Quotes About Fear

People who like to be in control of things can have a hard time with intimacy. Intimacy is anarchic and mutual and definitionally incompatible with control. You seek to control things because you are afraid.

A fact of my life was that I had a morbid fear of reproach, especially from women.

She was certainly hungry to sleep with someone; it was practically forever since she'd done it. But she liked Jason a little too much to think it was a good idea to sleep with him. What if she started liking him even more? Relationship pain and relationship horror seemed probable.

He'd realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall.

that people were cruel to what they were afraid of loving.

only a few victims of the Great Terror were afforded even the parody of due process that constituted a show trial.

His family feared he might one day succumb to the catastrophe of being a poet.

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time *isn't*.

Escúchame. Soy tímido. No tonto. No puedo mirar a la gente a los ojos. No sé si entiendes lo que se siente. Hay todo un mundo que existe a mi alrededor, lo sé. No es que no quiera mirarte. Es que no quiero que me vean. Tengo miedo de lo que veréis dentro de mi. Me avergüenzo, me da miedo que me mires a los ojos y descubras algo malo, estropeado.

Matthew and Lucinda felt at the exact edge of their lives, feeling them close, closer, as near at hand as yet elusive as the wind that whistled in their hair: the true complete lives in which they would at last drown, the oceanic voyage into their thirties and beyond, through which their inchoate yearnings would either be soothed or disappointed, or both.

As Bruno neared, Stolarsky stepped from behind the door. His feet and legs were bare. He held a pistol, loosely, and wore nothing but a thin T-shirt. The darkness beneath its hem revealed as a scribble of genitals and hair, his penis like a second sarcastic nose.

Sometimes people say terrible things when they're scared. They don't mean to, but they can't help it. They lash out because if they can see that their words hurt someone else, it makes them feel as if they aren't completely powerless.

Everyone carries around his own monsters.---Richard Pryor

In an age of fear, moderation is hard to find and harder to sustain. Who wants to listen to a nuanced argument, when what we want is someone to relieve us from the burden of thought and convince us that we were right all along? So people mock. They blame. They caricature. They demonise. In an age of anxiety, few can hear the still small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God.

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.

Do you have any coffee?'...'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.

sometimes you have to put your fears in order...

I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.

I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster's paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.

Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.

Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do?

Dad used to say that sometimes you have to put your fears in order...