Daily Inspiration Quote by Yvonne Craig

Fear is less a monster under the bed than a story we privately agree to believe. Yvonne Craig, an actress who spent her career toggling between costume spectacle and human vulnerability, lands a deceptively plain line that exposes how “scary” is manufactured: not discovered in the world, but assembled in the mind.

The phrasing matters. “Everybody” universalizes the mechanism without pretending we’re all afraid of the same thing. “In their own imagination” shifts the locus of power away from external threats and toward internal authorship. It’s a small democratic claim: your fear isn’t invalid, but it is personal, shaped by memory, media, and mood. Then “decides” does the real work. Fear often feels involuntary, a gut hijack, yet Craig frames it as choice-adjacent - not blame, but agency. Scary becomes a verdict, not a fact.

Coming from an actress, the subtext is meta. Performance is controlled fear: lighting, music cues, timing, a face held a beat too long. Craig implicitly points out that horror, suspense, even charisma rely on the audience completing the circuit. The same scene can be camp or chilling depending on what viewers bring with them - their thresholds, traumas, and expectations.

Culturally, it reads like a quiet rebuke to one-size-fits-all panic. In eras when news cycles and entertainment both monetize dread, Craig’s line reminds us the scariest part is often the projection - and that if imagination can escalate fear, it can also edit it down.