Unit 1: Part 3 Vocabulary

With success so imminent, we decided not to tell anyone until he could actually walk.

Once I had succeeded in teaching Doodle to walk, I began to believe in my own infallibility and I prepared a terrific development program for him, unknown to Mama and Daddy, of course.

On the topmost branch a bird the size of a chicken, with scarlet feathers and long legs, was perched precariously.

Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense—the starkest Madness—
’Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail—
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—

Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense—the starkest Madness—
’Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail—
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—

We lived then in the Dominican Republic, and the family as a whole spoke only Spanish at home, until my sisters and I started attending the Carol Morgan School, and we became a bilingual family.

He said, “Imagine this whole table is the human brain. Then this teensy grain is all we ever use of our intelligence!” He enumerated geniuses who had perhaps used two grains, maybe three: Einstein, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Beethoven.

She had an expressive, dreamy look that was accentuated by the wimple that framed her face.

Americans have a prejudice in favor of lone wolves. Moral superiority, we like to think, belongs to the person who stands alone.

Because in getting along with other people, most decent people know, as Hodges and Geyer put it, the “importance of cooperation, tact and social solidarity in situations that are tense or difficult.”

But, as the University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has argued, Milgram’s “subjects were not simply obeying a leader, but responding to someone whose credentials and good faith they thought they could trust.”

Young people are trying frantically to force themselves into an unbending mold of expectations, convinced that they live in a two-tiered system in which they are either a resounding success or they have already failed. And the more they try to squeeze themselves into that shrinking, allegedly normative space, the faster the walls close in.

As a Midwestern senior told me for my book The Overachievers, high schoolers view life as “a conveyor belt,” making monotonous scheduled stops at high school, college, graduate school, and a series of jobs until death.

More than half a century later, schools, students, and sometimes parents treat these nonconformists like second-class citizens, squelching that hope.

Dr. Darold Treffert, a Wisconsin physician and the leading researcher in the study of savant syndrome, gives one example, of a blind man with “a faculty of calculating to a degree little short of marvelous” in his book Extraordinary People...

Squares are always symmetrical shapes in my mind, which makes them especially beautiful to me.

Sacks also describes John and Michael as playing a game that involved swapping prime numbers with each other for hours at a time.