Fear and Anxiety

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Equal to the gods seems to me that man who sits facing you and hears you nearby sweetly speaking and softly laughing. This sets my heart to fluttering in my breast, for when I look on you a moment, then can I speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a cold sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes me all over, and I am paler than grass, and I feel that I am near to death.

Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue .

He holds him with his glittering eye—

When she introduces me to her parents back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie, should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa and not ask Where’s the bathroom?

Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.

The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.

I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish tohave them in the neighborhood, intrudinginto my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world thatcontained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.

 

If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.

It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did.

Wilt Thou not take the doubt of Thy children whom the time commands to try all things in the place of the unquestioning faith of earlier generations?

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.

We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother.

Terror … often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.

 

It's a dangerous business going out your front door. J. R. R.

Security is mostly superstition.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins.

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.

There are no clear paths. Only pitfalls and tripwires and darkness.

 

To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.

 

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him. J. R. R.

Paranoia means having all the facts. William S.

I can’t sleep.

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.