Quotes About Fear

In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.

the lightning would come and, a few moments later, the thunder. -Susie Salmon, The Lovely Bones

A grown child is a dangerous thing.

What you hope for, you also fear.

He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how I come to know trees fear man.

My fantasy life. Without it I'm afraid to exist.

I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

If I could be the mother of Wind I would blow all fear away from you. If I could be the mother of Water I would wash out the path that frightens you. If I were the mother of Trees I would plant my tallest children around your feet that you might climb beyond all danger. But alas, I am only a mother of humans whose magic powers have vanished since we allow our littlest ones to face injustice suffering & the unholiest of terrors alone.

It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

There is for human beings no greater hell to fear than the one on earth.

Try not to hold her fears against her. At the end she understood, and believed. And forgave-whatever there was to forgive.

Sound like death approaching, angels can't prevent it.

In our despair that justice is slow we sit with heads bowed wondering how even whether we will ever be healed. Perhaps it is a question only the ravaged the violated seriously ask. And is that not now almost all of us? But hope is on the way. As usual Hope is a woman herding her children around her all she retains of who she was; as usual except for her kids she has lost almost everything. Hope is a woman who has lost her fear.

I'm afraid, my dear, we were radiant.

Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them.

Don't you dare show me any fear, they seemed to say to one another. Act like nothings happening that I should be frightened of! [...] this is what civilization really meant. What it came to, in the end. Abandonment of the animal fear of annihilation, the scent of suffering. Not wanting to see it in others, not wanting to face it in yourself.

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears. I am speaking here of man's mind. The men both worshiped and feared the women.

opening beyond where I was afraid to go would be the medicine for my cure.

It did not seem possible that people would bomb one another rather than talk. What fear was this, that kept silent until announced by the loudest sound on earth, the sound of worlds being destroyed. Was it the fear that ones own terror would be glimpsed, ones own childhood of terror guessed?

I look in his eyes and I see he feeling scared of me. Well, good, I think. Let him feel what I felt.

I could get no further. There was a boulder lodged in my throat. My heart surged pitifully. I knew what the boulder was; that it was a word; and that behind that word I would find my earliest emotions. Emotions that had frightened me insane.