Philip Roth Quotes

We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last.

Victims always feel alone and helpless.

I had trained myself not to go to the bathroom throughout my elementary and junior high school years because I was bullied. And you don't understand why you're being bullied, so you just suppress it.

I think so many people live their whole life in fear and doubt and shame.

Fear is not a disease of the body; fear kills the soul.

What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.

Remembering how my mother looked before she gave birth to my sister is frightening. But even more frightening is the feeling that I wanted them to catch me and beat me. Why did I want to be punished? Shadows out of the past clutch at my legs and drag me down. I open my mouth to scream, but I am voiceless. My hands are trembling, I feel cold, and there is a distant humming in my ears.

Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture.

Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.

There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow endless drizzle.

Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.

They're fake bullets, so why do I feel like Im bleeding out?

Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.

No one escapes being haunted by something that absolutely terrifies them to the core, but very few feel it's okay to admit what it is that haunts us.

I've always been scared to death of pain - afraid, even, to think of it.

My fears and anxieties throughout my whole life have been slowly squeezing my voice.

A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.

I was afraid to express myself for a while.

I spent much of my life hiding.

We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.

It's people who are repressed and cannot express their fears that are dangerous.

The root of the problem I have is anxiety, and it's all derived from something - I'm just going to say it, some kind of sadness. It manifests in so many different ways and it affects people differently.

And I've known people who came out with a sense of torture.

I am a man whose mind has been ulcerated with a variety of embarrassments for 30 weary months.

True it is that each of us has only one life - but how many of us 'die a thousand deaths' in fear and nervousness!