Your eyes,' Asha grunted as he looked at him briefly. 'Turn them off.' He clicked his fingers and Blitzen's eyes blinked and when they opened only the whites of his eyes were visible, all he could see was darkness.

Once you let in the word, once you allow it to take root, it will spread like a mold through all of your corners and dark spaces— and with it, the questions, the shivery, splintered fears, enough to keep you permanently awake.

Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting." by Primo Levi in Drowned

There will come a time,'' I said, ''when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. [...]

Before that point, I’d always been scared of lightning. There was something terrifying about sudden electricity sparks flowing in the sky, but it didn’t matter after that point. Perhaps I had better things to worry about.

She realized with deep respect that this woman had always done what she had to do and faced what she had to face. If many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, there was nothing unreal about her courage.

I tell myself I have time. But the itch forming along the back of my neck and across my shoulders says otherwise.I hate this. It’s like I’m racing a clock ticking down to doomsday without knowing how much time I have left.

It takes me a while to figure things out, doesn't it?" Edilio grinned. "Do me a favor. When you find Astrid, repeat that to her, word for word, the part about how it takes you a while. Then remember her exact reaction and tell me.

Fear is the bane of all creatures and bubbles inside all forming a rock of solidifying darkness, sucking all will power to act or to think or to say away. Fear is the bane of all creatures, it is our black hole we cannot live without.

But fear isn’t a quiet pet that stays in a cage in the back room. Rather, as termites undermine the internal workings of a structure until it collapses from within, fear spreads to every part of your life unless you deal with it.

Sometimes the greatest fear and pain come from a sense of meaninglessness in life. Meaning is a choice, not a search, remember? A sense of meaninglessness is really, therefore, a call to let in higher awareness and truth.



People ended up together for a lot of reasons, and very rarely was one of those reasons the kind of kissing-on-a-mountaintop-at-sunset bullshit you saw in movies. Mostly people were just too chickenshit to walk through the world alone.

She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse.

...each of us from the seance stood alone. Like so many pillars of salt, we had tried to look back and failed. And in the eyes of the others who shared the pale, flat sky with us, there was sometimes suspicion, sometimes a little fear.

He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world. Though hast my sword. Strike. Death shall be a sweet rest to me. Thraldom, not death, should terrify me.