Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe — Read

Eugene spent the next four years of his life in Leonard's school. Against the bleak horror of Dixieland, against the dark road of pain and death down which the great limbs of Gant had already begun to slope, against all the loneliness and imprisonment of his own life which had gnawed him like hunger, these years at Leonard's bloomed like golden apples.

From Leonard he got little -- a dry campaign over an arid waste of Latin prose: first, a harsh, stiff, unintelligent skirmishing among the rules of grammar, which frightened and bewildered him needlessly, and gave him for years an unhealthy dislike of syntax, and an absurd prejudice against the laws on which the language was built. Then, a year's study of the lean, clear precision of Caesar, the magnificent structure of the style -- the concision, the skeleton certainty, deadened by the disjointed daily partition, the dull parsing, the lumbering cliché of pedantic translation: