Learning in our family was entirely self-directed: you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done. Some of us were more disciplined than others. (Location 834)
then a second time more slowly, pausing to make notes, to cross-reference, and even to write short essays on doctrines like faith and sacrifice. No one read the essays; I wrote them for myself, (Location 1095)
The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand. (Location 1103)
Learning to dance felt like learning to belong. I could memorize the movements and, in doing so, step into their minds, lunging when they lunged, reaching my arms upward in time with theirs. (Location 1355)
Fruit of the Loom. Caroline had tried to make the sweatshirts more (Location 1367)
he struck the concrete wall with its outcropping of rebar, (Location 2122)
But I understood this one fact: that a thousand times I had been called Nigger, and laughed, and now I could not laugh. The word and the way Shawn said it hadn’t changed; only my ears were different (Location 2948)
My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs. (Location 3193)
Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, (Location 3279)
I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money. (Location 3343)
the words left my lips stillborn. I believed them, but I didn’t understand them well enough to make them live. (Location 3627)
He’d seemed to say, “First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.” (Location 3697)
“It has never occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone.” He waited for an explanation. “I would enjoy serving the dinner,” I said, “more than eating it.” (Location 3889)
“You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. (Location 3893)
Dad looked at me, waiting for me to give an opinion, but I felt alienated from myself. I didn’t know who to be. On the mountain I slipped thoughtlessly into the voice of their daughter and acolyte. But here, I couldn’t seem to find the voice that, in the shadow of Buck’s Peak, came easily. (Location 3987)
He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion. (Location 4069)
understand, as I had not before, that although I had renounced my father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live in this one. (Location 4095)
But although I wished it were otherwise, I did not want to go home. I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak. (Location 4453)
I tried to forget that night. For the first time in fifteen years, I closed my journal and put it away. Journaling is contemplative, and I didn’t want to contemplate anything. (Location 4605)
I flew to the Middle East, where Drew was completing a Fulbright. (Location 4931)
Note: Search for fullbright
I had changed too much. All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere? (Location 4941)
I had built a new life, and it was a happy one, but I felt a sense of loss that went beyond family. I had lost Buck’s Peak, not by leaving but by leaving silently. (Location 5041)