Quotes About Fear

At that moment I realized the error of my thinking about Bootsie. The problem wasn't in her disease, it was in mine. I wanted a lock on the future; I wanted our marriage to be above the governance of mortality and chance; and, most important, in my nightly sleeplessness over her health, and the black fatigue that I would drag behind me into the day like a rattling junkyard, I hadn't bothered to be grateful for the things I had.

That's good. Because if you love somebody, or if you love the church, like I do, then you don't ever have to be afraid. People are only superstitious when they're afraid. That's an important lesson for little people to learn.

Here's the strange thing about death. At a certain age it's always with you, lurking in the shade, pulling at your ankles, whispering in your ear when you pass a crypt. But it doesn't get your real attention until you find yourself alone at home and the wind swells inside the rooms and stresses the joists and lets you know what silence and solitude are all about.

The collapse of the economy, the systemic spread of fear, the threat of imagined foreign adversaries would probably be enough to pull it off. But one way or another

The wind becomes your indispensable ally. When the trees and undergrowth and sometimes the elephant grass begin to thrash, the object that does not move or the shadow that remains like a tin cutout becomes the entity that is out there in the darkness, preparing to take your life. Except in this case, the presence on

The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we're already inside eternity and need not fear any longer.

Like many my age, I believe people in groups are to be feared and that arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next.

If we get scared enough we can convince ourselves that snake and nape are selective, and that a scarlet cross painted on a shield can make acceptable the beheadings of Saracens on a scaffold in Jerusalem.

But as John Steinbeck had said long ago, we had come to fear a man with a hole in his shoe.

and I set it on the night table. I feared for Clete. I was protected by the culture of law enforcement, one that is ferociously tribal in nature. Clete was a disgraced cop, a lone soul sowing destruction and chaos everywhere he went, and hated by the Mob and NOPD. I felt his eyes on the side of my face.

Maybe you'll have better luck dealing with the dead than I. They go where they want. They sit on your bed at night and stand behind you in the mirror. Once they locate you, they never rest. And you know what's worse about them?" He smiled at me and didn't reply. "When it's your time, they'll be your escorts, and they won't be delivering you to a very good place. The dead are not given to mercy.

Hackberry Holland's greatest fear was his fellow man's propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry's view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval.

I always had the sense that Desmond was trying to shrink inside his clothes, as though both fear and a great sadness lived inside him.

There may be room in government service for the altruist and the iconoclast, but I have yet to see one who was not treated as an oddity at best and at worst an object of suspicion and fear.

I could have written the entire incident off, but any time three people report a scream, they're calling not about a sound but about a memory that lives in the collective unconscious, one that goes back to the cave. When we are alarmed to the degree that we have to tell others about it, we're dipping into a primal knowledge about the darker potential of the gene pool. Or at least this has always been my belief.

said. "Whatdid you say?" she said. He shifted his rifle to his left hand and spun her in the opposite direction, then pushed her hard between the shoulder blades, snapping her head back. When she

Most government employees aren't bad guys; they're just unimaginative, they feel comfortable in a world of predictable rules, and they rarely question authority. But if you run up against the nasty ones and they sense fear in you, they'll try to dismantle you one piece at a time.

But every longtime cop will tell you that the criminals who scared him most were the ones who looked and talked like the rest of us and committed deeds that no one, absolutely no one, ever wants to have knowledge of.

the men who break in and steal by night, who spread self-doubt and fear and acrimony, will eventually fall by the wayside and be unremembered ciphers that disappear like scraps of newspaper in our rearview mirror.

He sought revenge on others for his own failure, and helped inculcate racial hatred and fear in the electorate to divide us against ourselves.

But I don't fear him, and that's because I have never known a bully who was not a coward.

I could see the uncertainty, the fear about her job, her paycheck, her relationship with her boss, the prospect of offending people with power and authority over others, the dark figure sitting in the shadows at the end of the bar when it's closing time. I wondered how many people would understand her frame of reference.

But every longtime cop will tell you that the criminals who scared him most were the ones who looked and talked like the rest of us and committed deeds that no one, absolutely no one, ever wants to have knowledge of. Five

The future is a strange monster. The less there is of it, the more it frightens.