Bernard Beckett Quotes

I'm superstitious.

I'm extremely superstitious.

I'm unbelievably superstitious.

I'm really superstitious.

It's a funny thing... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.

I’d always been afraid of sick people, and so had my mother. It wasn’t that we feared catching their brain aneurysm or accidentally ripping out their IV. I think it was their fortitude that frightened us. Sick people reminded us not of what we had, but of what we lacked. Everything we said sounded petty and insignificant; our complaints paled in the face of theirs, and without our complaints, there was nothing to say.

She knows there's more to life, and she's scared of ending up alone

I'm curious about what makes people do things that they do, unless it's absolutely terrifying to me.

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

I've always been fascinated by dark subjects, especially people's reactions to them. Why are people so uncomfortable talking about death if everyone dies?

There's nothing I'm afraid of like scared people.

If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.

I'm always just very nervous. I never feel like, 'I've got this'. I'm always very nervous and aware of how quickly people can hate you and that scares me. I never feel like I'm on top of it or I know what I'm doing... so, no. I never get a big head, I just get more and more anxious.

Understand death? Sure. That was when the monsters got you.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?

Some people say dying alone is a fate worse than death itself. Well, they should try being alone during the living part sometimes. There's no quicker way to make you wonder why the hell you ever thought you'd want to return.

Fear of self is the greatest of all terrors, the deepest of all dread, the commonest of all mistakes. From it grows failure. Because of it, life is a mockery. Out of it comes despair.

You were afraid of shooting people?" "No," I say. "I was afraid of my considerable capacity to kill." How many young men fear that there is a monster inside of them?

I can't trust the people I care about not to hurt me. And I'm not sure I can trust myself not to hurt them, either.

People die of fright and live of confidence.

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

It wasn't so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people.

Basic anxiety can be roughly described as a feeling of being small, insignificant, helpless, deserted or endangered in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, humiliate, betray, envy... . And special in this is the child's feeling that the parents' love, their Christian charity, honesty, generosity ... may be only a pretense.

Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.