“And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was.”

“You're afraid of heights," I say. "How do you survive in the Dauntless compound?" "I ignore my fear," he says. "When I make decisions, I pretend it doesn't exist." I stare at him for a second. I can't help it. To me there's a difference between not being afraid and acting in spite of fear, as he does. I have been staring at him too long. "What?" he says quietly. "Nothing.”

“Because that, more than any monster, was what Sam had feared: that he was weak and cowardly. He had a terrible fear of being afraid.”

“That was the way with Man; it had always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself.”

“She had seemed to need something from him that he hadn’t been able to give...at last he realized that what she had needed from him was need itself. That he should need her as she needed him.”

“Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?”