Our early life is cut off from the moment we came here, and that without our lifting a hand. We often try to look back on it and find an explanation, but never quite succeed.
At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognized that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill.
He does not speak of his mother or his brothers and sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.