The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

There is in the end no remedy but truth. It is the one course that cannot be evil.

I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself.

It is not what I do, it is the way I do it, that will get me in the end.