fear Quotes

“He stood there, rubbing his injured shoulder, and Rainsford, with fear again gripping his heart, heard the general’s mocking laugh ring through the jungle.”

“It was kind of scary. One day we were living in a law-abiding community and the next day the city and the community had both dissolved, with every person for himself. It struck me that Father and I had probably walked by this house, feeling as safe as we could feel in a demon street, many times, and now here we were hiding behind what was left of it, trying to keep from getting shot.”

“Thomas swallowed, wondering how he could ever go out there. His desire to become a Runner had taken a major blow. But he had to do it. Somehow he KNEW he had to do it. It was such an odd thing to feel, especially after what he’d just seen... Thomas knew he was a smart kid- he somehow felt it in his bones. But nothing about this place made any sense. Except for one thing. He was supposed to be a Runner. Why did he feel that so strongly? And even now, after seeing what lived in the maze?”

“At daybreak Rainsford, lying near the swamp, was awakened by a sound that made him know that he had new things to learn about fear.”

“I don’t think the demons were necessarily bad for not wanting to help others. They might have been scared, or so shocked they could not really know how selfish they were being.”

“Even so, I rather think they understand one thing—fear. The fear of pain and the fear of death.”

“‘Think about it. Our memories are wiped. We live inside a place that seems to have no way out, surrounded by bloodthirsty monster-guards. Doesn’t that sound like a prison to you?’ As he said it out loud, it sounded more and more possible. Nausea trickled into his chest”

“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.”

“Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one that rises against them and strikes back!”

“Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The power that connection holds in our lives was confirmed when the main concern about connection emerged as the fear of disconnection; the fear that something we have done or failed to do, something about who we are or where we come from, has made us unlovable and unworthy of connection.”

“It was school that kept me going in those dark days. When I was in the street it felt as though every man I passed might be a Talib. We hid our school bags in our shawls. My father always said that the most beautiful thing in a village in the morning is the sight of a child in a school uniform, but now we were afraid to wear them.”

“But no matter when I go back, the fact remains, eventually I need to face the other people on the tapes.”

“My father would say to me, ‘Any organization which works for peace, I will join. If you want to resolve a dispute or come out from conflict, the very first thing is to speak the truth. If you have a headache and tell the doctor you have a stomachache, how can the doctor help? You must speak the truth. The truth will abolish fear.‘”

″‘Father!’ Jasnah shouted. Gavilar hesitated as he stepped out onto the balcony, looking back at her. The balcony broke beneath him. Jasnah screamed, dashing through the room to the broken balcony, falling to her knees at the edge. Wind tugged locks of hair loose from her bun as she watched two men fall.”

“As more and more footage rolls, showing the marble façade of the courthouse explode into dust or a diamondglass wall withstanding a fireball, part of me feels happy. The Silvers are not invincible. They have enemies, enemies who can hurt them, and for once, they aren’t hiding behind a Red shield.”

“This return of trust in God’s providence allayed the turbulence of my fears, and I was enabled to concentrate upon my situation all the force of my intelligence.”

“Sometimes members of the court would come by to watch her practices. But if she caught their gaze, their eyes would drop and they would hurry on.”

“Most people won’t look into my eyes,” she said. “Most people fear them.”

″‘The anguish of the people Who are below here in my face depicts That pity which for terror thou has taken.‘”

“When I had the kite free, I needed a minute to rest. To recover before starting down. So instead of looking at the ground below me, I held on tight and looked out. Out across the rooftops. That’s when the fear of being up so high began to lift, and in its place came the most amazing feeling that I was flying. Just soaring above the earth, sailing among the clouds. Then I began to notice how wonderful the breeze smelled. It smelled like…sunshine. Like sunshine and wild grass and pomegranates and rain! I couldn’t stop breathing it in, filling my lungs again and again with the sweetest smell I’d ever known.”

“Abuelita smiled, reached over, and pulled the yarn, unraveling all of Esperanza’s rows. ‘Do not be afraid to start over,’ she said.”

“I could not tell which part I craved and which I feared, and I kept seeing the inside of nautilus shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a sudden leap off a cliff into the unknown.”

“The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She’ll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets!”

“I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t. I just watched. Paralyzed.”

“She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who’d lost nothing, was not.”

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

“Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.”

“…when I faced that restless beast, which, even as she stalked me, step by step had thrust me back to where the sun is speechless.”

“Can you make yourself love? Can you make yourself be loved?”

“Terror threatened to overwhelm her. She fought it the only way she knew: “I shall not fear. Fear is the mind killer . . . ”

“They hadn’t come here to fear. They hadn’t come to die. They had come to win.”

“This miry slough is a place that can’t be repaired. It is a low-lying place where the scum and filth that come with the conviction of sin drain and collect as the traveling sinner becomes aware of his lost condition. It is the fears, doubts, and discouraging apprehensions about oneself that arise in his soul.”

“That’s when I hear the scream. So full of fear and pain it ices my blood. And so familiar. I drop the spile, forget where I am or what lies ahead, only know I must reach her, protect her. I run wildly in the direction of the voice, heedless of danger, ripping through vines and branches, through anything that keeps me from reaching her.”

“Life passes. Then comes the depression. That feeling that you’ll never be right again. The fear that these outbreaks will become more familiar, or worse, never go away. You’re so tired from fighting that you start to listen to all the little lies your brain tells you. The ones that say you’re a drain on your family. The ones that say that if you were stronger or better this wouldn’t be happening to you.”

“With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.”

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

“All the excuses in the world won’t change one simple fact: that fear is a sign to do whatever it is you fear—and do it quickly.”

“I could not eat or drink a thing for my belly was tied up with fear. My thoughts chased round and round my brainpan.”

“I could not visit the prison daily. I was sure to be caught and punished. But I had to visit the prison daily. Curzon’s life depended on it.”

“For the first time, Paul allowed himself to think about the real possibility of defeat—not thinking about it out of fear or because of warnings such as that of the old Reverend Mother, but facing up to it because of his own assessment of the situation.”

Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone

“Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;”

“Her fears at last night’s supper seemed silly to her now. Perhaps they were crazy, but they weren’t criminals. She loved them. They belonged to her. ”

Other fish run from bigger things. That’s their instinct. But this fish doesn’t run from anything. He doesn’t fear.

“He spoke to the dog ... but in his voice was a strange note of fear that frightened the animal. ”

“As a youngster I was frightened of the dark—used to wake up sobbing in it, as if it were water and I were drowning—but you will observe that I have disciplined myself so thoroughly against that fear, that I much prefer a dark to a lit room”

“The only caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whip-lash and of harsh and menacing throat-sounds that threatened the whip-lash. ”

“For the record, he who does fear death also dies only once, but whatever.”

“A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared.”

“True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice on the matter.”

“You seemed locked inside of your mind, and I can’t know what’s going on in there, and it scared me.”

“Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice.”

“Hello, fear. Thank you for being here. You’re my indication that I’m doing what I need to do.”

“Daughter, dismiss thy fears; to thy desire The fates of thine are fix’d, and stand entire.”

“Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears.”

“When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.”

“The history of cities show that when conditions become overcrowded, when people are poor and when living conditions are bad, tensions run high. This is a situation that feeds on itself; poverty and crime in one group breed fear and hostility in others.”

“And, lest new fears disturb thy happy state, Know, I have search’d the mystic rolls of Fate.”

“While I was fearing it, it came, But came with less of fear, Because that fearing it so long Had almost made it dear.”

“In a serener Bright, In a more golden light I see Each little doubt and fear, Each little discord here Removed.”

“They hope the fated land, but fear the fatal way.”

“Coraline hesitated. She turned back. Her other mother and her other father were walking towards her, holding hands. They were looking at her with their black button eyes.”

“What’s the matter, Po? Do you fear me?” “Yes, I fear you, as I should when you’re angry. I won’t fight you when you’re angry. Nor should you fight me when I’m angry. That’s not the purpose of these practices.”

″‘Tis harder knowing it is due, Than knowing it is here.”

“‘Brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared, Starr,’ she says. ‘It means you go on even though you’re scared. And you’re doing that.’”

“A woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother. Only...”

In Brody’s dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned.

“For fear—that is man’s original and fundamental feeling; through fear everything is explained, original sin and original virtue.”

Sharks are like ax-murderers, Martin. People react to them with their guts. There’s something crazy and evil and uncontrollable about them.

“My shadow calleth me? What matter about my shadow! Let it run after me! I—run away from it.”

Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of—let alone in—water above his head give him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and a ache in his stomach—essentially the sensation some people feel about flying.

“From the corner of her eye she saw something bone white scamper from one tree trunk to another, closer and closer. She forced herself not to look at it.”

″‘You don’t frighten me,’ said Coraline, although they did frighten her, very much. ‘I want my parents back.‘”

″‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, <em>that’s</em> brave.‘”

You have to understand. There’s nothing in the sea this fish would fear.

“Coraline was too close to stop, and she felt the other mother’s cold arms enfold her. She stood there, rigid and trembling as the other mother held her tightly.”

″‘In danger?’ thought Coraline to herself. It sounded exciting. It didn’t sound like a bad thing. Not really.”

″‘I’m an explorer,’ said Coraline out loud, but her words sounded muffled and dead on the misty air. She had made it out of the cellar, hadn’t she?”

“Her long white fingers fluttered gently, like a tired butterfly, and Coraline shivered.”

“I was ready to join [Edward’s] family. The fear and guilt and anguish I was feeling now had taught me that much… The next time something came at us, I would be ready. An asset, not a liability.”

“All alone, in the middle of the night, Coraline began to cry. There was no other sound in the empty flat.”

“... the psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.”

“Come over here, we say - to the edge, we say. I want to show you something, we say. We are afraid, they say; it’s very exciting, they say. Come to the edge, we say, use your imagination. And they come. And they look. And we push. And they fly. We to stay and die in our beds. They to go and to die howsoever, inspiring those who come after them to come to their own edge. And fly. ”

“Life... is a paradise to what we fear of death.”

“So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.”

“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are cause by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”

″... I no longer had any feeling other than the dark terror of the condemned tied to the mouth of a cannon, at the moment when the shot is fired and scatters their limbs into the air.”

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

″‘Oh dear,’ said Aziraphale. ‘It’s him.’ ‘Him who?’ said Crowley. ‘The Voice of God,’ said the angel. ‘The Metatron.’ The Them stared. Then Pepper said, ‘No, it isn’t. The Metatron’s made of plastic and it’s got laser cannon and it can turn into a helicopter.‘”

“I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel ... the fear and empire of man had passed away.”

“Why do we have limiting beliefs about our success? Why do we not love ourselves? Why do we have fears? Isn’t thinking negative/small a sin then?”

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”

“I felt anger and fear and pain coming from him, but I didn’t back away, I stayed right there, and knew I had done the right thing when he buried his face in my neck and cried some more.”

“The fear I felt was no rational fear, but a panic terror not only of the Martians but of the dusk and stillness all about me. Such an extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had that I ran weeping silently as a child might do. Once I had turned, I did not dare look back.”

“You are scared out of your wits! What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Do you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent, man.”

“What seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my own heart.”

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”

“I feel like they done put me on death row, too. What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do and send you to death row?”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear, I wish I had never seen that filthy sword at all.”

“The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing.”

“Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.”

“Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper...”

“Seth pictured the gaunt man with the lank hair and the unphotogenic smile rocking the cocoon. ‘He can’t get in, he can’t get in, he can’t get in,’ Seth repeated softly to himself.”

“What scared Stanley the most about dying wasn’t his actual death. He figured he could handle the pain. It wouldn’t be much worse than what he felt now. In fact, maybe at the moment of his death he would be too weak to feel pain. Death would be a relief. What worried him the most was the thought of his parents not knowing what happened to him, not knowing whether he was dead or alive. He hated to imagine what it would be like for his mother and father, day after day, month after month, not knowing, living on false hope. For him, at least, it would be over. For his parents, the pain would never end.”

“This surpassed the fear of death. Death would be a mercy if it would make the feeling stop, the uncontrollable panic mingling with the mind-scrambling certainty of something sinister approaching, something with no need to hurry, something that would not be so kind as to let him die. The fear was palpable, suffocating, irresistible.”

“The truth. Tell them Hogwarts is no longer safe. It is as we feared, Minerva. The Chamber of Secrets has indeed been opened again.”

“Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognized as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship.”

“Why spiders? Why couldn’t it be ‘follow the butterflies.‘”

“When the Dementors approached him, he heard the last moments of his mother’s life, her attempts to protect him, Harry, from Lord Voldemort, and Voldemort’s laughter before he murdered her...”

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

“Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn’t even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence.”

″‘He believed her because here in the shadowy light of the stronghold everything seemed possible. Between the two of them they owned the world and no enemy, Gary Fulcher, Wanda Kay Moore, Janice Avery, Jess’s own fears and insufficiencies, nor any of the foes whom Leslie imagined attacking Terabithia, could ever really defeat them.‘”

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

“Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart.”

“None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or else because they could not understand it. I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way.”

“I felt better. Yes, I sensed it like the sweat of relief when nausea passes away; I felt better. We were even after all, even in enmity. The deadly rivalry was on both sides after all.”

“Finny turned toward me. “You were down at the bottom, weren’t you? he asked, not in the official courtroom tone he had used before, but in a friend’s voice.”

“I must warn you that I see your enemies lurking among the trees ahead, and if you ever let Craven Fear begin painting a picture on the screen of your imagination, you will walk with fear and trembling and agony, where no fear is.”

“I felt fear’s echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky.”

“We need not fear that in seeking God only we may narrow our lives or restrict the motions of our expanding hearts.”

“He would like to show his drawings to his dad, but he didn’t dare. When he was in first grade, he had told his dad that he wanted to be an artist when he grew up. He’d thought his dad would be pleased. He wasn’t.”

″‘Leslie, I swear – I’d go in there if I could.’ He really thought he would, too. ‘You ain’t scared of her, are you, Leslie?’ He didn’t mean it in a daring way, he was just dumbfounded by the idea of Leslie being scared.”

“Indecision is the seedling of fear! Remember this, as you read. Indecision crystalizes into doubt, the two blend and become fear!”

“I smiled—for what had I to fear?”

“Suddenly his mother let out a great shuddering sob. ‘O my God. O my God.’ She said it over and over, her head down on her arms. His father moved to put his arm around her awkwardly, but he didn’t take his eyes off Jess.”

″‘Course you’re scared. Anybody’d be scared. You just gotta trust me, OK? I’m not gonna let you fall, May Belle. I promise you.‘”

“I abandoned my disguise and became myself, free from fear or weakness or lust.”

“I’m just scared because everything feels weird. It’s as if everything’s changed. Not just you: everything!”

“So in the summer time they had all set out for America. At the last moment there joined them Marija Berczynskas, who was a cousin of Ona’s. Marija was an orphan, and had worked since childhood for a rich farmer of Vilna, who beat her regularly. It was only at the age of twenty that it had occurred to Marija to try her strength, when she had risen up and nearly murdered the man, and then come away.”

“the demons that make a person afraid are the hardest to cast out.”

“When I was younger, I scared my mother to death, the things I would blurt out about District 12, about the people who rule our country, Panem, from the far-off city called the Capitol. Eventually I understood this would only lead us to more trouble. So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts.”

″ Almighty God!—no, no! They heard!—they suspected!—they knew!—they were making a mockery of my horror!—this I thought, and this I think.”

“I often don’t say this out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you’d never guess from looking at me.”

“There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and in the air of the streets. Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak.”

“If you stop trying to make yourself more than you are, out of fear that you are less than you are, whoever you really are will be a lot lighter and happier and easier to live with, too.”

“I don’t know what I don’t see, what I don’t fear!”

“All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire.”

“To each his own fear.”

“Now, don’t be angry after you’ve been afraid. That’s the worst kind of cowardice.”

“When I’m mad I don’t have room to be scared.”

“By Red Flower Bagheera meant fire, only no creature in the jungle will call fire by its proper name. Every beast lives in deadly fear of it, and invents a hundred ways of describing it.”

“He was living proof of one of my worst fears: Your parents really could die and leave you alone in the world.”

“I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was always a dark, sinister shape lurking just underneath the surface.”

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

“Vianne didn’t hesitate. She knew now that no one could be neutral—not anymore—and as afraid as she was of risking Sophie’s life, she was suddenly more afraid of letting her daughter grow up in a world where good people did nothing to stop evil, where a good woman could turn her back on a friend in need. She reached for the toddler, took him in her arms.”

“At my age, I should not be afraid of anything—certainly not my own past.”

“A lot of these men had started as afraid of war as anyone, but the fear had been drummed out.”

“Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real. Just as he felt better at demonstrations (which, as I have pointed out, are all playacting and dreams) than in a lecture hall full of students, so he was happier with Sabina the invisible goddess than the Sabina who had accompanied him throughout the world and whose love he constantly feared losing.”

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.”

“I became terrified of him when he was angry. His face . . . would grow red, and he would shout, shout so loudly and furiously that it would, literally, paralyze me. I would not be able to think.”

“It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.”

“Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company.”

“I figured if anything happened to Mom, I would be alone on this planet.”

“Oh, monsters are scared . . . That’s why they’re monsters.”

“When I was little, something as small as Mom picking me up ten minutes late threw me into a wild panic.”

“They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.”

“Work and I are very good friends; I never was afraid of work yet.”

″ But he kept this knowledge of his fear thrust firmly down in him; his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness. ”

“On the other side of your fear is freedom.”

“I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

“What we did see was that jealousy is fear: it can corrode even if quite baseless. There was only one answer: total trust. And, we said, if that trust were ever violated, even the least bit, then a quick end; for trust can never be restored.”

“The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new.”

“He did not fear ridicule, he had never known it.”

“Oh dear, it was going to be a failure; a complete failure, Clarissa felt it in her bones as dear old Lord Lexham stood there apologizing for his wife who had caught cold at the Buckingham Palace garden party.”

″‘Do you think you could go back to bed?’ Grandpa asked. ‘Not likely,’ Kendra said. ‘I’ve never felt more awake. And I’ve never wished more that I was dreaming.‘”

“Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.”

“It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.”

“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

“And, I think, for those of us who came of age with the women’s movement, there’s always the fear that it’s not real, you’re not really allowed to determine your own life. It may be pulled back at any moment.”

“She was scraping at the mud on her bare legs. ‘I just wanted to find you, so you wouldn’t be so lonesome.’ She hung her head. ‘But I got too scared.‘”

″‘I don’t stay after I set out dinner,’ Mrs. Dudley went on. ‘Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes.‘”

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”

“It wasn’t so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing… Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.”

“She very soon came to an open field, with a wood on the other side of it: it looked much darker than the last wood, and Alice felt a little timid about going into it. However, on second thoughts, she made up her mind to go on: ‘for I certainly won’t go back,’ she thought to herself, and this was the only way to the Eighth Square.”

″‘Don’t look back,’ she cried out in a voice high with fear, ‘don’t look back—don’t look—run!‘”

“No; he did not think they would suspect him of anything. He was black. Again he felt the roll of crisp bills in his pocket; if things went wrong he could always run away. He wondered how much money was in the roll; he had not even counted it. He would see when he got to Bessie’s. No; he need not be afraid. He felt the gun nestling close to his skin. That gun could always make folks stand away and think twice before bothering him.”

“The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.”

“The primary difference between a rich person and poor person is how they manage fear.”

“Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear.”

“The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.”

″‘I’d bow, but I might fall over,’ I say to Queen Elara, and immediately I wish I could call back the words. She’s a Silver, I can’t talk to her that way. She could put me in the stocks, take away my rations, punish me, punish my family. No, I realize in my growing horror. She’s the queen. She could just kill me. She could kill us all.”

“Fear doesn’t go away.”

“Swift as a deer. Quiet as a shadow. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Quick as a snake. Calm as still water.”

“Remember this: the number one cause of failure in this country is the fear of failure. Fear paralyzes you from taking action.”

“When I lived with papa, he used to tell me what he thought about everything, so that I never had any opinions but his. And if I did have any of my own, I kept them quiet, because he wouldn’t have liked them. He called me his little doll, and he played with me just the way I played with my dolls.”

“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.”

“It’s just that it’s fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble.”

“Don’t be afraid to lose him, because if a man truly loves you, he’s not going anywhere.”

“Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness.”

“All of us have our own inner fears, beliefs, opinions. These inner assumptions rule and govern our lives. A suggestion has no power in and of itself, its power arises from the fact that you accept it mentally.”

“Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”

True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid.

“This was a female of his kind, and it was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the females. He did not know anything about this law, for it was no generalization of the mind, not a something acquired by experience in the world. He knew it as a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct - of the same instinct that made him howl at the moon and starts of nights and that made him fear death and the unknown.”

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

″ If you’ve got a head, you’ve got a voice of Resistance inside it.”

“It was Silver’s voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.”

“Our greatest fear is fear of success.”

“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed.”

“Yet, in reason, no man should possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, should dishearten his army.”

“Since we weren’t married, we couldn’t kiss each other in public, or even give one another a friendly hug to express our extreme joy. We risked imprisonment and being whipped.”

“Don’t worry. Everyone who left will come back. They’re just afraid of change.”

“That is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of.”

“You are not wise enough to fear me as I should be feared. You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.”

“It was war all right. Right away, the supermarkets were empty.”

“Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. ”

“The masking tape is to protect against flying glass during a bombing and the black curtains are to protect us from our neighbors.”

“It’s fear that makes us lose our conscience. It’s also what transforms us into cowards.”

“George: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf,… Martha: I...am...George...I...am...”

“I’m not a superstitious person, but when I wake up from this dream, this painfully clear memory of John, I have the most horrible feeling in my chest. I would rather die than see them hurt you. And I have a sudden fear that somehow, some way, what he said in the dream will come true.”

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

“Don’t leave me here alone! It’s your Sam calling. Don’t go where I can’t follow! Wake up, Mr. Frodo! O wake up, Frodo, me dear, me dear. Wake up!”

“Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push past the apathy and laziness and fear. Otherwise, the next day you’re going to have two things you don’t want to do, then three and four and five, and pretty soon, you can’t even get back to the first thing.”

“You only like guys you don’t have a shot with, because you’re scared. What are you so scared of?”

“Get to that Zone where you can shut out all the noise, all the negativity and fear and distractions and lies, and achieve whatever you want, in whatever you do.”

“Love is scary: it changes; it can go away. That’s part of the risk. I don’t want to be scared any more.”

“Although he could not put it into words, he knew not only had they resolved to put him to death, but they were determined to make his death mean more than a mere punishment; that they regarded him as a figment of that black world which they feared and were anxious to keep under control.”

“Thus the differences between the conservative and the radical seem to spring mainly from their attitude toward the future. Fear of the future causes us to lean against and cling to the present, while faith in the future renders us receptive to change.”

“The man who wants you to trust him is the one you must fear the most.”

“You are crying! You are afraid of me! And yet I am not really wicked.”

″‘There goes my old man.’ Mrs. Delacroix said. She held her breath while her husband went forward.”

“Who had very properly taught him equally to love and fear him.”

“Perhaps that was the beginning of it. Mafatu, the boy who had been christened Stout Heart by his proud father, was afraid of the sea.”

“Mafatu wanted to cry out after him: ‘Wait, Kana! I’ll go! I’ll try-‘. But the words would not come. Kana had gone.”

“I am surprised with an uncouth fear; A chilling sweat o’er-runs my trembling joints; My heart suspects more than mine eye can see.”

“Our innocence had been replaced by fear and we had become monsters. There was nothing we could do about it.”

“And so it was that he shuddered when the mighty seas, gathering far out, hurled themselves at the barrier reef of Hikueru and the whole island quivered under the assault.”

“We did not scale the rod because we ... could, we scaled it because we were terrified ... we couldn’t. ”

“Moana, the sea God, thunders on the reef. He is angry with us all because Mafatu is afraid!”

“Thunder in his ears. Water strangling him. Terror in his soul. The canoe slewed round into the trough. The boy flung himself forward, wound his arms about the mid-thwart. It was the end of a world.”

“When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off.”

“The room turned dim. Huge, cloudy, human-looking shapes bellied up in all four corners and advanced on Sophie and Michael, howling as they came. The howls began as moaning horror, and went up to despairing brays, and then up again to screams of pain and terror. Sophie pressed her hands to her ears, but the screams pressed through her hands, louder and louder still, more horrible every second. Calcifer shrank hurriedly down in the grate and flickered his way under his lowest log. Michael grabbed Sophie by her elbow and dragged her to the door.”

“I always get the shakes before a drop. I’ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can’t really be afraid. The ship’s psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked me silly questions while I was asleep and he tells me that it isn’t fear, it isn’t anything important — it’s just like the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate. I couldn’t say about that; I’ve never been a race horse. But the fact is: I’m scared silly, every time.”

“The most common one-liner in the Bible is, “Do not be afraid.” Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.”

“Esperanza and I knew the names of twenty other union members,” . . . “The teachers’ union did not have open meetings. We worked in cells, and communicated by message. Most people knew only four other members by name. This is what I am saying. In Guatemala, you are careful. If you want to change something, you can find yourself dead. This was not the—what do you call? The P.T.A.”

Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

“Mafatu went out alone to face the thing he feared the most.”

“It is undeniably the case that in our society we do not easily accept that death is a natural part of life, which results in a perpetual sense of insecurity and fear, and many are confused at the time of the death of a loved one, not knowing what they can do to help the one that has passed away or how to address their own grief. Exploring ways of overcoming our fear of death and adopting a creative approach at the time of bereavement, that is, focusing one’s energy on supporting the one that has passed away, are both extraordinary benefits of the insights and practices that are so beautifully expressed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. When I think of these things I often remember the Dalai Lama saying: ‘When we look at life and death from a broader perspective, then dying is just like changing our clothes! When this body becomes old and useless, we die and take on a new body, which is fresh, healthy and full of energy! This need not be so bad!’”

“I think fear had made us all a little cantankerous. I had spent the night in the waiting room. Gramps offered to get me a motel room, but I was afraid that if I left the hospital, I would never see Gram again.”

“I, Salamanca Tree Hiddle, was afraid of lots and lots of things. For example, I was terrified of car accidents, death, cancer, brain tumors, nuclear war, pregnant women, loud noises, strict teachers, elevators, and scads of other things. But I was not afraid of spiders, snakes, and wasps. ”

“Gram and Gramps knew that I wanted to see Momma, but that I was afraid to.”

“I prayed that we would not be in an accident (I was terrified of cars and buses) and that we would get there by my mother’s birthday – seven days away – and that we would bring her home.”

“We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration... The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.”

″ African-Americans themselves in certain parts join with Euro-Americans, to keep out of school, teachers who may be bold enough to teach the truth as it is. They usually say the races here are getting along amicably now, and we do not want these peaceful relationships disturbed by teaching of new political thought. What they mean to say with respect to the peaceful relation of the races, then, is that the African-Americans have been terrorized to the extent that they are afraid even to discuss political matters publicly.”

“I scanned the group. Faces spoke to their future. I saw courage, anger, fear and confusion. Others were hopeless. They had already given up.”

“Thy soul is by vile fear assail’d, which oft So overcasts a man, that he recoils From noblest resolution, like a beast At some false semblance in the twilight gloom.”

“Heaven’s justice goads them on, that fear Is turn’d into desire.”

“Fear is a hunter. But brave warriors, we brush away fear with a flick of the wrist. We laugh in the face of fear, kick it like a stone across the street.”

“Becoming fearless isn’t the point. That’s impossible. It’s learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it.”

“You’re afraid of heights,” I say. “How do you survive in the Dauntless compound?” “I ignore my fear,” he says. “When I make decisions, I pretend it doesn’t exist.” I stare at him for a second. I can’t help it. To me there’s a difference between not being afraid and acting in spite of fear, as he does.”

“One superstitious sailor can taint the whole ship’s company with his fear.