Fear Of Solitude Quotes

She formed her life day by day, taking as its materials the emptiness and panic as well as the rushes, like fever, of contentment. I am beyond fear of solitude, she thought, I am past it. The idea thrilled her. I am beyond it and I will not sink. This submission, this triumph made her stronger. It was as if finally, after having passed through inferior stages, her life had found a form worthy of it. ~ James Salter

I am not sure what lonliness is," she said. "If it is not literally being solitary, is it the fear of solitude, of being alone with oneself? I feel no such fear. I like being alone."
"What do you fear then?" he asked her.
She glanced briefly at him and smiled, a fragile expression that spoke for itself even before she found words.
"Never finding myself again ... ~ Mary Balogh

When you are a child at home alone, you're afraid someone might come; when you are old and at home alone, you're afraid no one will come. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Lydia had been fantasizing about him to the point she nearly drove him insane with it. It had taken four days for his energy to weaken inside her enough that he could go and visit her without fear she would throw him across the town in a gust of wind, and thus cause a scene. Although, getting run out of town after one day would be a new MacGregor record. ~ Michelle M. Pillow

I don't even know why, but I've just always done it - I don't walk on handicapped parking spaces. I don't like to step on the blue lines. I always step over them. I don't know what the deal is. I don't know if it's a fear of injury, or a disrespectful thing, or if I just don't want to think about something like that happening. ~ Chantal Sutherland

The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person's solitude. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I have been in Congress for more than a half century. I have lived through times of fear and times of hope. Of despair and of achievement. I have seen our government at its best, but today I fear that we see our government at its worst. ~ Robert Byrd

It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death. The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn. Wait, young man, and you will learn for yourself.

---Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ~ Donna Cummins

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me. ~ C.S. Lewis

I'm not a coward." He tries to convince me, as if I'd already called him the name. "It wasn't the fear of death that drove me ... it was captivity. Like you, I cannot be a spirit contained. I must be free. You understand, don't you? ~ A.G. Howard

I often sit over against myself, as before a stranger, and wonder how the unnameable active principle that calls itself to life has adapted itself even to this form. All other expressions lie in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death; - it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct - it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought - it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude - it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness. Thus we live a closed, hard existence of the utmost superficiality, and rarely does an incident strike out a spark. But then unexpectedly a flame of grievous and terrible yearning flares up. Those ~ Erich Maria Remarque

I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman - in spite of the fact that all three of them reacted positively I still have this fear. ~ Michael Chabon

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away. ~ Norman Mailer

Sympathies and antipathies . . .

Human friendships can very quickly become a club of mediocrities, enclosed in mutual flattery and approval, preventing people from seeing their inner poverty and wounds. Friendship is then no longer a spur to grow . . .

Scott Peck talks of pseudo-communities. These are where people pretend to live community. Everybody is polite and obeys the rules and regulations. They speak in platitudes and generalities. But underlying it all is an immense fear of conflict, a fear of letting out the monsters. If people start truly to listen to each other and to get involved, speaking from their guts, their anger and fears may rise up and they might start hitting each other over the head with frying pans. There are so many pent-up emotions contained in their hearts that if these were to start surfacing, God knows what might happen! It would be chaos. But from that chaos, healing could come. . . They discover that they have all been living in a state of falsehood. And it is then that the miracle of community can happen! ~ Jean Vanier

The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can't write - really that's exactly what you need to write. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The huge, drafty building echoed with the clanks and thuds and shouts of mock battle. Khesot walked slowly up and back, his mild brown eyes narrowed, considering, as he watched us work.
"Get that shield arm up," he said to a tough old stonemason. "Remember you will likely be fighting mounted warriors, and I very much fear that most of us will be afoot. The mounted fighter has the advantage; therefore you must unhorse your opponent before you can hope to win…"
We had spent days affixing shiny metal bits to our shields to reflect sunlight at the horses and cause them to rear. We had also practiced slicing saddle belts, hooking spears or swords around legs and heaving warriors out of the saddle. And we learned other methods of unhorsing warriors, such as tying fine-woven twine between two trees at just the right height so that the riders would be knocked off their horses.
Khesot turned around, then frowned at two young men who had assumed the old dueling stance and were slashing away at one another with merry abandon, their swords ringing.
"Charic! Justav! What do you think you are doing?"
The men stopped, Charic looking shamefaced. "Thought we'd refine a little, in case we take on one o' them aristos--"
"Many of whom are trained in swordplay from the time they begin to walk," Khesot cut in, his manner still mild; but now both young men had red faces. "By the very best sword masters their wealthy parents can hire. It would take them precisely as lon ~ Sherwood Smith

his real point is that in the climate of fear that would follow the breakdown of authority, the kinder, more trusting, side of human nature would be obliterated. And from what we know of human behaviour when people are caught up in civil war and other situations in which their very survival is at stake, he seems to have been right. We ~ David Miller

Pam," Issy attempted, voice high with fear. "I can tell you, from this side of the fence..you really need to calm down."
"I will shoot you in the face if you say one more word to me," I fumed.
"So noted."
"I am so glad that I am an only child," Coalhouse remarked quietly. ~ Lia Habel

When your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.
But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.
Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.
And after that, you have nothing to fear again. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

I thought I was inventing my own lot of imaginary aliens​, and I was only describing the Senoi. It is not only th Captain Davidsons who can be found in the unconscious, if one looks. The quiet people who do not kill each other are there, too. It seems that a great deal is there, the things we most fear (and therefore deny), the things we most need (and therefore deny). I wonder, couldn't we start listening to our dreams, and our children dreams? "Where did you fall to, and what did you discover? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I'm scared David"
"That's good, because there's lots to be afraid of ~ David Wong

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

Find your noble purpose and defeat any residue of fear. ~ Farshad Asl

Shyness is invariably a suppression of something. It's almost a fear of what you're capable of. ~ Rhys Ifans

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life. (Will Durant, Story of Civilization, pg 1, vol. 1) ~ Will Durant

Dicing with death is one man's cup of tea, but another man's poison. I just didn't fear anything. ~ Stephen Richards

Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Man was born free, but...he is in chains. Chains made of duty, hunger, fear. Chains hammered to our necks by a race that we lifted up. A race that we empowered. Not to rule, not to reign, but to lead us from a world torn by war and greed. Instead, they have led us into darkness. They expect your obedience, ignore your sacrifice, and hoard the prosperity that your hands create. To hold tight to their reign, they forbid our dreams. ~ Pierce Brown

For the perversely minded, simply killing the trinkets of your greatest amusement and nutritional satisfaction produces at best only temporary elation, a dazzling sensation that is over in a flash, but to permit your prey to fear calamity and to live through catastrophes large and small, to hope and to weep and to lament, to feel anguish over things lost, to regret things found, and to suffer with physical discomfort, emotional injuries and psychological lesions is the wellhead of enduring pleasure. ~ John Zande

Always, Mrs Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight. ~ Virginia Woolf

Part of the prejudice thing is that the victim has to be somebody weaker than you in numbers, but somebody you secretly admire or fear. ~ Robert Silverberg

My incomparable beloved,
Seven months you have been gone, and I fear you will never return. I await your brief, infrequent letters like a boy, desperate for any small indication that you remember I exist, hoping for evidence that you tire of that foreign land where you now live. I read your missives a hundred times for the slightest intimation that you will be coming home. The part of my mind that does nothing but wait grows daily, and soon nothing will be left to attend to life's duties. One word, my love, just one; that is all I seek. One word to let me know that you will not stay away forever, and that I will at least have your presence and friendship in my life, even if I can never have your passion and your love.
Julian Hampton to Penelope, Countess of Glasbury ~ Madeline Hunter

All these years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it. ~ Anne Lamott

Now all white Southern women keep as a weapon against uncouth world a certain smile that can be whipped out of storage and tacked up, in an instant, covering over a multitude of too-candid moments. My mother's face, whose upturned mouth never moved, registered confusion, then fear-then landed where I expected that steely doggedly cheerful resolve of a smile. ~ Joy Jordan-Lake

Everyone is in pain. Most people think pain in massage means something is happening, and if they can endure it, they will be improved, but sometimes the only thing pain means is pain.
It a very easy mistake to make, though.. She'd refused for the longest time to get therapy or take any psychoactive drugs because she'd felt that the "darkness" was necessary, not just for her as an actor, but as a human being.
You didn't have to feel slightly terrible all the time, as it turns out. Her only worry now was that slightly terrible was not a flaw in her chemistry, but an appropriate response to being the kind of person that she was. "You're very hard on yourself," Luke said.
"Can you imagine the kind of person that I'd be if I wasn't hard on myself?" she said back. Luke should be sympathetic. He was hoping to improve the human race, and it would be hard to get there if the human race thought it was already fantastic, thanks very much.
Well, she could still go dark, if she needed to, she could go dark right now. Yesterday she had done Terror. She'd done Fear and Dejection and Remorse. And because she had done Remorse as fully as a person could do it, she knew that she hadn't ever experienced that kind of pure Remorse before. What she'd felt in the past was polluted Remorse, because half the time she was sorry she was also privately resentful and building a case about why the actions that had led to Remorse could be justified. ~ Meg Howrey

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless. ~ Alan Moore