Quotes About Fear

Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of—let alone in—water above his head give him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and a ache in his stomach—essentially the sensation some people feel about flying. In Brody's dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned.

We're going to need a bigger boat.

Having a brain tumor is like finding yourself in the middle of a dark forest. You're not sure how you got there, and you don't know how you'll get out.

Just when he thinks he's adjusting to anxiety as a constant condition, Jake feels several internal organs shrinking.

A large part of our excessive, unnecessary manifestations come from a terror that if we are not somehow signaling all the time that we exist, we will in fact no longer be there

Here we sense a parallel: Facino's conviction that his power to "see" gold has blinded him sounds very much like the narrator's fear that his preternatural insight into the lives of others, allowing him passage into their very bodies and souls, may be an abuse of his mental faculties—the word "abus" is used in both these instances.

C'è un modo corretto di usare le parole e c'è un modo corretto di comportarsi con gli altri. […] le parole sono più facili da controllare rispetto ai comportamenti. […] Credo che sia questo a farmi paura: la casualità di tutto. Persone che per te potrebbero essere importanti, ti passano accanto e se ne vanno. E tu fai altrettanto. Come si fa a saperlo?

she had insisted on keeping the doors and windows shut, as if a sealed chamber could prevent death from entering, or life from leaving her.

Se nella mia vita quella donna fosse stata destinata a diventare importante? Credo che sia questo a farmi paura: la casualità di tutto. Persone che per te potrebbero essere importanti ti passano accanto e ne vanno. E tu farai altrettanto. Come si fa a saperlo? ..... Andandomene mi sembrava di abbandonarlo, di passar la vita, giorno dopo giorno, a abbandonare la gente.

October, many crossing the street to avoid him

Anytime I fall for a dame like you I hope that somebody will take me outside an' cut my head off quick because I would rather be tied up to a coupla wild alligators than get myself hitched on to you.

It is hard to go into a fight and were often afraid," confessed the Cheyenne warrior John Stands in Timber, "but it was worse to turn back and face the women.

Far may it be from my lord, that while a tyrant is restrained by fear after cutting down only two or three men, the sword of him who is the master of all Christian mercy should run riot for the slaughter of so many souls.

Running from horrors doesn't help. The only way to deal with them is to meet them head-on.

Once again I felt light-headed, but this time it wasn't from the scent of lilacs; it was from the scent of my own death.

The greatest experience open to man then is the recovery of the commonplace. Coffee in the morning and whiskeys in the evening again without fear. Books to read without that shadow falling across the page.

I've had lots of troubles in my life, but most of 'em never happened.

People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

Sweating bullets to line up the Bible with our exhausting expectations, to make the Bible something it's not meant to be, isn't a pious act of faith, even if it looks that way on the surface. It's actually thinly masked fear of losing control and certainty, a mirror of an inner disquiet, a warning signal that deep down we do not really trust God at all.

Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: "The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me.

In the spiritual life, the opposite of fear is not courage, but trust.

Doubting God is painful and frightening because we think we are leaving God behind, when in fact we are only leaving behind ideas about God that we are used to surrounding ourselves with—the small God, the God within our control, the God who moves in our circles, the God who agrees with us.

Sweating bullets to line up the Bible with our exhausting expectations, to make the Bible something it's not meant to be, isn't a pious act of faith, even if it looks that way on the surface. It's actually thinly masked fear of losing control and certainty, a mirror of an inner disquiet, a warning signal that deep down we do not really trust God at all. A

The big lesson I learned from wrestling with my own curveballs is how deeply my faith in God had been cemented in fear—which is to say, how I viewed God as very much antagonistic toward me. And so any thought on my part of listening to my experiences and interrogating my inherited faith—to inspect its boundaries let alone climb over its walls—was seen as a crisis that had to be averted or at least resolved immediately.