The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.” (Educated Quotes)
Tara Westover
Educated
“All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine—that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way.”
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
“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“Despite the singularity of her childhood, the questions her book poses are universal: How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”
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
“Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”
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 could have my mother’s love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.”
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
“Suddenly that worth felt conditional, like it could be taken or squandered. It was not inherent; it was bestowed. What was of worth was not me, but the veneer of constraints and observances that obscured 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
“The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. —VIRGINIA WOOLF”
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
“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
“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.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“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
“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”
Tara Westover
Educated
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?”
Tara Westover
Educated
“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“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.”
Tara Westover
Educated
“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
