Brad Meltzer Quotes

If your skin is crawling, pay attention. If something doesn’t feel right, pay attention. If the hairs on the back of your neck prickle, if your gut clenches up, if a wave of wrongness washes over you, if your heart starts beating faster, pay, pay, pay attention. Do not second-guess yourself or rationalize anything that impedes your safety. Our instincts are the animal inside of our humanness, warning us of danger.

There's two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way.

I think to be afraid is very important. It's to save your life, too. And over the years, each of us, and all my colleagues, we developed certain antennas. I can't really say why I don't want to go right or left. It's a feeling, and I trust mostly my feelings.

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks at the onrushing tidal wave, the descending avalanche, or the spinning funnel of the tornado, yet makes no attempt to flee, is not necessarily paralyzed with fright or resigned to an unavoidable fate. He may simply be unable to believe that the message of his eyes concerns him personally. It is all happening to somebody else.

Sometimes fear is a warning. It's like someone putting a hand on your shoulder and saying Go No Farther.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.

I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer

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

Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man's efficiency.

I have a good instinct for what's real and what's not. I don't have to second-guess myself.

I won't let you close enough to hurt me.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

If you know somebody very well, like your grandmother or your baby sister, you will know when they are real and when they are fake.

Knowing when someone's the real deal or not, but still with putting your guard up and self-protecting, you've got to stay open. It comes back to balance.

You are born into a dangerous world, there are all sorts of ways in which you could die, and you need to believe your parents when they tell you don't go near the edge of the cliff, or don't pick up that snake, etc. There could very well be a Darwinian survival value in that sort of brain rule of thumb. And a by-product of that could be that you believe your parents when they tell you about the juju in the sky, or whatever it might be.

When the lab rats hear the bell ringing, they freeze. That's what fear does to you - fear stops you dead in your tracks. Fear can keep you from harm, but fear can also rob you of your potential. Fear can rob you of an experience. Fear can rob you of happiness. Fear can rob you of real life... Darkness has a way of scaring us.

Pain is superficial, and therefore fear is. The torments of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the by-standers.

Sometimes I get this gut feeling about people - maybe I sense a hidden agenda or that they care for the money more than the message. I wish that I'd listen to that feeling instead of waiting for the truth to rear its ugly head. I'm a smart girl. I'm loyal. But sometimes I'm too loyal. I'm not loyal enough to myself.

Women don't like guys who are dangerous. Women just want us to think that because women are trying to kill us.

I quit because that thing inside of me that was driving me to drink that way was causing me so much pain that I was starting to get afraid for my own life, and my own health. It wasn't necessarily one instance. It was a lot that had piled up.

That is my story, simply told. Please do not ask again. I have told you in order to issue a warning. I have been damaged. Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

I was a coward on instinct.

Men broke into their homes, killed their families, threatened you--and you won't let them do anything for fear you'll be hurt. That's selfish. How would you like it if I took your bow and said I cared too much about you to let you fight?