Tim O'Brien Quotes

Better be killed than frightened to death.

… the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

It's easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don't want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.

'House of Leaves' is certainly about the unsettling nature of fear - and it was my aim to address that - but it's also about recovering from fear.

Latin Americans hold on tight even to pain and suffering, preferring a certain present to an uncertain future. Some of this is only natural, entirely human. But for us, the fear is paralyzing; it generates not only anxiety but also paralysis.

There's fear in everything, but we can't just succumb to that. We have to suppress it, so we get used to suppressing fear to make it through the our day. Otherwise, we'd become paralyzed by them.

If you lived through the shooting of Jaws, you can live through anything.

The only thing I am afraid of is fear.

When bombing is going on, you see a lot of people screaming around you and you can't do anything if you're small. You just want to break out of that and be strong.

I learned, by the time I was twenty, I'm not gonna die from a panic attack; you feel like you're going to.

When you look fear in the face, you are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'

So we become alive in a time of fear.

"They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but I don't believe that." he said. Then, a moment later, he added: "Oh, the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many different forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else. In my case, that something was the wave."

Fear is the mind-killer.

But this is a thing that I know--to live with fear is not to live at all. A man will die every moment he is afraid.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

... from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.

Fear is a force that sharpens your senses. Being afraid is a state of paralysis in which you can't do anything.

In life, there's a lot that I'm afraid of. Death is always scary. My sister passed away. I'm not scared to die, so much as I was scared to not have her in my life, and it took a long time for me to reconcile that. There are fears everyday, and things that I'm afraid of. I fear everything, but I keep going.

We have lived through fear all our lives, and when you have gone through a whole lot of fear, sometimes all you can do is resist the fear, and resistance comes in the form of courage.

The fear in my heart was like in one of those dreams where you try to run but you can't do it, you can't run because the fear is an anchor in your chest.

Margaret had always dreaded lest her courage should fail her in any emergency, and she should be proved to be, what she dreaded lest she was--a coward. But now, in this real great time of reasonable fear and nearness of terror, she forgot herself, and felt only an intense sympathy--intense to painfulness--in the interests of the moment.

I think about Old Nick carrying me into the truck, I'm dizzy like I'm going to fall down. "Scared is what you're feeling," says Ma, "but brave is what you're doing." "Huh?" "Scaredybrave." "Scave." Word sandwiches always make her laugh but I wasn't being funny.

Surrendering to fear and allowing ourselves to be paralyzed by peril isn't something most of us can afford to do.