Quotes About Fear

Nino has something that's eating him inside, like Lila, and it's a gift and a suffering; they aren't content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them.

the laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.

We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.

A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties.

It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. And the fact that she didn't answer emphasized that preoccupation. However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full.

it's good to be afraid. You need to be afraid even when there's no need, it keeps you alert. The bond with known spaces, with secure affections, yielded to curiosity about what might happen. Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many.

in his view love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself without fear or disgust

That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me. You can turn ugly because of worries—

That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.

For example, I came to my exams very well prepared, but if the professor were suddenly to ask me, "Do you know from what works I derive the authority on the basis of which I teach this subject in this university?" I wouldn't know what to answer. But the others knew. So I moved among them fearful of saying and doing the wrong things.

I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can't stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break.

For the first time, I left Naples, left Campania. I discovered that I was afraid of everything: afraid of taking the wrong train, afraid of having to pee and not knowing where to do it, afraid that it would be night and I wouldn't be able to orient myself in an unfamiliar city, afraid of being robbed. I put all my money in my bra, as my mother did, and spent hours in a state of wary anxiety that coexisted seamlessly with a growing sense of liberation.

Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection. With these words and those years I bring back the many fears that accompanied me all my life.

Le cose brutte che non dici a nessuno diventano cani che ti mangiano la testa di notte mentre dormi.

But I felt that things were taking a turn for the worse, and I was frightened. Having to stay alert in order to avoid mistakes and confront dangers had exhausted me to the point where sometimes simply the urgency of doing something made me think that I really had done it.

They're scared. They're afraid we won't be worthy of them.

And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I'm safe?

I didn't intend to say something unkind. I meant only that you are good at making yourself liked. The difference between you and me, always, has been that people are afraid of me and not of you.

Temevo che le accadessero cose, belle o brutte, senza che io fossi presente. Era un timore vecchio, un timore che non mi era mai passato: la paura che, perdendomi pezzi della sua vita, perdesse intensita' e centralita' la mia.

Especially at night she was afraid of waking up and finding him formless in the bed, transformed into excrescences that burst out because of too much fluid, the flesh melted and dripping, and with it everything around, the furniture, the entire apartment and she herself, his wife, broken, sucked into that stream polluted by living matter.

Me encontraba entre los que se esforzaban dia y noche, que conseguían magníficos resultados, que eran tratados incluso con simpatía y aprecio, pero que jamás lucirían con la actitud adecuada la alta calidad de esos estudios. Siempre tendría miedo: miedo de decir la frase equivocada, de usar un tono excesivo, de ir vestida de forma inadecuada, de revelar sentimientos mezquinos, de no tener pensamientos interesantes

Every footfall, every voice was Don Achille creeping up behind us or coming down toward us with a long knife, the kind used for slicing open a chicken breast. There was an odor of sautéing garlic. Maria, Don Achille's wife, would put me in the pan of boiling oil, the children would eat me, he would suck my head the way my father did with mullets.

Most of those who came were women, and I was now much criticized, now much praised by opposing groups. At first I was frightened, but Mariarosa interceded with authority and I discovered in myself an unsuspected capacity to summarize disagreement and agreement, choosing in the meantime a role as mediator. I was good at saying in a convincing way: That isn't exactly what I meant.

Volevo dire solo che sei brava a farti voler bene. La differenza tra me e te, da sempre, è che di me la gente ha paura e di te no.