For the first time I mutinied against my mother--mutinied myself into hysteria, until she let me wear the store undershirt so all the world could see.
Only a man who has undergone famine can properly value food; only sailors and desert-dwellers know the meaning of fresh water.

And only a child, with a child's imagination, can come to know the meaning of things it has been long denied.

I early discovered that the only things I could have were those I got for myself.

My meagre childhood developed meagreness.
The first things I had been able to get for myself had been cigarette pictures, cigarette posters, and cigarette albums.

I had not had the spending of the money I earned, so I traded "extra" newspapers for these treasures.