Quotes About Fear

Wars are begun by frightened men.

What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours.

Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

There is nothing like fear to complicate one's consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection

The finest people, as people go, cannot help but betray a fair portion of fear and insecurity, even full-blown panic.

While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire may symbolize our horror of both life and death, but none of us has ever been uprooted by a symbol. The zombie may conceptualize our sickness of the flesh and its appetites, but no one has ever been sickened to death by a concept.

I had always been afraid.

the logic of supernatural horror [is] a logic founded on fear, a logic whose sole principle states: "Existence equals nightmare." Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure..

Some heads are more haunted than others, whether they are haunted by ghosts or by gods or by creatures from outer space.

What can she do but shrink with terror? Soon she is only doll-size in dark doll's costume. Quivering bones and feverish blood are the stuffings of this doll, its entrails tickled by fear's funereal plume. It flies to a corner of the room and cringes within enormous shadows, sometimes dreaming there throughout the night—of carriage wheels rioting in a lavender mist or a pearly fog, of nacreous fires twitching beyond the margins of country roads, of cliffs and stars.

But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings.

There are things which only madmen fear because only madmen may truly conceive of them.

Haz ve ac?n?n aleyhimize yoz bir ittifak kurdu?u yerde, cennet ve cehennem ayn? korkunç bürokrasinin farkl? parçalar?d?r.

Without an iota of uncertainty, humankind is and will always be unsuited to take charge of its own deliverance. The delusional will forever be with us, thereby making pain, fear, and denial of what is right in front of our face the preferred style of living and the one that will be passed on to countless generations.

was driven by the will to negate what one fears. No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.

Fear, when blended with failure, distills into a deadly brew.

she is overwhelmed by an amorphous anxiety without a specific source.

And I succumbed to an ecstatic horror at this insight.

Abbiamo bisogno di sapere che le marionette sono marionette. Ciononostante, potrebbero ancora farci paura. Perché, se osserviamo la marionetta in un certo modo, è come se ci guardassimo indietro, non come esseri umani ma come marionette. Parrebbe di essere sul punto di prendere vita. In questi momenti di lieve confusione, si manifesta un conflitto psicologico, una percezione dissonante che attraversa il nostro essere con una convulsione di orrore soprannaturale.

But what could I say to her? That I'm drawn to those old buildings and junk because (voice beginning to seethe) . . . because they take me into a world (the seething builds) . . . a world that is the exact opposite of the one (voice seething to a pitch) . . . the one I'm doomed by my own weakness and fear to live in (uncontrollable, meta-maniacal seething) . . . to live in during my weeks, my months, my years and years of work . . . work . . . work?

I can only sit and wait, knowing that one day he will turn full around, step down from his stage, and claim me for the abyss I have always feared. Perhaps then I will discover what it was I did - what any of us did - to deserve this fate.

many societies, of course, ours was founded on fearful superstition, and this is always reason enough for any kind of behavior. She

Something is back there. She feels this to be a horrible truth. She almost knows what the thing is, but, afflicted with some kind of oneiric aphasia, she cannot find the word for what she fears. She can only wait, hoping that sudden shock will soon bring her out of the dream, for she is now aware that "she is dreaming," thinking of herself in the third person.

Madness, chaos, bone-deep mayhem, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page. Fiction, unable to compete with the world for vividness of pain and lasting effects of fear, compensates in its own way.