144 Quotes by Tara Westover

Again I thought about the family. There was a puzzle in it, something unresolved. What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves?

I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind, to be reshaped according to the contours of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself. Books that were not of God were banished; they were a danger, powerful and irresistible in their cunning.To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration.

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.

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.Westover, Tara. Educated (p. 242). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I wanted the mind of a scholar, but it seemed that Dr. Kerry saw in me the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in the library; I belonged in a crane.

My friends in Cambridge has become a kind of family, and I felt a sense of belonging with them, that for many years, had been absent.... I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given....

I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness.

Don't want your boyfriend to see you looking so glamorous?" He smiles and jabs me with ihs finger. He is looking at me strangely, as it to say, This is who you are. You've been pretending that you're someone else. Someone better. But you are just this.

What kind of lunatic would come back here once he'd escaped? There were now so many pink and yellow specks in my vision, it was as if I were inside a snow globe.