Fear and Anxiety

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

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.

I hate that dreadful hollow behind the little wood.

 

But what am I?

 

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

 

Timor mortis conturbat me.

 

The worst is yet to come.

 

Further, the war—our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation—has taken away the outer wall of security. . . . We pour to the edgeof a precipice . . . and then? I can’t conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.