Alberto Moravia Quotes

What is there so fearful as the expectation of evil tidings delayed? ... Misery is a more welcome visitant when she comes in her darkest guise and wraps us in perpetual black, for then the heart no longer sickens with disappointed hope.

I think that fear comes about when there's things in the world that we want to change, things we're scared or angry about, and we can't change them, and so we become fearful; we develop anxiety.

Hope and certainty are the enemies of peace.

Uncertainty always creates doubt, and doubt creates fear.

I do not know what is happening. The reason of my waking mind tells me that great evil has befallen and we stand at the end of days. But my heart says nay; and all my limbs are light, and a hope and joy are come to me that no reason can deny. [...] I do not believe that darkness will endure!

Where's my heart at? Aw. Um, in my chest. I think it's in there - on the right hand side. Sometimes it's in my mouth and sometimes I can feel it in my stomach, when I get really nervous. So it's pretty physical.

When you looked up to the sky and cried 'Why?' sometimes the sky shrugged, yet other times it answered with warm assurance of linked hands.

People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom.

I have tried to resign myself, and to console myself; and that, I hope, I may have done imperfectly; but what I cannot firmly settle in my mind is, that the end will absolutely come. I hold her hand in mine, I hold her heart in mine, I see her love for me, alive in all its strength. I cannot shut out a pale lingering shadow of belief that she will be spared.

Go back?" he thought. "No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!" So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.

Fear is always the result of an unquestioned past imagined as a future.

That's the scary thing about hope," she said. "If you let it go too long it turns into faith.

...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.

It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

Crying is personal. On the other hand, laughing is more general . Laughing makes our hearts wider.

Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy. . . . Speaking of paranoia, it's true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I'm paranoid.

Evil was coming. I wondered whose face it would be wearing.

I knew, in the silence that followed, that anything could happen here. It might be too late: again, I might have missed my chance. But I would at least know I tried, that I took my heart and extended my hand, whatever the outcome. "Okay," he said. He took a breath. "What would you do, if you could do anything?" I took a step toward him, closing the space between us. "This," I said. And then I kissed him.

I still doubt it will work." "You'd doubt the sun's rising if you weren't proven wrong each day," Raoden said with a smile.

It was better to know the worst than to wonder.

Whenever you make a big decision in life, at least any decision where you have a viable alternative, there is an inevitable uneasy aftermath. Anxiety is merely a sign that you're taking something seriously.

There are situations in which hope and fear run together, in which they mutually destroy one another and lose themselves in dull indifference.

Superstitions are man's way of trying to control things he has no control over.

Red was smiling back at me. "Ok. I'm not in trouble. But tell me your heart didn't start beating for the first time in a month." I couldn't deny it. So I didn't.