Mark Haddon Quotes

We fear that which we cannot see.

Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.

People tend to be scared of what they can't see.

I think what you can’t see is always what you should be frightened of.

People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when knowledge is so damn frightening.

Men fear most what they cannot see.

I do not fear anybody on the field or in society, but I fear at night when I am away from my parents. I am scared of the unknown described in horror movies.

Magic frightens people almost as much as it intrigues them.

I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is.

There's something about shadows because you make your own mind up about what's lurking in them.

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.

I'm terrified of the ocean. I think it's beautiful and magical, but I never go in. That deep, dark water, with no understanding of what goes on behind it - I think that's a metaphor for a lot of things.

There's always fear of the unknown where there's mystery.

I know little of women. But I've heard dread tales.

You musn’t be afraid of the dark.’ ‘I’m not,’ said Shadow. ‘I’m afraid of the people in the dark.

I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

It’s what we chase but never find. It is the mystery of our lives, the understanding that even when we have everything we want it is one day to leave us. It’s the something unseen, the lurking devastation, the darkness that gives our lives dimension.

I still get scared at night. Every tiny creak, every little noise, I open my eyes real wide and listen with them. Have you noticed that? When it’s dark and you can’t see a thing, you open your eyes really wide and glance back and force, like your eyes become your ears?

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.

I always think it's not what we know that's terrifying; it's what we don't know. That's sort of pervasive with everything in life.

We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.

I look up, and stop breathing. Eyes glitter in the darkness. Dark shapes sit in the car, more numerous than we are. The factionless.

The hand that unnerved Belshazzar derived its most horrifying influence from the want of a body, and death itself is not formidable in what we do know of it, but in what we do not.

It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.