My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

Thomas is describing an education driven less by formal schooling than by voracious, self-directed reading. “Liberty” suggests that what mattered was not a prescribed curriculum but the freedom to range widely and impulsively—“indiscriminately”—across books, styles, and subjects. The comic hyperbole “with my eyes hanging out” conveys both physical intensity and youthful appetite: reading to the point of exhaustion, yet with delight. The remark also fits Thomas’s broader image as a poet formed by immersion in language and sound, implying that his literary sensibility was cultivated through constant exposure rather than systematic instruction.