Quotes About Fear

The last time she had seen him in the flesh, all the vital force of his life stripped away, his sharpened face had confronted her with such a fearful fixed finality of sightless indifference that she had been frozen in mortal terror, engulfed by abysmal despair. After all the years of unfailing support, his huge, inhuman, deaf, blind inaccessibility was horrifying. He had not kept his promise. He had abandoned her, left her to suffer alone.

Now I understood why I had to prevent the day world from getting real. I saw that my instinct about this was a true one. As my eyes grew more discerning, I recognized my enemy's face and I was afraid, seeing there was a danger that one day might destroy me. Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place.

Night is the worst time, when her vitality sinks to its lowest ebb and she's frightened of everything. Unable to read or do anything else, she wanders about the house like a woman living with ghosts, who can't find the way or the will to return to the living world.

Hell had at least been familiar; she knew that, if she'd been capable of feeling anything, she would have felt afraid of this irresistible force that had picked her up like a scrap of paper and was sweeping her into the void, right out of the world as she knew it, as if whirling her off the earth altogether.

She was over-sensitive, highly strung, afraid of people and life; her personality had been damaged by a sadistic mother who kept her in a permanent state of frightened subjection.

An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.

Curiosity was a mild irritant, but nothing in the face of fear like this. By doing nothing, I determined that nothing would change, and it didn't. People moan about being in limbo, but actually, I found limbo the safest place to be.

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree–or even, occasionally, the careless–may turn out to be half a life.

I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?

Ukrainian politicians' worst nightmare is Donbass separatism, the fear that one day eastern Ukraine will want autonomy, or even bid to rejoin Russia.

Unlike other dictators, Stalin and his satraps never made the mistake of believing themselves beloved -- on the contrary they saw plots under every stone.

Death was just as close, but not behind him; it was everywhere. It was inescapable; he felt death's physical presence—as if death itself were something alive. Like in the old pictures, a creature that can hide behind a bed of asters or behind a baby carriage and can come out and touch you.

She had said, "Those people at the Gestapo, they know everything about a person." Mrs. Wallau had said, "That's all exaggeration. They only know what they've been told.

And all the time they threatened me with everything they could possibly threaten me with. All that was lacking was hellfire. They really wanted to make me think they were the Last Judgment. But they are not the slightest bit all-knowing. All they know is what you tell them.

Noch hatte keine Schuld ihre Helligkeit getrübt, keine Ahnung, dass das Herz unter dem Druck des Lebens sich auf allerlei einlassen muss, was es dann später vorgibt, nicht begriffen zu haben- aber warum hat es dann so bang und hastig geschlagen?-, [...]

His few friends and his former teachers might be watched, as well as his brothers and those dearest to him. The entire city, a dragnet. And he was already in it. He had to slip though its meshes. But by now he was really done in.

They didn't want to have any children in the Third Reich because eventually those children would be put into brown shirts and drilled to become soldiers.

Of course, it was possible that Fiedler might die more quickly and more terribly than they had feared in the struggles he'd gotten involved in. Only in times when nothing at all is possible anymore does life pass by like a shadow. But those times when everything becomes possible again contain all of life as well as death and destruction.

It's like something out of the Krays.

Darkness was already coming down like a cloak on the deserted streets,

You who understand what a human mind can be, how can you bear it? I don't have the hundredth part of your mind and there are days when I think I'll go mad. I can feel it. Or hear it. It's more like hearing something creeping along the walls, just behind my head, getting closer and closer. A big insect, maybe a scorpion. A dry skittering, that's what madness sounds like to me.

With any luck, I'd go instantly—with my new health insurance, I couldn't afford a slow decline.

The truck was its own driver, and that driver was a high-functioning paranoid.