Quotes About Fear

Then a strange moment came, a moment of the kind that determines the fate of nations, because when a crowd loses its fear of an army the world changes.

They feared her [the dream beloved], knowing that, being impossible, she was irresistable, and that was why the king loved her best.

Faced with the possibility that evil existed, that pure malevolence had walked into my life and convinced me it was love, faced with the loss of everything I wanted from my life, I fainted. And dreamed dark dreams of blood.

Guns were alive in America, and death was their random gift.

It felt as if a thing that had been impossible had become possible, a thing that had been unthinkable had become thinkable, and Luka did not want to give that terrifying thing a name.

Mr. Gibreel Farishta on the railway to London was once again seized as who would not be by the fear that God had decided to punish him for his loss of faith by driving him insane.

But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?

Had he, as a child, intuited something and then, afraid of what he had guessed, buried the intuition so deep that he retained no memory of it? And could books, some books, gain access to those hidden chambers and use what they found there?

But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought. I have to go back soon, she told herself, I need to reclaim it or it will be gone, I will be gone from it, and nobody will mourn my loss. She thought about Wile E. Coyote rushing out over the chasm and not falling until he looked down. That's me, her weak voice thought, and then her strong voice answered, Then don't look down.

He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of no-way-back, made him afraid. When you lose the past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide.

Guilty secrets make paranoids of us all.

He wanted to run but didn't know where or how, which made him more fearful still, because he knew that in his spy fiction he had already told himself the answer. You can run but you can't hide.

Fear was a solipsist, a narcissist, blind to everything except itself.

Fear was stronger than ethics, stronger than judgement, stronger than responsibility, stronger than civilisation. Fear was a bolting animal trampling children underfoot as it fled from itself. Fear was a bigot, a tyrant, a coward, a red mist, a whore. Fear was a bullet pointed at his heart.

By embracing the inescapable, I lost my fear of it. I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against

But what I learned from the Widow's Hand is that whose who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities

Was it possible that his fear of flying had been cured at exactly the moment at which it was perfectly rational to feel afraid?

The antidote to joy is dread.

Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us unwilling to criticize ideas that are increasingly maladaptive and patently ridiculous.

While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its problems. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us unwilling to criticize ideas that are increasingly maladaptive and patently ridiculous.

Eventually, it begins to seem as if you are repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No matter how terrible the dream, the relief is instantaneous.

We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain—and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running

Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is denial - at once full of hope and full of fear - of the vastitude of human ignorance.