Fear Quotes in Revenge of the Witch (The Last Apprentice)

There aren't many real jobs we can think of that are scary, except for personal assistant to the head of a fashion magazine. But Tom's not your average Joe. He's got a little superhero, or at least a little special power, in him. So his duties are far greater than ours.

The Spook seems to be saying that fear is a selfish emotion. Tom is scared because he's only concerned about what might happen to him. By thinking about the dead soldier, he understands the soldier more, and his own fears of the ghost disappear.

It seems that Tom's more afraid of disappointing his mother than he is of ghosts trying to bury him alive. There are a lot of those mothers in literature—mothers you'd rather stick in a dark alley with the Predator than eat dinner with.

The Spook lists three things one should actually be afraid of: the dark, the Spook, and Tom's own self. Sometimes finding yourself can be the scariest thing of all… That, and clowns. But those are too scary to even be included in this book.

This is another quote that alludes to the internal nature of fear. The dark feeds on fear because when you can't see something, your own brain starts coming up with all sorts of scary things that could be in there to feed on you. When children are afraid of the dark, what they're really afraid of is their own imaginations.

This quote tells us two things. First, Tom has a high enough opinion of himself that he thinks people should be afraid of him—even though he's just a twelve year-old with a stick. And second of all, Alice is fearless. Okay, we're not sure of number two yet, since Tom isn't anything too scary himself. But she'll prove herself to be fearless later in the novel.

As brave as Tom is—would you chase a witch in the middle of the night?—his basic fears still manifest themselves unintentionally. You've probably felt the same thing before. You break out into a nervous sweat during a speech or a test that you thought you felt confident about. Sometimes, your body is more scared than your mind is.

In this instance, Tom is afraid of himself. He's scared to find out that he has it in him to kill a person, even if that person is a witch.

Here's one of those instances where Tom cooks up the worst possible scenario. Alice rationally explains to him that a possessed baby couldn't really do much harm, so if Malkin were to possess anyone, it wouldn't be the baby. But fear and common sense aren't BFFs. You'll never see them eating at the same lunch table.

Unfortunately, one of Tom's worst fears comes true at the end of book: the fear that he will be feared. Poor, lonely Tom.