“He'd tried so hard to fight his fear, but there was a something liberating about giving up the battle and recognizing his fear was part of him. It wasn't something to be exorcised. It wasn't something to be obeyed. It needed only to be acknowledged.”

“He wasn't a bad person. He didn't want to fight. The trouble was that he'd tried to be part of the larger questions, tried to become part of politics and history. Happiness had a smaller location, though this wasn't something to flaunt, of course; very few would stand up and announce, 'Actually, I'm a coward,' but his timidity might be disguised, well, in a perfectly ordinary existence situated between meek contours...Cowardice needed its facade, its reasoning, like anything else if it was to be his life's principle. Contentment is no easy matter. One had to situate it cannily, camoflauge it, pretend it was something else.”

“Fear wears so many clever disguises it is virtually impossible to always recognize it. Fear disguises itself as the need to be somewhere else, doing something else, not knowing how to do something or not needing to do something.”

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”

“He pulled something out of his pocket and tried to stick it in her arm. A needle. He'd offered her hope, but then he was trying to hurt her. Poison. She pushed him away. "That wasn't nice.”

“It was fear. Fear that, after all the years of protecting his health, his heart, his mind, setting bedtimes and boundaries, giving warnings about strangers and looking both ways before crossing the street, it wouldn't be enough. Fear that, as he stood on the threshold of adulthood, forces beyond their control would take him down a path where they could no longer reach him. Fear that he'd be seduced by something ugly and would choose it. And that there would be nothing they could do but let him go.”