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As I hid myself in my little room in the college dormitory, away from the scornful and yet curious eyes of the students, I pined for sympathy. Often I wept in secret, wishing I had gone West, to be nourished by my mother's love, instead of remaining among a cold race whose hearts were frozen hard with prejudice. (VII. INCURRING MY MOTHER'S DISPLEASURE)

With me and my queer nature, that set me so at odds with the world and all its ordinary rules, I could not find a place in it to live and be content.

HOW TO READ A BOOK

1. READ IT

2. CHANGE A LOT

3. REREAD IT

The key is to keep the focus on people's actions, on their behaviors, rather than speculate about their motives. Trying to determine what's in a person's head or heart is a pointless distraction. It's impossible to know for certain the heart's inner secrets.

She expressed herself clearly, as only people who talk a lot to themselves can.

a great deal of pathological drug use is driven by unmet social needs, by being alienated and having difficulty connecting with others.

NOT EVERYTHING

NEEDS TO BE

EVERYTHING.

Tricked out of our expectations, we fall back on our senses. What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look.

The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. (p. 193)

Supposing there was somewhere reality was a little thinner than usual? And supposing you did something there that weakened reality even more. Books wouldn't do it. Even ordinary theater wouldn't do it, because in your heart you knew it was just people in funny clothes on a stage. But Holy Wood went straight from the eye into the brain. In your heart you thought it was real. The clicks would do it. (p. 286)

He had not got where he was today by bothering how things worked. It was how people worked that intrigued him. (p. 282)

Victor had never worked for anything in his life. In his experience, jobs were things that happened to other people. (p. 93)