Yann Martel Quotes

Violence is the instinctive response to fear.

Men do weird things when they experience fear. It's like a fight-or-flight thing.

The purpose of fear, clearly, is to help you get away - which it does. If your heart rate increases, there is more blood pumping so you can use that blood to fuel your muscles to run away. Oxygen is sent to the lungs so you can run fast. Pupils dilating help you see in the dark. All of that prepares your body to fight or escape.

Animals of all classes, old and young, shrink with instinctive fear from any strange object approaching them.

Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

When I'm scared, my natural state is to hide and run for cover.

I don't have any irrational fears. Obviously, if I was walking through the outback, and I saw a snake, I wouldn't go up and stroke it, but I wouldn't run screaming from it, either.

As a human, if you're in a scary situation, you pretty much forget about everything else! You just try and survive.

I'm scared of any fighter I've ever fought because they are some dangerous people to be dealing with. That's also where the anxiety comes from.

I don’t wanna die, man. They’re not playing. Have you seen how many of them are out there? One just took a shot at me, so unlike you morons, I’m hiding. Hiding is nice. (Vik)

The only thing that can combat fear is action. And there's two actions. There's fight and flight.

Fear, in evolution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any other emotion it is crucial for survival.

Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.

I had really good hearing and when you're scared it gets heightened so you hear scratching noises or something.

It is a very natural human trait to destroy that which frightens us.

No one is depressed when they're being chased by a bear.

We are all born cowards.

If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.

Fear invites aggression - do not show it to a predator.

This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

Where there is fear there is aggression.

Horror is a reaction; it's not a genre. Somebody's life would have to be in danger for it [story] to be a horror story.

It seemed his demon couldn't tell the physical difference between when he was in danger and when he was "in" Danger.

Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, a larger portion of fear than they should.

Even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.