Don’t make up problems you don’t have yet. It’s not a problem until it’s a real problem. Most of the things you worry about never happen anyway.

The fear is always bigger than the actual threat. Once you stop being afraid, the threat falls apart.

Nothing is going on, but everybody is afraid of something.

Do not fear what you can address. What should worry you is not the problem, but if you are resisting addressing it.

Then I could turn around and justify that, by saying that it isn’t really paranoia if there really are people out to get you.

Tell me, is this true or is it just one of those tales that people like to make up to worry others?

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't — and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.

In secrecy, in silence, a whole race may be destroyed without notice. Whole cultures and species have been destroyed while men smiled and spoke of economics, of employment, of progress, of the welfare of mankind. Is a threat less deadly because it does not scream and rage and threaten force of arms?

Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

I worry that it's me they're really after." "You don't exist. At the risk of wounding your ego, not everyone in the known universe is obsessed with you and your secret history.

Why am I freaking out over something that I have no proof is even true?

I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations.

I can't imagine," said Dupre, "a better way to unnerve people than to tell them there's no cause for alarm.