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Quotes About Fear

We love each other, Terence repeated, searching into her face. Their faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said nothing. He was afraid to kiss her again. By degrees she drew close to him, and rested against him. In this position they sat for some time. She said Terence once; he answered Rachel.
~ Virginia Woolf
Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible.
~ Virginia Woolf
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one's parents giving it into one's hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.
~ Virginia Woolf
She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not
~ Virginia Woolf
she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.
~ Virginia Woolf
The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?
~ Virginia Woolf
What they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.
~ Virginia Woolf
Luego (lo había sentido aquella misma mañana) estaba el terror; la abrumadora incapacidad, los padres poniendo la vida en nuestras manos, para ser vivida hasta el final, para recorrerla serenamente; había en lo más hondo de Clarissa un miedo terrible.
~ Virginia Woolf
Siempre le había parecido muy peligroso, terriblemente peligroso, vivir, aunque fuera solo un día.
~ Virginia Woolf
Qué enemigo percibimos ahora avanzando hacia nosotros, tú, sobre quien ahora cabalgo, mientras piafamos en este pavimento? Es la muerte. La muerte es el enemigo. Es la muerte contra la que cabalgo, lanza en ristre y melena al viento, como un hombre joven, como Percival cuando galopaba en la India. Pico espuelas. ¡Contra ti me lanzaré, entero e invicto, oh Muerte!
~ Virginia Woolf
It passed through his mind that if he missed this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have to face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again, demanding an explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better, on the whole, to risk present discomfiture than to waste an evening bandying excuses and constructing impossible scenes with this uncompromising section of himself.
~ Virginia Woolf
You're growing old together," she said to me. "You and what frightens you.
~ Vivian Gornick
You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
And blood-black nothingness began to spin. A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subdued, frightened-to-death rocking chair, before I drove to wherever the beast's lair was - and then pulled the pistol's foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite space, galaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretense, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves—not to let down, not to ring out Ã¢â'¬Â¦ and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any thought of them was criminal.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
how can I write about this when I am afraid of not having time to finish and of stirring up all these thoughts in vain?
~ Vladimir Nabokov
My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart ("a hollow, muscular organ," according to the gruesome definition in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin's orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
In those years, that marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae, interstellar gaps and all the rest of the awesome show provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic, as if I were hanging from earth upside down on the brink of infinite space, with terrestrial gravity still holding me by the heels but about to release me any moment
~ Vladimir Nabokov
the compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die.
~ Vladimir Nabokov