Entry tags:

hp, insights

I was fed up with books, which I still continued to gulp down with indiscriminate voracity, and searched for another key to the highest truths: there must be a key, and I was certain that, owing to some monstrous conspiracy to my detriment and the world's, I would not get it in school. In school they loaded me with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to. I will find a shortcut, I will make a lock-pick, I will push open the doors."

Ambitious; intelligent but not quite scholarly; arrogant ... Marauder-era Snape?

(The quote is from "Hydrogen," a chapter of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, which is a perfectly astonishing book.)