Everybody sizing one another up as being fresher off the boat, more foreign and weird. These were critical determinations, often coming down to the strangeness of some kid's sneakers or shirt or haircut. I don't recall any of the sort of taunting and name-calling we had at the apartment complex, but there was patent discrimination.
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"My first conscious calculation as to how to go about defeating the world's intentions for me," Baldwin would later write of his first cultural outing with Bill, "began on that Saturday afternoon." The defeat was total and triumphant.
Maria Popova
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
J.M. Barrie — The Little Minister
We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a "narrative," and that this narrative is us, our identities. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique.
Oliver Sacks