c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
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, Transformation
Nuclear is clear so near to fear and tear.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Ah, Zora, you are so naive," the fire fairy said with a hearty chuckle. "You have no idea what happened to them, do you? You have no clue as to what happened to your parents.
— Markelle Grabo, The Elf Girl
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, Smarra & Trilby
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 Magicians
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Welcome to the Monkey House
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, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry
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, Hitch-22: A Memoir
She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.
— Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden
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, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
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, Greylands
Instead of the final judgement, what worries me is the final dream.
— João Cabral de Melo Neto
...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, The Séance
I'm not givin' in an inch to fear.
— David Crosby, The Best of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for Guitar: Includes Super Tab Notation
Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Both terrorism and insurance sell fear -- and business is business
— Liam McCurry, Terminal Policy
Fear is a powerful stimulant.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
It's because you're scared that there's danger.But could she manage not to be scared anymore?
— Johanna Verweerd, The Winter Garden Shelf Promotion Package
The combination of power, fear, and mania can be deadly. The leader, convinced that he might be betrayed, acts first and betrays others first. Afraid that he's not well liked, he works so hard to get others to like him that it has the opposite effect. Convinced of mismanagement, he micromanages and becomes the source of the mismanagement. And on and on - the things we fear or dread, we blindly inflict on ourselves.
— Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations for Clarity, Effectiveness, and Serenity
Dr. StupidParker says that when I'm sad it really means I'm angry and when I'm angry it really means I'm afraid.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
But she believed there was a thin line between accepting one's fears and giving in to them altogether.
— John Corey Whaley, Highly Illogical Behavior
Why escape your intended purpose by copying and trying to be someone else? You will discover who you were meant to be only after you have shown confidence being yourself.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Mental illness" is among the most stigmatized of categories.' People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers.
— Elyn R. Saks, Refusing Care: Forced Treatment and the Rights of the Mentally Ill
The most judgmental people are often those who complain most about being judged. The ones not complaining will look as though they're the ones doing the judging.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Doubt kills more dreams than failure will.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
When you fail to tap into your wellsprings of inner strength due totoxic habits, environments or people, you wind up feeling trapped, stranded and unhappy. You end up in soulless jobs, destructive relationships and empty friendships. Most of all, youfind yourself unsatisfied with who you are, and you often become your own worst enemy,perpetuating the cycles of pain, anger and fear within you – like I did
— Aletheia Luna, Quiet Strength: Embracing, Empowering and Honoring Yourself as an Introvert
Why be crying, fearful, lonely, when you have the whole universe? Be still, listen to your heart, breathe, and know you need nothing.
— Jay Woodman
I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
One day I'm a normal person with a normal life,” he said. “The next I'm standing on a street corner in Madrid with a secret phone and a hole in my arm and I'm bleeding all over, hoping I don't get arrested. It was completely crazy. But it seemed like the only way at the time.
— Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs
This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said 'Yes', without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.
— Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer
Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.
— Nathaniel Branden, Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
A well painted facade seldom scares a resident cockroach.
— Hasse Jerner
Don't be managed by the likelihood of mishaps. Be motivated by the promise of favor!
— Carlos Wallace, The Other 99 T.Y.M.E.S: Train Your Mind to Enjoy Serenity
Do we really want to be rid of our resentments, our anger, our fear? Many of us cling to our fears, doubts, self-loathing or hatred because there is a certain distorted security in familiar pain. It seems safer to embrace what we know than to let go of it for fear of the unknown. (Narcotics Anonymous Book/page 33)
— Narcotics Anonymous
I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God's reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
FEAR stands for face everything and recover – Old AA saying
— Stephen King, Doctor Sleep
She looked at him like it physically hurt her not to speak, and yet she stayed silent.
— Dennis Sharpe, First Boy
What may intimidate a man is a woman who thinks with her mind before she feels with her heart. Nevertheless what determines the strength in the man is his ability to accept one when he sees one.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The desire to make art begins early. Among the very young this is encouraged (or at least indulged as harmless) but the push toward a 'serious' education soon exacts a heavy toll on dreams and fantasies....Yet for some the desire persists, and sooner or later must be addressed. And with good reason: your desire to make art -- beautiful or meaningful or emotive art -- is integral to your sense of who you are. Life and Art, once entwined, can quickly become inseparable; at age ninety Frank Lloyd Wright was still designing, Imogen Cunningham still photographing, Stravinsky still composing, Picasso still painting.But if making art gives substance to your sense of self, the corresponding fear is that you're not up to the task -- that you can't do it, or can't do it well, or can't do it again; or that you're not a real artist, or not a good artist, or have no talent, or have nothing to say. The line between the artist and his/her work is a fine one at best, and for the artist it feels (quite naturally) like there is no such line. Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all -- and for those who do, trouble isn't long in coming. Doubts, in fact, soon rise in s
— David Bayles, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
Worry is stressing about a situation that may or may not occur and it’s always in the negative sense.
— Rob Liano
Bond sat for a moment frozen to his chair. Suddenly, there flashed unwanted into his mind that most sinister line in poetry: 'They reckon ill who leave me out. When me they fly, I am the wings.
— Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever
The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid
— Lucian of Samosata, Lucian's True History;
I'm scared of the geese. When I was five, my mom took me down there to feed those horrible beasts and one of them nearly took my hand off.
— Leah Rae Miller, The Summer I Became a Nerd
That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
They’d have people out looking for her, and nothing makes grown-ups quite so mad as finding a child safe when they’d been scared silly that they might find that child dead.
— Jenny Wingfield, The Homecoming of Samuel Lake
I had lied to myself from the very beginning, deceived myself into believing that I was being fanciful and overly imaginative. Surely such monstrosities only existed in nightmares? Yet I had lived through a nightmare these past months, and that was no dream at all.       I was still fighting against the awful truth, not wanting to give in, searching my mind for a logical explanation—but there was none. And the most horrible realization of all was that I had known, somewhere deep inside, ever since the day I first set eyes on Vladec Salei.       Plague carrier.       Living death.       Drainer of life.       The phrasing did not matter. No euphemism could strike fear into the hearts of men the way that single word 
— Melika Dannese Lux, Corcitura
Respectable opinion would never consider an assessment of the Reagan Doctrine or earlier exercises in terms of their actual human costs, and could not comprehend that such an assessment—which would yield a monstrous toll if accurately conducted on a global scale—might perhaps be a proper task in the United States. At the same level of integrity, disciplined Soviet intellectuals are horrified over real or alleged American crimes, but perceive their own only as benevolent intent gone awry, or errors of an earlier day, now overcome; the comparison is inexact and unfair, since Soviet intellectuals can plead fear as an excuse for their services to state violence.
— Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism
Fears arise when you look back, and they arise when you look ahead. If you're prone to disaster fantasies, you may even find yourself caught in the middle, staring at your half-finished canvas and fearing both that you lack the ability to finish it, and that no one will understand it if you do.Fears arise when you look back, and they arise when you look ahead. If you're prone to disaster fantasies, you may even find yourself caught in the middle, staring at your half-finished canvas and fearing both that you lack the ability to finish it, and that no one will understand it if you do.To which the Master replied, 'What makes you think that ever changes?'That's why they're called Masters. When he raised David's discovery from an expression of self-doubt to a simple observation of reality, uncertainty became an asset. Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution -- and it should be. Vision, Uncertainty, and Knowledge of Materials are inevitabilities that all artists must acknowledge and learn from: vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.
— David Bayles, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
She knew Paul D was adding something to her life—something she wanted to count on but was scared to... His waiting eyes and awful human power. The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well—to tell, to refine and tell again. The things neither knew about the other—the things neither had word-shapes for—well, it would come in time.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
And, as always, I thank my family who are an amazing network of support.
— Laisha Rosnau, Notes on Leaving
Victories are won while on your knees! Keep praying for those who rise up against you. Fear not. The Lord has rectified the problem. Prayer is POWERFUL!!
— Anita R. Sneed-Carter
Pausing on the threshold, he looked in, conscious not so much of the few familiar sticks of furniture - the trucklebed, the worn strip of Brussels carpet, the chipped blue-banded ewer and basin, the framed illuminated texts on the walls - as of a perfect hive of abhorrent memories.That high cupboard in the corner, from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars; the mouseholes, the rusty grate - trumpet of every wind that blows - these objects at once lustily shouted at him in their own original tongues.("Out Of The Deep")
— Walter de la Mare, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
You can not be fearless without first admitting you have been afraid.
— Jack Laursen
The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it.
— Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature
I am not a man of fear, but I am a man that knows how to fear. Without fear, we become lazy. Without fear, we become reckless. Fear doesn't limit a man, it keeps the man sharp.
— Lionel Suggs
Her face expressed suffering so deep that I will never forget it; her eyes radiated a deep sadness...Mrs. Folmer was oppressed by that special sadness, perhaps the most horrible torture, of those who had no idea what happened to their loved ones.
— Diet Eman, Things We Couldn't Say
When fear raises it's head, don't freak, look it in the eye, ask it its name and what it wants to teach you, then invite it to dance, pull it in real close and let it know that this is your life and your dance and you'll be taking the lead.
— Les Dossey
The worst fear in the hearings was that you would get some evil interrogator: you could never know what might happen then. No one who lives in a free country will ever understand that kind of fear. What is most horrifying is the realization that you have no idea what can happen, that your life is totally in the hands of someone in the chair in front of you, someone might well be a demon.
— Diet Eman, Things We Couldn't Say
Being in charge of your work life doesn't mean you always move with assurance and sublime self-confidence; it means you keep moving, continuing on your own path, even when you feel shaky and uncertain.
— Charlotte Beers, I'd Rather Be in Charge: A Legendary Business Leader's Roadmap for Achieving Pride, Power, and Joy at Work
There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.
— Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
Behind every flinch is a fear or an anxiety - sometimes rational, sometimes not. Without the fear, there is no flinch. But wiping out the fear isn't what's important - facing it is.
— Julien Smith, The Flinch
I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
The past haunts the present in more ways than we think. It certainly scares the living daylights out of ME"~ Old Wrinkly
— Cressida Cowell, How to Break a Dragon's Heart
She knows that feeling too. Of believing that each time someone says her name, it’s to tell her that something bad has happened.
— Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son
for PEOPLE to rule themselves in a REPUBLIC , they must have virtue;for a TYRANT to rule in a TYRANNY ,he must use FEAR.
— William J. Federer, Change to Chains-The 6,000 Year Quest for Control -Volume I-Rise of the Republic
Each person bears a fear which is special to him. One man fears a close space and another man fears drowning; each laughs at the other and calls him stupid. Thus fear is only a preference, to be counted the same as the preference for one woman or another, or mutton for pig, or cabbage for onion.
— Michael Crichton, Eaters of the Dead
No sign of pleasure greeted the announcement. The mood in the hall was leaden.My mood was livelier. Fright is livelier than lead.
— Gail Carson Levine, Fairest
But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.
— James Lee Burke, Jolie Blon's Bounce
Success or failure inbusiness is caused more by mental attitude even than by mentalcapacity." Banish the fear-attitude; acquire the confidentattitude. And remember that the only way to acquire it is—toacquire it.
— Walter Dill Scott
That's the kind of thing people always thinking. They always got to see some sort of scary thing in everything.
— S.D. Crockett, After the Snow
He pulled the gun from his waist, running it along my cheek and back down to my lips. I blinked back the tears at sick game. He finally stopped the gun at my temple, my pulse fighting against the pressure of the cold metal of the gun.“Do you think you are a good person, Kendall?”“No, not at all,” I said, swallowing down the misery of my honest answer.“Really?” he asked, one eyebrow lifting in confusion. “Are you afraid to die?”I wished I could spit in his face for making everything so hard. I wished he would just pull the trigger and end it already. But a small part of me was begging and pleading internally that he wouldn’t shoot me.“No, I’m not afraid to die,” I admitted, I closed my eyes and the tears fell quickly. “I’m not afraid of much in life. I’ve seen too much to be scared.”He let out a sigh. I opened my eyes. He pulled the gun away from me.“Well, damn. How the hell am I supposed to kill someone so miserable?”I looked away. Even in death I was pitiful.
— Holly Hood
Eventually he'd let the answering machine take over and had hidden in his studio. Where he's hidden all his life. From the monster. He could feel itin their bedroom now. He could feel its tail swishing by him. Feel its hot, fetid breath.All his life he knew if he was quiet enough, small enough, it wouldnn't see him. If he didn't make a fuss, didn't speak up, it wouldn't hear him, wouldn't hurt him. If he was beyond criticism and hid his cruelty with a smile and good deeds, it wouldn't devour him. By now he realized there was no hiding. It would always be there, and always find him. He was the monster.
— Louise Penny
I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
The rain of Madre de Dios is similar to that of the Amazon, but there is a petrifying aspect to it, as if it seeks to wound rather than to nurture.
— Tahir Shah, House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.
— William Manchester
I could smell something. Fear.I could taste it now.It tasted like blood in my mouth, and I could feel it slide through me and open me up when I saw him ...
— Markus Zusak, Getting the Girl
It was any outcast's nightmare.If I looked carefully, I suspected I might find it beneath the black paint of the small acrylic by the window.
— Nancy Werlin, Black Mirror
There was nothing green left; artillery had denuded and scarred every inch of ground. Tiny flares glowed and disappeared. Shrapnel burst with bluish white puffs. Jets of flamethrowers flickered and here and there new explosions stirred up the rubble. While I watched, an American observation plane droned over the Japanese lines, spotting targets for the U.S. warships lying offshore. Suddenly the little plane was hit by flak and disintegrated. The carnage below continued without pause.Here I was safe, but tomorrow I would be there. In that instant I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.
— William Manchester
Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act. 
— Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water
There's no shame in fear. But understand this - the coward is ruled by fear, while the hero rides it like a wild stallion.
— David Gemmell, Dark Moon
Bravery is a willing decision to do what must be done. Fear is a cancer that is cured only by doing what must be done, backed by an intelligent, open mind.
— Corey Aaron Burkes
When you buy into any version of fear, it can become your experience because your molecules are intelligent and your energy responds to the predominant feeling in your being. The focus of your mind is exactly what gives the orders to create what you experience.
— Barbara Marciniak, Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living
I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.
— H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
— Stanisław Lem, Solaris
O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?And shall I couple Hell?
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
I could a tale unfold whose lightest wordWould harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,Thy knotted and combined locks to part,And each particular hair to stand on endLike quills upon the fretful porpentine.But this eternal blazon must not beTo ears of flesh and blood.List, list, O list!
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Fear is the brother of hate.
— Larry Niven
She realized with deep respect that this woman had always done what she had to do and faced what she had to face. If many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, there was nothing unreal about her courage.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water
There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone.
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
One day the enemy will cross the Great Green. They will bring war and tragedy to these eastern lands. Such is the nature of vile men. Yet we cannot live in dread of them. We cannot hide behind these high walls, our hearts trembling. For that is not life. We must accept the needs and the duties of each day, and face them one at a time.
— David Gemmell, Lord of the Silver Bow
It is better to be respected by few than to be feared by all
— mng
Fear is not a sin in the taiga, but cow­ardice is [..].
— John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
You have done well," Grandfather said. "We thank you.""We were afraid sometimes," Jetsam replied."Good." Grandfather's eyes smiled. "That means you had the courage to keep trying.
— Sheila Moon, Knee-Deep in Thunder
It was even odds that the thing I was the most afraid of didn't actually exist at all.
— Steven Kotler, West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief
To implant fear in the minds of children is a crime. If parents try to rule the child by fear, then fear rules the child.
— E. Stanley Jones, Abundant Living
It never hurts a fool to appear before anaudience, for his capacity is not a capacity for feeling.
— Dale Carnegie, The Art of Public Speaking
Real terror is a crippling experience. You sweat so much that your skin goes all wrinkly like when you've been in the bath all afternoon. And then the scent of your sweat changes. It smells like cat pee, no doubt from the adrenalin. However hard you wash, it won't come off. It smothers you, as your muscles become frozen with acid and your mind paralysed by despair.
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
fear in sooth holds so in check all mortals, becasue thay see many operations go on in earth and heaven, the causes of which they can in no way understand, believing them therefore to be done by power divine. for these reasons when we shall have seen that nothing can be produced from nothing, we shall then more correctly ascertain that which we are seeking, both the elements out of which every thing can be produced and the manner in which every thing can be produced in which all things are done without the hands of the gods.
— Titus Lucretius Carus
Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.
— Raymond Lindquist
...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.
— Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough; but precisely because of the extremity of danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he percieved, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situatuions. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralyzed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
— George Orwell, 1984
It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.
— H.P. Lovecraft, Air Froid
In the presence of the storm, thunderbolts, hurricane, rain, darkness, and the lions, which might be concealed but a few paces away, he felt disarmed and helpless.
— Henryk Sienkiewicz, In Desert and Wilderness
[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
— Adam Gopnik
Maybe I am getting too grown to want to sleep with Mama. But like a baby, I still have this smallness to my mind. I don't need her hands to convince me the world I can't see from under my blanket is real. I need her hands to do more than her words. Convince me the world I see outside it- ain't.
— Connie Rose Porter
Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government.
— Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
The mouse that fears the trap has already been trapped.
— Marty Rubin
A Stalin functionary admitted, "Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.
— Paul Johnson, Modern Times
What gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we all have.
— Elizabeth Benedict
When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run. . . .
— Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches
Mind sees ghost when frightened and hopeless.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned.
— Henryk Sienkiewicz, In Desert and Wilderness
In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading.
— Henryk Sienkiewicz, In Desert and Wilderness
All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for?
— C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season
So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.
— Peter Ackroyd, English Music
My brothers’ faces haunt me. I hear their children, my nieces and nephews, asking me why I came home without their daddies. I think of their wives, imagine their questions. Our parents, forever seeing the faces of their lost sons when they look at me. They will want answers, demand to know how I survived. And what do I tell them? That I huddled like a baby inside my tent while their killer beckoned me forth for one last stand?
— Kevin Wallis, Beneath the Surface of Things
People who avoid their fears also avoid their power.
— Timothy Roderick
With no one to fear him, it seemed at times as if he didn't exist at all.
— F.J. Dagg, The Lowlands of Heaven
By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going to far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom.
— Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts
The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown
Thin ribbons of fear snake bluely through you like a system of rivers. We need a cloudburst or soothing landscape fast, to still this panic. Maybe a field of dracaena, or a vast stand of sugar pines—generous, gum-yielding trees—to fill our minds with vegetable wonder and keep dread at bay.
— Amy Gerstler, Medicine
What would you think of an engineer who expounded the art of flying without revealing the secrets of the engine and propeller? That's what you do, you engineer of the human soul. Just that. You're a coward. You want the raisins out of my cake but you don't want the thorns of my roses. Haven't you too, little psychiatrist, been cracking silly jokes about me? Haven't you ridiculed me as "the prophet of bigger and better orgasms"? Have you never heard the whimpering of a young wife whose body has been desecrated by an impotent husband? Or the anguished cry of an adolescent bursting with unfulfilled love? Does your security still mean more to you than your patient? How long will you go on valuing your respectability above your medical mission? How long will you refuse to see that your pussyfooting procrastination is costing millions their lives?
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
But a smell shivered him awake.It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. Meaty and redolent of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive - so alive! And it was close.The vapors invaded Nicholas' nostrils and his hair rose to their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear.The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was a hard shell, sharp and ready to ready be struck and to ring like steel.A shadow moved.It poured like oil from between the tall trees and flowed across dark sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. Trees seem to bend toward it, spellbound. A long, long shadow...
— Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path
And the great question for mankind is what is to be loved or hated next, whenever and old love or fear has lost its hold.
— Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
He became merely the broken statue of a beast, now without another's fear to animate it.
— John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
I make a joke of it, but... but I'm afraid of death." He straightened up and turned to look into Joseph's eyes. Joseph saw the fear there and was shocked by the intensity of it. "Are you afraid to die, Joseph?" Joseph considered for a moment, then shook his head. "I'm not afraid to now, but then I'm not dying now. When I come to that moment, I will probably be... what's the right word? Maybe frightened in a way that you're frightened when an experience lies before you you've never had. "No more than that?" "I hope not.
— Gilbert Morris, Till Shiloh Comes
Don't be scared," Willa Mae said.I looked at her. "Aren't you scared?"Willa Mae looked at me and said, "Shoot. Only thing I'm afraid of is that I'm going to do something I'll regret.""Being scared is just one more thing to turn into what you want it to be," Willa Mae said. "The thing with fear is, it's like anger. You've got to change it into something else. Make it your weapon. Some can just turn it into smarts. The best of 'em can turn fear and anger into love." She looked out toward our neighborhood. "I'm not there yet.
— Margaret McMullan, Sources of Light
She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. [..] Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would have been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.
— Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell
What people are afraid of can tell us a lot about society.
— Anne Holt
And all we feared inside the night / shows true in morning's biased light.
— Garth von Buchholz
The image of the "presence," whatever it was, waiting there for him to go--this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short--he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.
— Henry James, The Jolly Corner
Death, everyone fears it in one way or another but when I stood in front of it myself, face to face, I felt no fear.
— Atarah L. Poling, Forbidden Secret: Shadows Behind Locked Doors
It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. (“The Disinheritors”)
— Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1
One of the paradoxes of our time is that the War on Terror has served mainly to reinforce a collective belief that maintaining the right amount of fear and suspicion will earn one safety. Fear is promoted by the government as a kind of policy. Fear is accepted, even among the best-educated people in this country, even among the professors with whom I work, as a kind of intelligence. And inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighborly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognized it for - a violence.
— Eula Biss, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
Weaponry is a fear-raising idea.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
When I walked into the room, I looked down to the floor and saw that each and every garment I owned had been pulled from its rightful place and had been meticulously sliced into countless pieces. One thing was painfully obvious to me: these clothes were symbolic of me; they represented my body.What you really wanted was to slice me into countless pieces.
— Rasmenia Massoud, Human Detritus
...when you go down a dark alley and you feel that tingling across the back of your neck, that's not just a bad feeling, that's a biological gift from God - the Gift of Fear...when you ignore that gift - when you go down the dark alley and say, Y'know, I'm sure it'll be okay - that's when you find real pain.
— Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle
I wasn’t about to tell him that I never said anything to anyone who teased me. I just went along with it like it was my joke too. I wanted everyone to like me…
— Sydney Salter, Jungle Crossing
And y'know what they decided the number one threat was? The destructive and disruptive capability of a small group. That's what they're worried about most...they're terrified of a small group with a committed goal.
— Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle
Lady Dance's music wasn't a magic charm. I'd misunderstood. We had all failed to understand. The song and dance didn't stop us dying. It just stopped the fear of death swallowing us up while we were still alive. 'Rejoice,' came the soft voice of Lady Dance in my mind. 'Watch the moon and stars...' Death had ruled my life till I met Lady Dance. Her dance had set me free.
— Jackie French, Lady Dance
I told myself 'Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?
— Guy de Maupassant, Complete Works
If we have plain old ordinary fear then we are within reach of a solution. Fear has been with humankind for millennia and we do know what to do about it--pray about it, talk about it, feel the fear, and do it anyway. "Artistic" fear, on the other hand, sounds somehow nastier and more virulent, like it just might not yield to ordinary solutions--and yet it does, the moment we become humble enough to try ordinary solutions.
— Julia Cameron, Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance
He himself, he realized, had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail god upon a rickety throne, afraid of opening letters, of making decisions, afraid of the instinctive knowledge in the eyes of mules, of the innocent eyes of good men, of the elastic nature of the passions, even of the devotion he had received from some men, and one woman, and dogs.
— Patrick White, Voss
Something like panic struck at Hurlow. Moffat's calm confession of fear withdrew the prop upon which he had leaned. Down there, among the motionless shadows, lurked invisible things, things that were nameless, shapeless and malignant; things which could see without being seen. One of the long lost terrors of childhood returned to him, and like a child he put his hand into Moffat's.
— A.M. Burrage
We shall convince France and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.
— John  Adams
Senses disabled by fear.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
They think the government shows people everything —how to work, study, eat, sleep and that’s it. They are afraid of change. They do not understand that if you want to do something, you should do it. You are free, people, free!
— Anton Krotov
The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.
— P.D. James
Often, the human animal dresses terror in rage, and expresses both in a way unlike either.
— Julius Lester, The Autobiography of God
I think locality exercises strange influence over some minds. The peaceful meadow-scenery holds no lurking horrors in its bosom, but in the lonesome moorlands, full of curiously molded boulders, grotesque fancies must assail one there. Creatures seem to come, odd and ill-defined as their surroundings. As a child I had a peculiar horror of those tall, odd-shaped boulders, with seeming faces, featureless, it is true, but sometimes strangely resembling humans and animals. I believe the spinney may be haunted by something of this nature, terrible as the trees. ("The Haunted Spinney")
— Elliott O'Donnell
All in a moment Hurlow forgot the beauty of the sounds and smelt fear. He smelt it as an animal smells it, the breath cold in his nostrils. He had read about Pan, a dead god who might safely be patronized while poring over a book in a London lodging, but here and at this hour a god not to be scorned. ("Furze Hollow")
— A.M. Burrage
I am Indonesian. I don't buy fear of western ghosts.But when you deal with a giant garagasi of sumatera,there's no word worth enough to express the eeriness.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
If you’re not scared every day, you’re not pushing hard enough.
— Richie Norton
You can't get rid of fear, you must learn to move through it.Know that deep in your soul, that fear is just a door to a room filled with something so big, so important, so life changing, that it scares you a little.
— Eileen Anglin
You cannot be afraid of the unknown. In every moment and with every step you take, the unknown becomes the known.
— Dragos Bratasanu, Ph.D., Sleepers: A Little Book on How to Find Hope, Meaning and the Courage to Fall in Love with Your Dreams
Too much war, hatred and fear in the world.Desperately needed: More art, love and poetry.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
This goes to show you that sometimes the unseen is not to be feared and that those meant to love us most are not always ones who do.
— Leigh Bardugo, The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic
Fear is the thing that makes the heart grow.
— Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine
You could die," she whispered. "Everything dies," he whispered back. "I'm afraid of so much more than dying.
— Kristen Ciccarelli, The Last Namsara
Centre yourself. Fear will get you killed as easily as a weapon.
— Sarah J. Maas, Tower of Dawn
Overcome your problems as they arise. Do not live in fear of the next bad thing in your life. Enjoy your time now and trust that you have the strength to defeat every problem that comes your way in the future.
— Avina Celeste
I tell myself I am brave and yet, I still fear change. I guess it’s time to face that fear.
— Avina Celeste