As a young girl, I thought that being in love with the man I married would guarantee a life of eternal joy. I soon learned that there weren't too many - Nina Graboi

Throughout this, I kept paring away at the accretions of my conditioning. I subjected all my beliefs to radical doubt and questioned the values by which I lived. Were they truly mine? Or had they been foisted on me, as on everybody else, by the culture? I had questioned before, but not nearly enough. I discovered new possibilities, alternative approaches to almost everything I had hitherto taken for granted, and I saw the hypocrisy and the phoniness of much that made up the image I presented to the world. I called it "peeling the onion" and worked diligently to free myself of robot prejudices and responses. These inner events took place over a period of years, and they are still going on. (Chapter Nineteen)

The political atmosphere was heating up. In Germany, Hitler blared his message of the super race and of hatred for the Jews into Aryan ears. In Italy, Mussolini dosed dissenters with castor-oil. (Chapter Four)

A vast gap between who I was and who I could be had opened up. I saw that we humans carry within us the potential for a greatly expanded awareness of reality that embraces levels which are not accessible to ordinary consciousness. The cosmic nature of the reality that the books described dwarfed the microscopic portion of it that I knew. More than anything, I longed to look into the invisible realm. (Chapter Nineteen)