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“His chief form of entertainment was reading. The last moments he was in a cabin were usually spent scanning bookshelves and nightstands. The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of actual human interactions was so complex. Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there's innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It's part of being human. To Knight, it all felt impossible. His engagement with the written word might have been the closest he could come to genuine human encounters. The stretch of days between thieving raids allowed him to tumble into the pages, and if he felt transported he could float in bookworld, undisturbed, for as long as he pleased.”

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Book:The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
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“It's possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.”

PeopleLifeMoneyLivingComputerWoodsPrimeAcceptableSaneIdeaPossibleDisturbedExchangeEnterprisingLivedRelaxingTentCubicleIndolentConfounded
Book:The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
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“With his release imminent, Knight seems more unsettled than ever. He scratches furiously at his knees. Jail, he's realized, might not be all bad. There's routine and order in jail, and he's able to click into a survival mode that is not too dissimilar, in terms of steeliness of mental state, to the one he'd perfected during winters in the woods. "I'm surrounded in here by less than desirable people," he says, "but at least I wasn't thrown into the waters of society and expected to swim.”

PeopleOrderSocietyWoodsExpectedReleaseThrownSwimJailRoutineDesirableBadWatersSurroundedSurvival ModeMental StateUnsettledWintersImminentPerfectedSteelinessFuriously
Book:The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
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