Quotes About Fear

At some point I asked her if she was at peace with the idea of dying. She looked at me like I was stupid and insane. "No," she said. "I want to live." You idiot! would have finished the sentence nicely. It was one of the only times she seemed really disappointed in me. I realized I had learned everything I know about death from movies. There is no peace in dying.

I love my father. It's not his fault that he made up a fear and, in order to make it feel more real to him, gave it to me. I was obviously built to receive it.

For some people, status is what protects them from oblivion. And when they feel their status is slipping away from them, they act fearfully, irrationally.

I love my father. It's not his fault that he made up a fear and, in order to make it feel more real to him, gave it to me. I was obviously built to receive it. As a father now myself, it's sobering to think about how the smallest comments will ripple through your children's lives, with some leaving permanent warps.

The theory of crisis is not just a theory of fear but also a theory of hope.

Beware: the Government Is Armed and Dangerous.

How can you render the duties of justice to men when you're afraid they'll be so unaware of justice they may destroy you? ...especially since their attitude toward their own race is a destructive one.

I traveled from city to city in those days, and the view from within the ghettos was terrible and terrifying. While white people in the periphery were arming themselves against the day when they would have to defend themselves from attack by blacks (and really believed someone was fomenting a racial war in which black people would rise up and attack them), black people mostly without arms huddled inside the ghettos feeling that they were surrounded by armed whites.

The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him. The

The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him

Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.

I'm not afraid, but I'm very nervous.

If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.

Safer than we are." I told Franny. "Safer than love." "let me tell ya kid," Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. "Everything's safer than love.

there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.

there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

There's nothing as scary as the future.

It was not the cold that made you want to rush out as soon as you'd jumped in; it was the unmeasured depth - our fear of what was on the bottom, and how far below us the bottom was.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone's older brother and someone's older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

The principal difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin, the greater the adventure).

Of course: because it was in one of the camps that he went blind. They had performed some failed experiment on his eyes in the camp. 'No, not summer camp,' Franny had to tell Lilly, who had always been afraid of being sent to summer camp, and was unsurprised to hear that they tortured the campers.

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.

It surprised him that she was the one who looked stricken with fear, as if she were a prisoner in the passenger seat and saw the fast-approaching collision seconds before the drive could react to it. Bonnie pinched her lower lip with her teeth and stared at Jack as if she were transfixed--as if he were the upcoming accident, and, even though she saw him coming, she couldn't turn away.