Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all love… - John Irving

It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.

Almost none of them understood Great Expectations or David Copperfield, anyway. They were not only too young for the Dickensian language, they were also too young to comprehend the usual language of St. Cloud’s. What mattered to Dr. Larch was the idea of reading aloud – it was a successful soporific for the children who didn’t know what they were listening to, and for those few who understood the words and the story, then the evening reading provided them with a way to leave St. Cloud’s in their dreams, in their imaginations.
Dickens was a personal favorite of Dr. Larch; it was no accident, of course, that both Great Expectations and David Copperfield were concerned with orphans. (‘What in the hell else would you read to an orphan?’ Dr. Larch inquired in his journal.)

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.