My mother was below the salt...

My mother was a Methodist, but my father was Anglican: thus my mother was below my father’s level socially, as such things were accounted then. (If she’d lived, my Grandmother Adelia would never have allowed the marriage, or so I decided later. My mother would have been too far down the ladder for her – also too prudish, too earnest, too provincial. Adelia would have dragged my father off to Montreal – hooked him up to a debutante, at the very least. Someone with better clothes.)

Margaret Atwood

The Blind Assassin (2000)

We found our refuge in science...

I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess. ... We found our refuge in science. ... We learned that science is a revenge of victims against oppressors, that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred.

Freeman Dyson

"To Teach or Not to Teach" (1992)

From Eros to Gaia Vol. 5