Quotes About Fear

Being easily freaked out comes with its own special skill set: you develop subtle tricks to work around it, make sure people don't notice. Pretty soon, if you're a fast learner, you can get through the day looking almost exactly like a normal human being.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

I'm amazed this guy manages to get out of bed in the morning without working himself into a panic attack over the chance that he might trip on the bath mat and stab himself through the eye socket with his toothbrush and be left with a permanent twitch that'll ruin his chances of landing an airplane safely if the pilot has a heart attack and doom hundreds to a fiery death.

Don't fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we're afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place.

I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.

If you put your energy into how much a fall would hurt, you're already half way down.

I was never afraid of getting killed and I was never afraid of losing my nerve. My kind of courage holds up best under fire; it's different dangers, more refined and insidious ones, that shake me.

someone else, bore its way in and feed off that mind too. Even the cute little student mincing along in her flowery dress, the shuffling old fella with his shuffling spaniel, they look Ebola-lethal. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me. Maybe I'm getting the flu.

Some part of me believed, unassailably, and wordlessly and perhaps with a flick of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had- simply by surviving-become a freak of nature.

Frightened people are obedient–not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally.

We see this a lot, people desperate to keep talking because when they stop we will leave and they will be left alone with what has happened.

And some go the other way, the most lethal way of all: when the pressure gets to be too much, it's not their nerve that breaks, it's their fear. They lose the capacity to be afraid, even when they should be. These can't ever go home again. They're like those First World War airmen, the finest ones, shining in their recklessness and invincible, who got home and found that home had no place for what they were. Some people are undercovers all the way to the bone; the job has taken them whole.

And then, too, I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.

what if I never got another day in my life when I was normal again?

Once the fear took hold, I was fucked. I'd never known anything like it could exist: all-consuming, ravenous, a whirling black vortex that sucked me under so completely and mercilessly that it truly felt like I was being devoured alive, bones splintered, marrow sucked.

Liv was never afraid of cot death or of Holly falling out of bed and hitting her head or any of the standard-issue parental boogeymen. All she worried about was that Holly might wake up, in the middle of the night, and think she was all alone.

In the nights afterwards I used to wake up with my mind full of those headlights, brighter and deeper than the sun. I saw them again behind my eyelids in that dark lane, and I understood then that I could have just kept driving. I could have been like Lexie. I could have hit full speed and taken us soaring up off the road, into the vast silence at the heart of those lights and out on the other side where nothing could touch us, ever.

We lay very still. I could feel the air around us changing, blooming and shimmering like the air over a scorching road. My heart was speeding, or hers was banging against my chest, I'm not sure. I turned Cassie in my arms and kissed her, and after a moment she kissed me back. I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.

This guy couldn't order a sandwich without tying himself in knots about the possible consequences of mayonnaise.

Ask any economist: broke is made of how you feel. The credit crunch didn't happen because people woke up any poorer than they'd been the day before; it happened because people woke up scared.

At the top of the basement steps, Kevin balked. "No way. I'm not going down there. Seriously, Frank." "Every time you say no to your big brother, God kills a kitten. Come on.

Irgendwo hab ich gelesen, dass das letzte Wort auf der Black Box eines jeden abgestürzten Flugzeugs, das Letzte, was der Pilot sagt, wenn er weiß, dass er sterben wird, 'Mama' ist. Wenn dir mit Lichtgeschwindigkeit die ganze Welt und das ganze Leben entrissen wird, ist dieses Wort das Einzige, was dir bleibt.

I've been trying not to say it out loud because I don't want to jinx it. Like a dumb kid; like one of those moaners who believe the universe has it in for them and everything is just looking for an excuse to turn to shite.

Aber irgendwie wurde ich trotzdem das ungute Gefühl nicht los, dass sie mich weggeschickt hatten, weil sie sich vor mir fürchteten. Wie ein entsetzlich missgestaltetes Kind, das eigentlich das Säuglingsalter nicht hätte überstehen sollen, oder wie ein siamesischer Zwilling, dessen andere Hälfte unter dem Messer gestorben war, so war ich einfach nur dadurch, dass ich überlebt hatte, zu einem Monstrum geworden.