Quotes About Fear

I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It's smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.

It occurred to her one night that she was one of the vengeful monsters they were scared of: She had killed a white boy. She might kill one of them next. And because of that fear, they erected a new scaffolding of oppression on the cruel foundation laid hundreds of years before.

Before I came back to North Carolina, I'd never seen a mob rip a man limb from limb," Martin said. "See that, you stop saying what folks will do and what they won't." True

Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money. The shadow of the black hand that will return what has been given.

Elwood dressed in the dark slacks from last year's Emancipation Day play. He'd grown a few inches, so he let them out and they showed the barest sliver of his white socks. A new emerald tie clip held his black tie in place and the knot only took six attempts. His shoes glinted with polish. He looked the part, even if he still worried for his glasses if the police brought out nightsticks. If the whites carried iron pipes and baseball bats.

venturing now or after nightfall. Cora thought better

Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money.

That was Sea Island cotton the slaver had ordered for his rows, but scattered among the seeds were those of violence and death, and that crop grew fast. The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room, America remained her warden.

Patrol was not difficult work. They stopped any niggers they saw and demanded their passes. They stopped niggers they knew to be free, for their amusement but also to remind the Africans of the forces arrayed against them, whether they were owned by a white man or not.

The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An

said. "It was full moon when we picked, but there was always blood.

The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room America remained her warden.

He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.

The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood.

She didn't see anyone she recognized; their faces had been transformed by fear.

Verticality is such a risky enterprise.

He heard the sound of teeth splintering.

The most frightening proposition was that he had no connection to this place, that this fourth-floor office was simply where be broke down. If his presence here was random, then why not an entire world governed by randomness, with all that implied? Solve the Straggler, and you took a nibble out of the pure chaos the world had become.

Mark Spitz backed away from the fucking corn.

Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent.

One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.

Up the steps he goes, into the drab office block. A heaviness in the corridors. He walks along, shaking hands, touching shoulders. He knows every single one of their names. They are polite, deferent—scared, too. If they are to own it, they are also the ones to lose it. A valuable thing. Once in a thousand years. Peace.

Always the same seesaw. The fear that my scribbling could get me put into a concentration camp. The feeling that it is my duty to write, that it is my life's task, my calling. The feeling of vanitas vanitatum, that my scribbling is worthless. In the end I go on writing anyway, the diary, the Curriculum.

The dominant feeling is that this reign of terror can hardly last long, but that its fall will bury us.