Orson Scott Card Quotes on Fear
-
It frightened him to have this girl need something from him so desperately
-
I wish I had died before seeing him, he will surely undo me before he's through
-
You're afraid of the stranger, whether he's utlanning or framling. When you think of killing a man that you know of and value, then it doesn't matter what his shape is. He's varalese then, or worse - djur, the dire beast, that comes in the night with slavering jaws. If you had the only gun in your village, and the beasts that has torn apart one of your people was coming again, would you stop to ask if they also had the right to live, or would you act to save your village, the people that you knew, the people who depended on you?
-
Sitting there in paranoid fantasy You can't read minds You always get morose and speculate about the destruction of the universe whenever you come out of starflight. It's your peculiar manifestation of motion sickness.
-
Are you ready to reveal yourself to the rest of humanity? I've always been ready. The question is, are they ready to know me?
-
You've done all this thinking, you've seen all the possibilities for the future - good ones and bad ones alike - and yet the only ones you are willing to believe in, the imagined future that you seize upon as the foundation for all your moral judgments, is the only future in which everyone that you and I have ever loved and everything we'd ever hoped for must be obliterated.
-
Who is more cursed, the one who dies, unknowing until the very moment of his death or the one who watched his destruction as it approached, step by step, for days and weeks and years?
-
I just don't what to face her again. Because I love her and I fear her. Because I'm not sure whether I should help her or try to destroy her.
-
She believed that people revealed themselves most when they were vaguely anxious, and few things brought out nonspecific anxieties like being in the presence of a person who never speaks.
-
She might be protective and possessive with her children whom she thought of as needing her, but with the people she needed, she was the opposite. If she feared they would be taken from her, she withdrew from them; she stopped permitting herself to need them.
-
I really don't fear death. I never knew that.
-
You don't understand how devastating fear and rage can be, and how quickly religion and civilization and human decency are forgotten when a mob forms.
-
I left because I couldn't....... Because you couldn't bear to let him leave you. You felt it, didn't you? You felt him fading even then. You knew that he needed to go away, to end this life, and you couldn't bear to let another man leave you so you left him first.
-
I'm Mr. Scared-from-Ass-to-Ankles. Whereas you are just plain old miss ass.
-
Stop threatening me... I've lived in terror and I've come out of it. Kill me or not, torture me or not, it doesn't matter to me. Just decide what to do.
-
In all his life, [he] had never spoken with such brutal frankness about his own fear; he had never felt so exposed and vulnerable in front of anyone.
-
He fears his own murderous heart so much that he won't let himself think of his whole plan openly
-
The old fear and strangeness remained as an undercurrent, despite all her attempts to reassure herself. Until now, seeing him, she realized she was not afraid of him..... No she was afraid of what he would think of her - an even older and darker fear
-
Frozen, right? But to others, it looks like you're calm as could be. That's why some of the others tease you so mercilessly sometimes. They thing you're made of stone, and they want to break in and touch the human feelings. They just don't know that when you seem most stony, that's when you're the most frightened and breakable.
-
We never know when you will stop. And so we obey you when you're angry and irrational, because we're afraid of you. And if you think about it without letting rage cloud your reason, you'll realize that we have cause to be afraid
-
What difference does it make, whether we keep our silence because [they] force us or because we're afraid they might force us?
-
Hiding from your enemy is the same as letting him win
-
But the fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.
-
Peggy couldn't tell the truth. She knew these folks too well. She knew what they all were scared of, what they all wanted, what they all had done that they'd kill her or theirself if they once got a notion that she knew. Even the ones who never done a bad thing, they'd be so ashamed to think she knew their secret dreams or private craziness. So she never could speak frankly to these folks, or something would slip out, not even a word maybe, it might be just the way she turned her head, the way she sidestepped some line of talk, and they'd know that she knew, or just fear that she knew, or just fear. Just fear alone, without even naming what it was, and it could undo them, some of them, the weakest of them
-
He was close to her hour after hour, the smell of her, the touch of her breath on the hairs of his arms or on his ears as she leaned over his shoulder to watch. He thought sometimes he might go insane with desire for her; but he could not think of a way to change what lay between them, and though he thought she liked him well enough now, he still didn't know if their friendship was yet the thing a marriage should be made of. Do you love me? He wanted to ask her, to demand of her. But fearing the answer would be a wan 'I'm sorry, Ivan,' he did not speak
-
This is the way the paths of our lives entwine and cross and go apart: if she sent for him the day before, even then he might have loved her. But she did not send for him until she was afraid; she was not afraid until he undid her work; he did not undo her work until he was past loving her. If only we could stand outside our lives and look at what we do, we might repair so many injuries before they're done
-
Some of us don't suffer from completion anxiety
-
Don't it ever occur to you that only good people are afraid of paying for their sins?' No ma'am. I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts.. And they think everyone else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else
-
Even step - she knew that she didn't really know him, that always there was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn't approve of her and didn't want her in his life anymore
-
The world will probably be destroyed again, unless we repent. And don't think you can hide from the angels. They start out as ordinary people, and you never know which ones. Suddenly god put the power of destruction in their hands, and they destroy. And just as suddenly, when all the destruction is done, the angels leaves them, and they're ordinary people
-
Most people, brought much more than this when they traveled. Perhaps because they were insecure, and needed to surround themselves with familiar things, or to feel that they had many choices to make each day when they dressed, so they didn't have to be so frightened or feel so powerless. Obviously that was not Hunahpuh's problem. He apparently never felt fear at all, or perhaps never regarded himself as a stranger. How remarkable it would be to feel at home in any place. I wish I had that gift
-
Love is random; fear is inevitable.
-
Afraid because his eyes still looked at her and said, mine, and because somewhere in her was something that answered, impossibly, yours
-
What do I tell him? Tell him that I will see him. She was startled. She was confused. She abandoned words, and sang her confusion. The song was meek and uncontrolled, for she would never be a master, not even a teacher, but wordlessly she asked Nniv why he would even listen to such a man, why he would risk have the rest of mankind think, the songhouse treats all men alike, judging only on merit, not on power - except for Mikal.
-
Ansset could clearly hear the fear singing through the back of his brave words. Well, why not? Death was certain now, and Ansset knew of no one, except perhaps an old man like Mikal, who could look at death, especially death that also meant failure, without some fear
-
He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more
-
[he] looked death in the eye and did not seem disappointed
-
We feel pain; what we don't feel is fear. Or rather, we've learned to separate pain and fear
-
They're afraid of death! Can you at least imagine what that means? We fear death, too No... You resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else.
-
Then he thought, is my life so empty that this is the best thing I can think of to think about?
-
If I believe it she can kill me with my own fear
-
But was there really any place on earth where he could be free of this?
-
[He] had never been beaten up. He had, however, seen the Rodney king tape.
-
Something was bitterly wrong with the world, they could see that; they had all felt anger in the past, but till now something had always come between the thought and the act, and calmed them. Now, tonight, that calm was gone. They could feel it in themselves, nothing soothing their fear, nothing telling them wordlessly, all is well.
-
What are they afraid of? 'Dying first But they still die don't they?
-
Justice hates it when I make people obey me out of fear. She thinks it's ugly and not nice. She always used to make people obey her by changing what they wanted, so it didn't occur to them to disobey. I think that's degrading and turns people into animals