Fear Quotes

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

~ Jennifer Egan

He is a man, and he is afraid. This is not a good combination.

~ Kristin Hannah

What is it?Nothing. I had a bad dream.What did you dream about?Nothing.Are you okay?No.He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said.I was crying. But you didnt wake up.I'm sorry. I was just so tired.I meant in the dream.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells.

~ Mark Vonnegut

Is almost a good enough reason for fear ?

~ Beth Revis

I carefully lifted out of the pose and spoke up: Uh, Fran? When I'm doing the pose (camel), I have this feeling in my chest, kind of a scary, tight feeling.Fran was adjusting someone across the room. She had a way of looking like a thoughtful seamstress when she made adjustments: an inch let out here, a seam straightened there, and everything would be just right. She might as well have had pins tucked between her lips and a tape measure around her neck. Without missing a beat or looking up she said, Oh, that's fear. Try the pose again.Fear. I hadn't even known it was there.

~ Claire Dederer

Another of the hard things about being in a war, grandchildren, is that although there are times of quiet when the fighting has stopped, you know you will soon be fighting again. Those quiet times give you the chance to think about what has happened. Some of it you would rather not think about, as you remember the pain and the sorrow. You also have time to worry about what will happen when you go into battle again.

~ Joseph Bruchac

I understood about fear. And I knew better than anyone in that room what Mouse was capable of. But still I had been raised in a place where to show your fear was worse than cowardice. It was suicide, a sin.

~ Walter Mosley

You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.

~ Mary Lawson

Mind doesn't work properly when taken intoa higher level where fear dominates the will.

~ Toba Beta

Thousands of years ago, when our ancestors encountered a predatory animal like a lion, it was best to react immediately and not stand around thinking about the lion, admiring its beauty or wondering why it was bothering them instead of tracking down some tasty antelope. Thus, the fast track to the amygdala kept our ancestors alive.

~ John B. Arden

Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.

~ G.k. Chesterton

All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.

~ Anne Rice

Fear of our own depths is the enemy.

~ James Hollis

...we, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness. (p184)

~ Benjamin Hale

Who is the brave man--he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Surrender to your fear so you may triumph over it.Choose me,open you soul to me, and embrace the Devouring.

~ Simon Holt

We can always count on people to hate and to fear.To harm one another and to be harmed.To kill and be killed.It is what opens the gate.

~ Simon Holt

But human beings are like that, she thought. We've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear.

~ Paulo Coelho

White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.

~ Tom Robbins

Courage and fear were one thing too.

~ John Steinbeck

They lurk in the cold and dark.Hungry and,wicked,they wait for their one chance to devour the weak on Sorry Night.Then the vours feast on a banquet of fear.Your fear.They steal your soul but your body remains.No one knows the difference.

~ Simon Holt

You skin is so soft. Smells like…”She had to tilt him to get this other arm free and hated knowing how badly she was hurting him as she did so. “Sheer, unadulterated fear?

~ Cherry Adair

To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?

~ Edward Abbey

When you've already broken the rules of the universe, fear becomes only a feeling of disconnection, distant.

~ Jonas Samuelle

I thought of Shelley in the hospital, how she said sometimes sadness only looked like anger and judgment. Maybe fear did too.

~ Holly Cupala

What is there so fearful as the expectation of evil tidings delayed? ... Misery is a more welcome visitant when she comes in her darkest guise and wraps us in perpetual black, for then the heart no longer sickens with disappointed hope.- The Evil Eye

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Nuclear is clear so near to fear and tear.

~ Toba Beta

Scarcely has night arrived to undeceive, unfurling her wings of crepe (wings drained even of the glimmer just now dying in the tree-tops); scarcely has the last glint still dancing on the burnished metal heights of the tall towers ceased to fade, like a still glowing coal in a spent brazier, which whitens gradually beneath the ashes, and soon is indistinguishable from the abandoned hearth, than a fearful murmur rises amongst them, their teeth chatter with despair and rage, they hasten and scatter in their dread, finding witches everywhere, and ghosts. It is night... and Hell will gape once more.

~ Charles Nodier

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

~ Lev Grossman

The forest has shrunkAnd fear has expanded,The forests have dwindled,There are less animals now, less courage and less lightning, less beauty and the moon lies bare, deflowered by force and then abandoned.

~ Visar Zhiti

It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.

~ Christopher Hitchens

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

~ Kate Morton

Mental clarity ain't for the faint of heart.

~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer

Fear is the venom impact of predator sting, causing prey not to be focus on the survival.

~ Toba Beta

Many truths which are not believed are called lies,' the Laughing Beast said. 'Mirrors do not themselves lie unless they have been enchanted. Ordinary mirrors merely reflect what is revealed to them. People lie and mirrors reflect people. If your mother feared mirrors in your land, she feared herself.

~ Isobelle Carmody

...each of us from the seance stood alone. Like so many pillars of salt, we had tried to look back and failed. And in the eyes of the others who shared the pale, flat sky with us, there was sometimes suspicion, sometimes a little fear.

~ Joan Lowery Nixon

I'm not givin' in an inch to fear.

~ David Crosby

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

~ George Eliot

Both terrorism and insurance sell fear -- and business is business

~ Liam Mccurry