| Chapter # | Sentence # | Quote |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | 47 | In any event, I View more quotes about knew">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. |
| Chapter # | Sentence # | Quote |
|---|---|---|
| 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. |
| 7 | 48 | To such an organism could biology be irrelevant? Surely templates must exist in the human organism, as in other forms of life, perhaps subtler and vaster, but just as real. |
| 7 | 49 | Could my behavior, my promptings, what would satisfy me, what I would need, be wholly independent of my form of life, be unique amongst all living forms, merely accidents and oddities imposed upon me from the outside, beginning with the first flash of light, the first breath, the sobbing birth cry of a small, bloody animal? That did not seem likely. |
| 7 | 50 | The cultures which denied men and women to themselves, for their own purposes, in their own interests, inertial, self-perpetuating structures, productive of misery and alienation, were inventions of recent date, the mere tick of a clock, marking a moment in millenniums. |