How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
[…]—Theodora caught at Eleanor's thought, and answered her. "Don't be so afraid all the time," she said and reached out to touch Eleanor's check with one finger. "We never know where our courage is coming from." (2.101)
Theodora hits upon one of Eleanor's major character flaws. She's always afraid, and mostly, she's afraid of herself.
Quote #5
"[…] People," the doctor said sadly, "are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring." (3.93)
The novel suggests that our ability to catalogue, categorize, and specialize give us a certain type of fear-cancelling power. This might prove true at a distance, but we'd have to put this one to the test in a dark forest filled with lions and tigers and—oh, we don't know—bears or something.
Quote #6
"We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways." [Dr. Montague] turned away. "We have marvels still before us" […] (4.98)
Remember the fear of the unknown we talked about earlier? Here, Dr. Montague explains what he feels is the key to that fear: the unknown.