Quotes About Fear

What are you looking at? I was just thinking that you're going to be rather happy. Nicole was frightened: Am I? All right--things couldn't be worse than they have been.

They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must speak. 'I think,' he said and his voice trembled, 'that if I lost faith in you I'd lose faith in God.' She looked at him with such a started face that he asked her the matter. 'Nothing,' she said slowly, 'only this: five men have said that to me before, and it frightens me.

never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most vulnerable part—once in bed, you're safe; he may lie around under the bed all night, but you're safe as daylight. If you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head.

She [suddenly]: I like you. He: Don't. She: Modest too-- He: I'm afraid of you. I'm always afraid of a girl--until I've kissed her. She [emphatically]: My dear boy, the war is over. He: So I'll always be afraid of you. She [rather sadly]: I suppose you will [A slight hesitation on both their parts.]

For a full minute, our bowels were one with the bowels of the earth--like some nightmare attempt to attach our naval cords again and jerk us back to the womb of creation. -Cecelia Brady describing the earthquake

You know I'm old in some ways--in others--well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-- and I dread responsibility. I don't want to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the summer.

You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this "woman proposition"; but it's more than that, Amory; it's the fear that what you begin you can't stop; you would run amuck, and I know whereof I speak; it's that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it's the half-realized fear of God in your heart.

I knew I'd be tongue-tied soon, so I tried to press my worry down by telling myself what Grandpa Leong used to tell me, that the best way to conquer fear is to act. Open the mouth and tell.

Fault. In English or in Cantonese, that was the word we were all afraid of. I held it like a seed in my mouth. As kids, the three of us loved to suck on dried plums. Long after the sour and salty fruit dissolved, the seed stayed sweet, the true secret. Now I was afraid my secret guilt would start to grow sweet, and I would never want to spit it out.

No, non era la morte a spaventarla. Era questa sua vita di ogni giorno, che cominciava a ricordarle troppo da vicino la grigia sala d'aspetto del reparto di terapia intensiva.

Her daughter had given her a puff of a marijuana cigarette once, but after all the hot pads on the counter started walking toward her, she got scared and never tried it again. So dope was out.

Sex, maybe, friendship, yes, but love, no. If she ever felt love coming toward her, she would cross the street to the other side.

Capital is a coward

Fear is a great divider—and fears of disease in particular have divided the world in the past. In the nineteenth century, when the bubonic plague had long disappeared from Europe but lingered in some parts of Asia, it reinforced the divide between the industrial and nonindustrial world, between colonizers and colonized.

If that was dying, I don't want to do it again.

The allied air power was very strong and this added to my doubts. But this was not the kind of thing you said openly, for two reasons: if the Kempeitai [military police] heard that you were saying such things you could get your head chopped off! Also it would only reduce the men's morale.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines! Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves.

An anxiety for being me, forever trapped in myself, floods my whole being without finding a way out, shaping me into tenderness, fear, sorrow and desolation. An inexplicable surfeit of absurd grief, a sorrow so lonely, so bereft, so metaphysically mine...

My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning.

Se te queres matar, porque não te queres matar? Ah, aproveita! que eu, que tanto amo a morte e a vida, Se ousasse matar-me, também me mataria... Ah, se ousares, ousa!

Believing that each step of my life would mean contact with the horror of the New and that each new person I met was a new and living fragment of the unknown to be placed before me on the table for my daily horrified contemplation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go nowhere, to reduce action to the minimum, to avoid as far as possible meeting either men or events, to perfect abstinence and cultivate renunciation. That's how much living frightens and torments me.

I abhor running real risks, but it's not because I'm afraid of feeling too intensely. It's because they break my perfect focus on my sensations, and this disturbs and depersonalizes me. I never go where there's risk. I fear the tedium of dangers.