With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.
Interpretation
We often confront our fears, drawn to them as if they hold a deeper truth or understanding.
Clive Barker uses the metaphor of a person returning to a painful tooth to illustrate how we persistently revisit our fears despite their discomfort. Just as one might instinctively probe a sore tooth out of curiosity or compulsion, we are drawn to our fears, often wanting to analyze and understand them, much like a hungry person is drawn to food, suggesting that confronting our fears is an inherent and essential part of human experience.
In practice
In a motivational speech about facing challenges, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of confronting fears.
Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.
We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else.
In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.
Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now--in this bright, laughing moment--and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.
You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.
I'm not the expert on the great gameplay. I come in for the character design, monsters, atmosphere. I'm not the technician.
We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.
Literally falling on the ice and having to pick yourself up in front of thousands of people is not an easy thing to do. The thing that you learn is to pick yourself back up, to learn from your mistakes.
It is the character of a brave and resolute man not to be ruffled by adversity and not to desert his post.
I feel very adventurous. There are so many doors to be opened, and I'm not afraid to look behind them.
You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.
The battle of Iwo Island has been won. The United States Marines by their individual and collective courage have conquered a base which is as necessary to us in our continuing forward movement toward final victory as it was vital to the enemy in staving off ultimate defeat.
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