Lydia Davis Quotes

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

I am always the type of person who is waiting for the other shoe to drop and for it to peter out and end. And if it does that's fine.

It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.

I let it ring. I wanted to breathe for a few minutes, and I could think of nothing that couldn't wait. Besides, I had paid almost $50 for an answering machine. Let it earn its keep.

Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true.

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.

Ten minutes can be a long time when you're waiting with a beating heart for something you don't understand, something you don't really want to know.

But fear is confusing. It tears you in two. Half of you wants to run far, far away, but the other half is paralyzed, frozen, immovable. And the hard part is that you never know which half is going to win.

I don't answer the phone. I get the feeling whenever I do that there will be someone on the other end.

Doubt may be a poor encouragement to do anything, but it is a bad reason for doing nothing.

I'm not a fearful person, but I'm a pretty pessimistic person. So some of my best times are waiting, anticipating. That's the way it always has been with me, whether anticipating a ball game, anticipating a relationship.

The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short - he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.

...crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.

If we are waiting for guaranteed courses of action, we may spend much of our life waiting.

He asked himself those some questions too many times and felt the fears again that kept him where he was

I don't know. I just feel stuck, like I'm afraid to take any steps, in case they're the wrong ones.

of all the follies that we can commit, the greatest is to hesitate.

It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what's waiting for us now that we've returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one place and life to the next. We try to do the best we can. There are moments like this, however, when we are neither coming nor going, and all we have to do is sit and look back on the life we have made.

You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I’m just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch – you wait… Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on *form* Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting – any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.

Most fears in life rarely come to fruition.

Inaction and indecision in the present is because of fear of consequences of the future.