Fearsome Quotes & Sayings

I had a terrible premonition. His flight was to Miami. The old news footage flashed through my mind of Air Florida Flight 90 to Miami that went down in a freezing rain. It showed pieces of the wings and smashed fuselage floating in a huge hole in the ice next to the Fourteenth Street Bridge. A helicopter trying to lift a survivor from the black water. Rescuers watching helplessly from the shore. I tried to call him, but the network was down. I'd seen this fearsome power of the past before, how it can rise up without warning and strike the living with unerring timing. Later Lorenzo called from Miami and said it was a rough flight but they made it. I was happy that for once my intuition was wrong. — J. J. Jorgens

At night she'd close her eyes and imagine: over a hundred million billion insects hatching and dying every year - all those bristling, pointed, winged lifetimes: murderers and egg raiders, cooperators and queens. There were the glamorous dragonflies and fearsome widows; slave-holding ants; migrating monarchs; the delicate mantid chewing down her lover; dragonflies making love at thirty miles an hour - all the flagships of entomology. But — Anthony Doerr

Most dramatically, the Bridge served as an agonizing or exhilarating psychological symbol for the more than 1.2 million servicemen and women who sailed beneath it during World War II and for those soldiers and Marines who saw it from the air as their chartered World Airways or Flying Tiger plane took off from the Oakland Airport, banked westward across both bridges, and headed to Vietnam. Seen upon departure, whether from the channel or the air, the Golden Gate Bridge expressed the life left behind and the fearsome dangers to come. Seen upon return, the Bridge suggested safe harbor, recovery, the joy of life in years that now would be theirs. — Kevin Starr

We need a new name since Nate is more in the fold. Are we back to the foursome fearsome? — Tijan

Certain kinds of people, and a fortiori certain kinds of writers, have always experienced the world around them in the Gothic manner, I'm almost positive. Perhaps there was even some little stump of an apeman who witnessed prehistoric lightning as it parried with prehistoric blackness in a night without rain, and felt his soul rise and fall at the same time to behold this sublime and terrifying conflict. Perhaps such displays provided inspiration for those very first imaginings that were not born of our daily life of crude survival, who knows? Could this be why all our primal mythologies are Gothic - that is, fearsome, fantastical, and inhuman? — Thomas Ligotti

Go on," he offered magnanimously. "Feel free to piss on yourselves and
cower helplessly."
Gods, sometimes his generosity overwhelmed him. — G.A. Aiken

Kali comes from the Sanskrit word 'kal', meaning time. She is a Hindu goddess, who is greatly misunderstood by the Western world as being associated with sex, death and violence, but in the Hindu text she kills only demons. For humankind, she represents the death of the ego and the will to overcome the 'I am the body' idea. She reminds us that the body is only temporary, and through this realisation she provides liberation to her children. To the soul who aspires to greater spiritual endeavours, Kali is receptive, supportive and loving. It is only a person filled with ego who will perceive Kali in a fearsome form. Her black skin represents the womb of the quantum darkness, the great non-manifest from which all of creation arises and into which all of creation will eventually dissolve. — Traci Harding

Men deprived of female company quickly became fearsome creatures, and Trevor believed you could argue that civilization was in fact the invention of women, or at least the invention of the men who wanted to please them. If it were not for the ladies, Trevor often proclaimed, especially after a few beers, humanity would doubtlessly still be roaming the forests in animal skins. But — Kim Wright

The rook is a skilled survivor. He is ancient and has inhabited the planet longer than humans. This you can tell from his singing voice: his cry is harsh and grating, made for a more ancient world that existed before the innovation of the pipe, the lute, and the viol. Before music was invented he was taught to sing by the planet itself. He mimicked the great rumble of the sea, the fearsome eruption of volcanoes, the creaking of glaciers, and the geological groaning as the world split apart in its agony and remade itself. — Diane Setterfield

The naked statement - a black man has been killed by a white policeman - is such a fearsome divider of the races that the people who preside over a city immediately try to cover it with details. — Calvin Trillin

Can fearsome Ayo, who is herself a warrior, not understand their suffering? Can she not see what fire and inundation have done to the Wakadan heart?" "Tetu, I am a woman . I saw more suffering, more of the human heart, in my first five years than you will see in five lifetimes. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Fearsome Beasts and Strange Creatures Wonders in Paper and Mist — Erin Morgenstern

The ethical decision is always the fearsome decision. When something matters enough that we are afraid of the consequences afraid that even the honorable choice could result in harm or loss or sorrow that's when ethics are involved. — Henry W. Bloch

FORGIVE OR NOT, AS YOU WILL, AND KNOW ALWAYS THAT YOU ARE A HURRICANE IN THE BODY OF A GIRL, GLORIOUS AND FEARSOME AND WONDERFUL AND CAPABLE OF ANYTHING. — Seanan McGuire

His hand slid back up to my shoulder. He gave me a pat. "Threesome fearsome. No one stands a chance."
I grinned at him. "What about Nate?"
He tapped his beer with mine. "When he's around, it's the foursome fearsome. You can add any 'some to that name. Thank goodness, huh?" Then he groaned. "I really need to get laid tonight. — Tijan

Nothing in the world is as fearsome as a bloody, battered opponent who will never surrender. — Gerry Spence

I picked up the statue and looked at it from different angles. The eight arms were fearsome. Note to self: in a battle against Durga, run the other direction. — Colleen Houck

For a moment, the cardboard sets come crashing down to reveal that squalling monster, reality, locked up in the confines of its man-made cage. It is a fearsome thing, beautiful, inherent only to itself. Faced with such naked, existential truths, I understand why humans worship flesh-eating monsters and bloodthirsty gods.
But only for a moment. — Nenia Campbell

The newly created Darth Vader flexes his Force-muscle as the Emperor's enforcer to maintain order and obedience in a galaxy reeling from civil war and the destruction of the Jedi Order. To the galaxy at large, Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker - the Chosen One - died on Coruscant during the siege of the Jedi Temple. And, to some extent, the was true - Anakin was dead. But from the site of Anakin Skywalker's last stand - on the molten surface of the planet Mustafa, where he sought to destroy his friend and former master, Obi-Wan Kanobi - a fearsome spectre in black has risen. Once the most powerful Knight ever known to the Jedi order he is not a disciple of the dark side, a lord of the dreaded Sith, and the avenging right hand of the galaxy's ruthless new Emperor. Seduced, deranged and destroyed by the machinations of the Dark Lord Sidious, Anakin Skywalker is dead ... and Darth Vader lives ... — James Luceno

The most fearsome monsters of all may inhabit the dark corners of our mind waiting for us to release them through our believes and gullibility. the phenomenon feeds on fear and believe. Sometimes it destroys us altogether other times it leads us upwards into the labyrinth of electromagnetic frequencies that form a curtain in the area we call windows and stalk us to drink our blood and create all kinds of mischievous beliefs and misconceptions in our feeble little terrestrial minds. — John A. Keel

Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan--it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution--tiger, tiger burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic.

Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will . . . they could never be known in every detail and they never should be. — Lydia Millet

He flipped up his middle finger. "I don't care. I can't handle this. My game is talk. You tried to take that away." He shot an arm towards Mason. "He fights. I talk. That's the magic of our twosome fearsome. — Tijan

And he wonders if he has a space in his brain or in his soul for monsters and demons, or if he will, like most people, choose insanity when confronted with a fearsome reality. — Christopher Rice

We used to be "shiftless and lazy," now we're "fearsome and awesome." I think the black man should take pride in that. — James Earl Jones

A lot of times when people meet me, theyll definitely try to make me feel young or inexperienced. Like, Its all taken care of. Teenagers are such a discerning group of people. Theyll immediately sniff out anything that feels contrived. Im, like, constantly scanning myself to see if Im some corporate executive version of a teenager. Ive developed something of a fearsome reputation. People know that if you talk down to me, I will roll my eyes or whatever. — Lorde

and Ravn recited a long poem about some ancient hero who killed a monster and then the monster's mother who was even more fearsome than her son, but I was too drunk to remember much of it. And — Bernard Cornwell

Mr. Jamrach led me through the lobby and into the menagerie. The first was a parrot room, a fearsome screaming place of mad round eyes, crimson breasts that beat against bars, wings that flapped against their neighbours, blood red, royal blue, gypsy yellow, grass green. The birds were crammed along perches. Macaws hung upside down here and there, batting their white eyes, and small green parrots flittered above our heads in drifts. A hot of cockatoos looked down from on high over the shrill madness, high crested, creamy breasted. The screeching was like laughter in hell. — Carol Birch

He always maintained that we fear something because we recognize it as fearsome through rational inferences, and that only the reason had any power; the heart had none. While I ate well and drank well, he kept demonstrating to me the advantages of reason... In striving after the positive, the poor man had argued away all life's splendour, all the sunbeams, all the faith and all the flowers, leaving nothing but the cold, positive grave. — Heinrich Heine

The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite - on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel - keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one ... that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger - indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it - than it is a monumental distraction from hunger. — Caroline Knapp

To sentimentalise something is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalise something is to savour rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats. — Frederick Buechner

To give birth is a fearsome thing; there is no hating the child one has borne even when injured by it. — Sophocles

It is hard to describe to you but I swear it was a fearsome sight. There were not eyes to speak of, but chasms that saw into its dark depths. A shade of a mouth full with phantom teeth. There seemed to be a skull shifting in and out of form beneath the black. Bound together by an unspeakable evil. — Solange Nicole

A fearsome reputation will someday mean less of this bullshit. People and things will get so they won't dare mess with me. Crazy violent sociopaths get left alone. Or locked up. I nodded. Yeah, that's the down side. — Morgan Blayde

Of the many fearsome beasts and monsters that roam our land, there is none more curious or more deadly that the Basilisk, known also as the King of Serpents. This snake, which may reach gigantic size, and live many hundreds of years, is born from a chicken's egg, hatched beneath a toad. Its methods of killing are more wonderous, for aside from its deadly and venomous fangs, the Basilisk has a murderous stare, and all who are fixed with the beam of its eye shall suffer instant death. Spiders flee before the Basilisk, for it is their mortal enemy, and the Basilisk flees only from the crowing of the rooster, which is fatal to it. — J.K. Rowling

The fearsome blessing of that hard time continues to work itself out in my life in the same way we're told the universe is still hurtling through outer space under the impact of the great cosmic explosion ... I think grace sometimes explodes into our lives like that-sending our pain, terror, astonishment hurtling through inner space until by grace they become Orion, Cassiopeia, Polaris to give us our bearings, to bring us into something like full being at last. — Frederick Buechner

Beggin' your pardon, miss, but I was told you be the one to help me cross on to the next world."
"Who told you this?"
His eyes widen. "A fearsome creature with a head full of snakes!"
"You musn't fear her," I say, taking the man's hand and leading his toward the river. "She's as tame as a pussycat. She'd probably lick your hand given the chance."
"Didn't seem harmless," he whispers, shuddering.
"Yes, well, things are not always as they appear, sir, and we must learn to judge for ourselves. — Libba Bray

Though sympathy tugged at her, Sophie's imagination made fearsome leaps. The grieving widower. The destitute governess. A motherless child. It had all the makings of a scintillating novel. — Laura Frantz

You only have to gaze around you at the natural world to see the proof that beauty, form, order, and growth have survived for billions of years. In dealing with your shadow, you are aligning yourself with the same infinite power. The shadow isn't a fearsome opponent but a worthy one. Powerful as it is, the power of wholeness is infinitely greater, and by a miracle of creation, it is within your grasp. — Deepak Chopra

Tonight is a night to turn heads. Make them remember you. Make sure they never forget. You are the Calipha of Khorasan, and you have the ear of a king." Despina put her hand on Shahrzad's shoulder and grinned at their shared reflection. "More important, you have his heart." She bent forward and lowered her voice. "And, most important, you are a fearsome thing to behold in your own right. — Renee Ahdieh

Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. — Rosa Luxemburg

Heroism is not fighting some big battle. It is not standing up to some fearsome foe ... Heroism is every day getting up with a mission to show this world that you are going to light it up with your spirit, to make the best out of yourself. — Cory Booker

Quarkbeasts, for all their fearsome looks, are obedient to a fault. They are nine-tenths velociraptor and kitchen blender and one-tenth Labrador. It was the Labrador tenth that I valued most. — Jasper Fforde

Am I not a fearsome enemy?"
"You frighten me primally. — Kevin Hearne

You know why I'm scared of the ocean?" She shook her head. "It's not just because I'm scared of drowning. Though I guess I am. It's because of all that space. It's because everywhere I look, I see blue, and I have no idea where it begins. When I'm out there, I stay as close as I can to the sand, because at least then I know where it ends." She didn't speak for a while, just continued walking a little bit ahead of him. Maybe she was thinking about fire, the thing she had told him she most feared. Marcus had never seen so much as a picture of her father, but he imagined that he had been a fearsome man with a scar covering one whole side of his face. He imagined that Marjorie feared fire for the same reasons he feared water. — Yaa Gyasi

Lucky!" she shouted. The creature pulled up and pranced excitedly before her, front hooves pawing at the ground. Laughing with happiness, Kelley flung her arms around the kelpie and buried her face in his mane. Lucky nuzzled her shoulder and head-butted at her in delight.
Besides Sonny, Fennrys gestured with his good arm. "Isn't that ... ?"
"The Roan Horse, Harbinger of the Wild Hunt and Fearsome Bringer of Doom. Yeah" Sonny nodded. "Used to be."
"Thought so." Lucky kicked up his back hooves like a frolicking colt, and Fennrys snorted is disgust. "Evil really needs to step up its game. — Lesley Livingston

It's just that it's fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble. — Larry McMurtry

The incredible length of Bombay sped by, those endless sprawls of buildings, huts and shacks, children squatting and shitting by the tracks, refuse, the crowded grey roads twisting and winding between, all of it blurred but fearsome in its strength, in its very life that grew it unstoppably. — Vikram Chandra

Two against thirty two," Niten said. "Good odds."
"I've never fought the Spartoi before," Prometheus admitted. "I only know of them by their reputation - and it's fearsome."
"We have an equal reputation," Niten said.
"Well, you do," the Elder said. "I was never that much of a fighter. And after the fall of the island, I rarely took up weapons again."
"Fighting is a skill you never forget," Niten said, a touch of sadness in his voice. "I fought my first duel when I was thirteen. I've been fighting ever since."
"But you are more than just a swordsman," Prometheus said. "You are an artist, a sculptor and a writer."
"No man is ever just one thing," Niten answered. His shoulder dropped and his short sword appeared in his left hand, water droplets sparkling from the blade. "But first and foremost, I was always a warrior." He jabbed his sword into the fog and stirred it like liquid. — Michael Scott

We seem to prefer a comfortable lie to the uncomfortable truth. We punish those who point out reality, and reward those who provide us with the comfort of illusion. Reality is fearsome .. but experience tells us that more fearsome yet is evading it. — Bill Moyers

Although the scythe isn't pre-eminent among the weapons of war, anyone who has been on the wrong end of, say, a peasants' revolt will know that in skilled hands it is fearsome. — Terry Pratchett

There was something severed and rough about her, something tainted and, yet, at the same time those jagged pieces were the makings of something fearsome. She'd wanted to become someone the Senate would fear, why not shatter the sky? — Elise Kova

Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows. — Carl Sagan

Drink was the most fearsome of deceivers ... for it promised one thing and came through with quite another. — Kay Boyle

I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility. — Harold Pinter

She felt his hands move to the fastening of his breeches, and then he swore under his breath as he was forced to roll off her in order to (in his words), "get the bloody things off." She couldn't help but chuckle at his profanity; he seemed to be having a much rougher time of it than she imagined was usual.
"You're laughing?" he asked, his brows rising into a daring arch.
"You should be glad I was already out of my gown," she told him. "Thirty-six cloth-covered buttons down the back."
He gave her a fearsome look. "It would not have survived. — Julia Quinn

Alpha of the Vltava Pack. Been around since the Middle fucking Ages. Apparently a baker-of all the sodding things for a fearsome Alpha to be. We are glad we don't have to tell people our Alpha is a motherehumping baker. — Patricia Briggs

Shiva! The Mahadev. The God of Gods. Destroyer of Evil. Passionate lover. Fierce warrior. Consummate dancer. Charismatic leader. All-powerful, yet incorruptible. A quick wit, accompanied by an equally quick and fearsome temper. — Amish Tripathi

I never had a dog that showed a human fear of death. Death, to a dog, is the final unavoidable compulsion, the least ineluctable scent on a fearsome trail, but they like to face it alone, going out into the woods, among the leaves, if there are any leaves when their time comes, enduring without sentimental human distraction the Last Loneliness, which they are wise enough to know cannot be shared by anyone. — James Thurber

That said, a fireball like the one hurtling towards us was worthy of the utmost respect. To adopt the jargon of commercial managers, this was a Premium-Class Fireball. Speaking in poetic terms, it was a Tsar-Fireball. A biologist would have said it was an Alpha-Fireball. As a cool, calculating mathematician might have remarked, it was a fireball with a diameter of about three metres.
It was a fireball fearsome enough to make you shit yourself! — Sergei Lukyanenko

For Bulgakov, however, the greatest underlying source of unease, amounting at times to despair, was something less tangible though very real to him, since it occurs as an ever-present refrain throughout these stories. This was the sense of being a lone soldier of reason and enlightenment pitted against the vast, dark, ocean-like mass of peasant ignorance and superstition... [in] the fearsome, pre-literate, mediaeval world of the peasantry — Michael Glenny

Though our challenges are fearsome, so are our strengths. Americans have ever been a relentless, questioning, hopeful people. — William J. Clinton

But the most wonderful thing of all, our highest achievement and the one thing for which I pray we will always be remembered, is stuffing wads of polyester into an anatomically incorrect, cartoonish ideal of one of nature's most fearsome predators for no other reason than to soothe a child. — Rick Yancey

From the social cognitive perspective, it is mainly perceived inefficacy to cope with potentially aversive events that makes them fearsome. To the extent that people believe they can prevent, terminate, or lessen the severity of aversive events, they have little reason to be perturbed by them. But if they believe they are unable to manage threats safely, they have much cause for apprehension — Albert Bandura

Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui - these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real. — David Foster Wallace

We are no longer awkward younglings. Our enemies may be fearsome, but so are we. It is time we remind them of that. — Christopher Paolini

I would say I'm more fascinated by Big Daddy V than I am necessarily a huge fan of Big Daddy V. He simply threw on the double-strapped unitard ... and now he's some sort of fearsome, fighting, wrecking machine. — James Roday

Their characteristics are well-known. They're beautiful
when they're not astoundingly ugly. They're both goddesses for men to worship, and demons for them to flee. They adore children, sometimes to the point of unhealthy obsession. They have a strong association with nature, from which they're often assumed to draw magical power. Their anger is a terrible thing to behold, and all the more fearsome because anything can spark it; the rules by which these creatures operate are not those of rational men. They are creatures of fanciful whim, and they never, ever, can be understood.
I'm talking, of course, about women. — Marie Brennan

Without imagination, things were only as they appeared - and that was blindness. Things were more than they appeared, so much more. When he considered an oak tree, it was not just a tree. To someone small, like an ant, it was a whole landscape of rugged barky cliffs and big green leaf-plains that quaked when the sky was restless, a place of many strange creatures where fearsome winged beasts could pluck and devour someone in a blink. — Jonathan Renshaw

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons ... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?". — Yevgeny Zamyatin

If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed. — Michael Parenti

In the three boats story, a man is floating alone in an ocean without a life jacket when a boat passes by. "Get in. I'll save you," the boatman says. "Oh, no, it's fine," the floating man answers, "I'm putting my faith in the Lord." In time, two more boats come along, and to each rescuer the man - usually me, in Wade's telling - says, "No, no, I'm putting my faith in the Lord." Eventually, and it isn't very long in coming, the man drowns. Yet when he stands up to meet his Maker at the fated spot where some rejoice but many more cower, his Maker looks sternly down and says, "You're a fool. You're assigned to hell forever. Go there now." To which the drowned man says, "But your honor, I put my faith in you. You promised to save me." "Save you!?" fearsome God shouts from misty marmoreal heights. "Save you? Save you?" God thunders. "I sent you three boats! — Richard Ford

But, sir, isn't death a dreadful thing?" asked Malcolm.
"That depends on whether a man regards it as his fate or as the will of a perfect God. Its obscurity is its dread. But if God be light, then death itself must be full of splendor
a splendor probably too keen for our eyes to receive."
"But there's the dying itself; isn't that fearsome? It's that I would be afraid of."
"I don't see why it should be. It's the lack of a God that makes it dreadful, and you would be greatly to blame for that, Malcolm, if you hadn't found your God by the time you had to die. — George MacDonald

The weight of words.
Words can be fearsome weapons, tools or means powerful! — Joko Ono

A tiger, however fearsome, could be hunted into a corner. It fought alone, so it died alone. But to hunt a wolf was to constantly look over your shoulder, wondering if others were behind you in the dark. "Lost? — Nicholas Eames

Black bears, though, are not fearsome. I encountered one on the road to my house in Vermont, alone at night. I picked up two stones just in case, but I wasn't afraid of him. I felt a hunter's exhilaration and a brotherly feeling. — Edward Hoagland

In practice, the ocean is the world's wildest place because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore. — Rose George

A noble and resolute people can safely tread a dark and fearsome path if they always shine before them the lamps of wisdom and valor. — Aleksandra Layland

Tall, pale-skinned, and trained for warfare since childhood, the Celts were fearsome. They spiked up their hair with lime, covered their bodies in dyes or tattoos, ripped off their clothes in battle, and fought totally butt-naked, so mad on war and glory that no one could stop them. The Romans were terrified of the Celts, but they admired them too. Too bad Roman discipline won out in the end. But not tonight... tonight is going to be massive - awesome beyond awesomeness - and my Celts are going to win! — A.E. Conran

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. — Hannah Arendt

Though we were all taught to be proud of living in this great parliamentary democracy the civil servants who ran it were a fearsome bunch - a nameless mass of people with jobs (police, social workers, record-keepers, teachers, councilmen) whose sole purpose was to keep everyone shuffling from birth to death in a nice orderly queue. Surely some social-service record had been passed to the local constabulary bearing a huge black question mark beside the name Finn and the scrawled words, Why isn't this boy in school — Meg Rosoff

( ... ) we must learn to accept that all creatures, however fearsome they may be, are of divine
origin. — Colleen Houck

There is a God to love and there is a God to fear, and He is one and the same! Did He not judge His own Son as a demonstration of His love for the world? And did He not then show His love for the Son He judged by raising Him from the dead? How silly to think that if He is a loving God, He cannot also be a fearsome God. The two attributes complement each other. — David Jeremiah

A properly trained lybrarian is one of the most fearless and fearsome beings in the world! — Jen Swann Downey

I have several people among my acquaintances who might be described as 'fearsome rogues.' Did he give a name? — Pamela Belle

It was murder - strangulation - but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word 'LILITH'. One need not mention these things because they vanished so quickly - as for Suydam, one could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; — H.P. Lovecraft

PERCY MISSED BOB. He'd gotten used to having the Titan on his side, lighting their way with his silver hair and his fearsome war broom. Now their only guide was an emaciated corpse lady with serious self-esteem issues. — Rick Riordan

But the remarkable thing about the beetles was their sensitivity to all the grammar and directives and slogans and even unstated desires of the ant world, which they learned to manipulate. They first memorized the proper antenna-vibration and foreleg-tap which the ants themselves used to request food. The poor workers, busy going here and there and back again all day and never getting a chance to think, automatically assumed that these fearsome strangers had been authorized by the Central Committee since they knew the password, and so they regurgitated a drop or two of fruit juice on cue, much the same as when one is traveling across Europe or Asia on the train and a person in uniform requests one's passport, one's ticket, takes them away, and comes back, or else does not come back, having sold them; a badge and a superior manner can obtain anything in this world. — William T. Vollmann

The maester had taught him all the banners: the mailed fist of the Glovers, silver on scarlet; Lady Mormont's black bear; the hideous flayed man that went before Roose Bolton of the Dreadfort; a bull moose for the Hornwoods; a battle-axe for the Cerwyns; three sentinel trees for the Tallharts; and the fearsome sigil of House Umber, a roaring giant in shattered chains. — George R R Martin

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:
All our dream-worlds may come true.
Fairy lands are fearsome too.
As I wander far from view
Read, and bring me home to you. — Salman Rushdie

Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men. — Thomas Merton

There's nothing so fearsome as the revolt of a sheep, said de Marsay. — Honore De Balzac

Here was the heart of dread. It was not fearsome. It was fetid, noxious, hopeless. A deep and exhausting misery, a crevasse so bottomless that, in the blackness, all one could make out were the contours of despair. — Laura Tillman

Only humans can hurt one another, Ada thought; only humans falter and betray one another with a stunning, fearsome frequency. As David's family had done to him; as David had done to her. And Ada would do it too. She would fail other people throughout her life, inevitably, even those she loved best. — Liz Moore

Lack of leadership can have fearsome consequences. A dog's mental health, after all, depends to a large degree on leadership: dogs get enormously distressed when they think no one is in charge. Accordingly, it's not only nonsensical to fail to establish rules and limits with a dog ... but cruel. — Caroline Knapp

I think if you talk to my colleagues, I was less than a fearsome individual. — Karl Rove

Rockwood didn't have a movie theater or an IHOP or a strip mall. But it did have two churches, a ramshackle bar, and last (but certainly not least) Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, a barren landscape of wilted ferns and plastic flamingos with peeling paint. Wacky Willie had added the 'Deluxe' when finally ridding the thirteenth hole windmill of a stubborn family of bats after a great and terrible struggle that would forever be known as 'The Fearsome Bat War of Rockwood County' by Willie, but was usually referred to as 'That Time Willie Had to Get Rabies Shots' by everyone else. — A. Lee Martinez

The pinecone is a fearsome tool of destruction!
-Bacchus — Rick Riordan

She comes by night, in fearsome flight, in garments black as pitch, the queen of doom upon her broom, the wild and wicked witch. — Jack Prelutsky

Whenever I hear people clucking about the decline of civilization, what's wrong with young people, how vulgar popular culture is, how confusing and frightening they find the internet, alarms go off. I know I'm around somebody whose hinges are rusting. Death will be bad enough, but for me, this early harbinger is more fearsome, because a part of one's spirit and openness and ability to learn and grow disappears. — Jon Katz

Love of truth is something fearsome and mighty. — Friedrich Nietzsche