Time & Perspective Quote by Dylan Thomas

Thomas turns education into a kind of sanctioned unruliness: not a ladder you climb but a door left off its hinges. The phrase "liberty I had" matters as much as the reading itself. It frames learning as permission and escape, a private jurisdiction carved out from whatever boxed him in - class expectations, formal schooling, the grind of earning. In a century that treated education as credential and discipline, he insists on the opposite: the formative power of appetite.

"Read indiscriminately" is a deliberate provocation. He is arguing for promiscuity of influence, the refusal to sort texts into "useful" and "frivolous". For a poet, that matters: indiscriminate reading is how you build a mind that makes strange connections, how you stock the subconscious with rhythms, voices, and images that later surface as style. The subtext is also defensive, almost mischievous: if his learning looks chaotic on paper, that's because it was. He preemptively dignifies that chaos as method.

Then he spikes the sentence with grotesque comedy: "with my eyes hanging out". It's cartoonish, bodily, excessive - a boy gorging on print until the act becomes physical strain and ecstatic compulsion. That hyperbole does cultural work. It demystifies genius (no angelic muse here) while mythologizing it in another register: the poet as ravenous reader, half feral, half self-made. The line lands because it refuses polite uplift. Thomas isn't selling education as self-improvement; he's describing it as a binge that rearranges you.