you'd found ways to ignore now had you looking for the particular highlight off some creep's eyes that would send you behind double and triple locks to a room lit only by the TV screen, and whatever was in the fridge to last you till you felt together enough to step outside again.

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumb struck, undefended, scared shitless.

For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.

Sometimes things aren't very clear, that's all. Things look like they're going against us, and though it always turns out fine in the end, and we can always look back and say oh of course it had to happen that way, otherwise so-and-so wouldn't have happened--still while it's happening, in my heart I keep getting this terrible fear, this empty place, and it's very hard at such times really to believe in a Plan with a shape bigger than I can see...

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will." ? Thomas Pynchon