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Tara Westover Quotes
born 1986 United States
Tara Westover (born September 1986) is an American memoirist, essayist and historian. Her memoir Educated (2018) debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the LA Times Book Prize, PEN America's Jean Stein Book Award, and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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16 quotes
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
Educated (2018)
Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure.
Educated (2018)
The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow.
Educated (2018)
I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.
Educated (2018)
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.
Educated (2018)
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.
Educated (2018)
The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.
Educated (2018)
I decided to experiment with normality.
Educated (2018)
By the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.
Educated (2018)
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.
Educated (2018)
The irony was that if Dad was bipolar—or had any of a dozen disorders that might explain his behavior—the same paranoia that was a symptom of the illness would prevent its ever being diagnosed and treated. No one would ever know.
Educated (2018)
I searched my mind and discovered a new conviction there: I would never be a plural wife. A voice declared this with unyielding finality; the declaration made me tremble. What if God commanded it? I asked. You wouldn’t do it, the voice answered. And I knew it was true.
Educated (2018)
Suspended between fear of the past and fear of the future, I recorded the dream in my journal. Then, without any explanation, as if the connection between the two were obvious, I wrote, I don’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to get a decent education as a child.
Educated (2018)
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.
Educated (2018)
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.
Educated (2018)
That’s all that was left of the life I’d had here: a puzzle whose rules I would never understand, because they were not rules at all but a kind of cage meant to enclose me. I could stay, and search for what had been home, or I could go, now, before the walls shifted and the way out was shut.
Educated (2018)
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