Quotes About Fear

I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.

I remember one time I heard this English professor asking the class what the world's scariest noise is. Is it a man crying out in pain? A woman's scream of terror? A gunshot? A baby crying? And the professor shakes his head and says, 'No, the scariest noise is, you're all alone in your dark house, you know you're all alone, you know that there is no chance anyone else is home or within miles—and then, suddenly, from upstairs, you hear the toilet flush.

Sure, on a larger scale, it was healthy to have people out there you cared about more than yourself. She knew that. But then there was the abject fear you would lose it. They say possessions own you. Not so. Loved ones own you. You are forever held hostage once you care so much.

We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

This is something one must bear, beyond the claims of religion, not the idea of one's dying but the reality of one's death. One schools oneself in an acceptance of the terror. It is the shape that life takes toward its end. It is a form of life.

Fear comes, and once you recognize it and accept it, it passes just as fast as it comes, and you don't really think about it anymore. You just do what you have to do, but you learn the real meaning of fear and life and death.

An enthusiastic reader of English poetry, Lincoln forgot or ignored Dryden's warning from "Astraea Redux": "An horrid stillness first invades the ear,/ And in that silence we the tempest fear.

He not only fumbled badly in his attempts at impromptu oratory en route to the capital, but worst of all, ended his journey in the dead of night, embarrassingly fearful for his safety, after encouraging unseemly partisan demonstrations in friendly Northern cities. He was too conspicuous. He was too sequestered. He was too careless. He was too calculating. He was too conciliatory. He was too coercive. He was too sloppy.

To admit the presence of fear isn't weakness. Only a fool would pretend that he is never fearful.

Worry, on the other hand, is the persistent, nagging, debilitating concern over something you can generally do nothing about.

Saya percaya bahwa orang bukannya takut mati. Mereka takut sesuatu yang lain. Sesuatu yang lebih menggelisahkan dan lebih tragis daripada maut itu sendiri. Kita takut tidak pernah hidup, menjelang akhir hayat kita dengan perasaan bahwa kita tidak pernah benar-benar hidup. Bahwa kita tidak pernah memahami, untuk apa kehidupan kita itu.

I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear... that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived.

I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

It was either live in the shadow of the fear all our lives or, once and for all, break free of it and have all the things we wanted. That was the whole of it. We had to be free of the fear so that we could think of tomorrow, a tomorrow we had been afraid to look into because it looked so much like yesterday.

The reality of living was never greater than when you held death clutched tightly in your hands.

You're getting two C-notes and a one-way ticket. Make sure you never come back this way." He jerked back on her finger. She screamed. "You broke it!" "Your friend don't want to hear from you again, no how, capiche?" She sobbed, dizzy, ready to pass out. "Now when I say no how, he don't want to hear from any lawyer, either. You capiche that?

She made me love her," said Colson, "and she scared me at the same time. I was suspicious of her on account of the way her husband, Peter Gunness, died.

In the view of one prominent alienist, she was "a woman of dual personality: a kind and indulgent mother at certain times and at others a demon without fear of God of man or of the law.

Belle Gunness was a lady fair In Indiana State. She weighed about three hundred pounds, And that is quite some weight. That she was stronger than a man Her neighbors all did own; She butchered hogs right easily, And did it all alone. But hogs were just a sideline She indulged in now and then; Her favorite occupation Was a-butchering of men.

The scene is an early example of a theme that preoccupied Lang throughout his career: the speed at which ordinary, law-abiding citizens can turn into a savage mob.

Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.

What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.

I hope, my good sir, that you are not exposed to any difficulty on our account," said George, anxiously. "Fear nothing, George, for therefore are we sent into the world. If we would not meet trouble for a good cause, we were not worthy of our name." "But, for me," said George, "I could not bear it." "Fear not, then, friend George; it is not for thee, but for God and man, we do it," said Simeon.