“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
―
Tara Westover,
Educated
“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.” ― Tara Westover
“To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.” ― Tara Westover
“To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.” ― Tara Westover, Educated
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