| Chapter # | Sentence # | Quote |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | 44 | Who were View more quotes about others">others, to tell me who I was? How was this a freedom, to be told how to be? How strangely false and unsatisfying seemed the culture to which I was expected to conform, and that which I was expected to perpetuate! Was I truly an artifact, a meaningless, unhappy puppet of a dismal world, responsive to strings I had neither designed nor requested? Perhaps humanity, in its flight from nature, into its thousands of ideologies, superstitions, and pretenses, had unknowingly betrayed itself, building up about itself, brick by subtle brick, its invisible prison, satisfying only those who might profit by its exploitation. |
| Chapter # | Sentence # | Quote |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | 41 | How the fellow who had accompanied me in the van would have been amused, to see his prisoner, the vain, aristocratic young lady, indeed, the debutant, afflicted by need, slave need! As the reader, if reader there may be, may have gathered, I had been much troubled on Earth, not knowing who I might be, or what might be my nature. |
| 7 | 42 | I had been alarmed by casual thoughts, sometimes stealing upon me when I was unprepared to resist them, certain frequently recurring daydreams, and surely the strange, wild, unaccountable realities revealed to me in the astonishments of my troubled slumber. |
| 7 | 43 | It was at such times, that I found it difficult, despite my upbringing, my education, and background, to see myself, and feel myself, as I had learned I should see myself, and feel myself. |
| 7 | 44 | Who were others, to tell me who I was? How was this a freedom, to be told how to be? How strangely false and unsatisfying seemed the culture to which I was expected to conform, and that which I was expected to perpetuate! Was I truly an artifact, a meaningless, unhappy puppet of a dismal world, responsive to strings I had neither designed nor requested? Perhaps humanity, in its flight from nature, into its thousands of ideologies, superstitions, and pretenses, had unknowingly betrayed itself, building up about itself, brick by subtle brick, its invisible prison, satisfying only those who might profit by its exploitation. |
| 7 | 45 | But perhaps, too, there are no prisons, other than those we ourselves make, or will accept. |
| 7 | 46 | It would be interesting if the walls we most fear, within which we feel ourselves the most constrained, within which we most lament, do not exist. |
| 7 | 47 | In any event, I knew that I carried in my body, as other human beings, a history and a heritage extending back to the first blind, reproducing forms of life, ages prior to the complex marvels of the unicellular organism. |