Quotes About Fear

Why do you got to get killed? You ain't so little as mice.

All this is a preface to the fear and uncertainties which clamber over a man so that in his silly work he thinks he must be crazy because he is so alone.

Here you play in the street, little chicken. Some day an automobile will run over you; and if it kills you, that will be the best thing that can happen. It may only break your leg or your wing. Then all of your life you will drag along in misery. Life is too hard for you, little bird.

Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses—the whole world over his fence.

Tom's cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men.

Joseph habitually scowled at furniture, expecting it to be impertinent, mischievous, or dusty.

It is not true as is romantically presumed that people frightened or injured or persecuted are wakeful. More often than not they retire into sleep to be free of trouble for a time.

Ain't you thinkin' what's it gonna be like when we get there? Ain't you scared it won't be nice like we thought? No, she said quickly. No, I ain't, You can't do that. I can't do that. It's too much - livin' too many lives. Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes, it'll on'y be one. If I go ahead on all of'em, it's too much.

Casy gathered in his canvas sneakers and shoved his bare feet into them. I ain't got your confidence, he said. I'm always scared there's wire or glass under the dust. I don't know nothin' I hate so much as a cut toe.

The great artists of finance like Morgan and Rockefeller weren't deflected. They wanted and got money, just simple money. What they did with it afterward is another matter. I've always felt they got scared of the ghost they raised and tried to buy it off.

He hated old women. They frightened him. There was a smell about them that gave him the willies. They were fierce and they had no price. They never gave a damn about making a scene. They got what they wanted. Louie's grandmother had been a tyrant. She had got whatever she wanted by being fierce.

Well, suppose there's a slight doubt that the boy should be in the army and we send him and he gets killed." "I see. Is it responsibility or blame that bothers you?" "I don't want blame." "Sometimes responsibility is worse. It doesn't carry any pleasant egotism.

The women watched the men, watched to see whether the break had come at last. The women stood silently and watched. And where a number of men gathered together, the fear went from their faces, and anger took its place. And the women sighed with relief, for they knew it was all right—the break had not come; and the break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.

Her father was frightened by a strange bed or a foreign language or a political party he didn't belong to. Her father truly believed that the Democratic party was a subversive organization whose design would destroy the United States and put it in the hands of bearded communists.

I was afraid I had you in me. No, I haven't. I'm my own. I don't have to be you. I just know. It just came to me whole. If I'm mean, it's my own mean.

Possibly the deep feeling is that if people learn to eat one another the food supply would be so generous and so available that no one would be either safe or hungry.

You have defied not the pearl buyers, but the whole structure, the whole way of life, and I am afraid for you

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him—he has known a fear beyond every other.

Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared. I'm scared.

Ale já se takovejch moc pÄ›knejch vÄ›cí bojím.

His reaction to the idea was not simple. He felt a great warmth that they should want to give him a party and at the same time he quaked inwardly remembering the last one they had given. Now everything fell into place-Mack's question and the silences when he was about. He thought of it a lot that night sitting beside his desk. He glanced about considering what things would have to be locked up. He knew the party was going to cost him plenty.

When angered she had a terrible eye which could blanch the skin off a bad child as easily as if he were a boiled almond.

What have I to fear but starvation? Kino asked.

Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.