Quotes
The routine dulls the terror.
Over generations, love of the maji turned into fear. Fear turned into hate. Hate transformed into violence, a desire to wipe the maji away.”
ANGER IS FEAR’S BODYGUARD, a poster in the hospital had read (Chapter 9, p110)
As a child I feared the size of the world. The farther away the sound of howling dogs, the farther away the sound of the trains, the tighter I curled myself under the quilt. The trains sounded deeper and deeper into the night. They had not reached the end of the world before I stopped hearing them, the last long moan diminishing toward China. How large the world must be to make my grandmother only a taste by the time she reaches me. (p99)
The road in either direction
is neither longer nor shorter,
nor more narrow nor wider
than the fear that closes your heart.
Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass. (p400)
Trust yourself. Even if you're really, really scared, never let on that you are.
"In my business, fear is a sane and very healthy emotion. That's because death and disaster aren't abstractions. They're as goddamn real as real can be." (Chapter 5)
Didn’t anything scare the two aliens? Sometimes she wondered if humans were the only beings in the universe with a sense of cowardice (be charitable, and call it and instinct for self-preservation).
p. 396
Generation after generation, humankind fights to preserve the status quo, maintaining "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know," a bit of folk cynicism that assumes the unknown to be dangerous. p. 197
We might more accurately think of nonattachment as nondependency. Much of our inner turbulence reflects the fear of loss: our dependence on people, circumstances, and things not really under our control. On some level we know that death, indifference, rejection, repossession, or high tide may leave us bereft in the morning. Still, we clutch desperately at things we cannot finally hold. Nonattachment is the most realistic of attitudes. It is freedom from wishful thinking, from always wanting things to be otherwise.
Just so, our natural power is sapped by the parasites of the centuries: fear, superstition, a view of reality that reduces life's wonders to creaking machinery. If we starve these parasitic beliefs they will die.
