"The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow."

"The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand."

"I began to study trigonometry. There was solace in its strange formulas and equations. I was drawn to the Pythagorean…"

"I don’t know how long I sat there reading about it, but at some point I’d read enough. I leaned back and stared at th…"

"Suspended between fear of the past and fear of the future, I recorded the dream in my journal. Then, without any expl…"

"By the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had…"

"I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we …"

"To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frai…"

"My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me th…"

"The irony was that if Dad was bipolar—or had any of a dozen disorders that might explain his behavior—the same parano…"