28. “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”
Now orphaned, she and her siblings went to live with their maternal grandmother, who was both religious and a stern disciplinarian. Of her childhood, Eleanor wrote that she “always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear.” She learned to find solace in reading and, though she would never find acceptance through it, poured herself into volunteer work.
