50 Educated Tara Westover Quotes With Page Numbers

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Educated Tara Westover Quotes With Page Numbers 

“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, Page 0

 

“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, Chapter 3, Page 27

 

“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, Chapter 4, Page 35

 

“It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 5, Page 43

 

“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 6, Page 62

 

“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, Chapter 11, Page 102

 

“For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 12, Page 111

 

“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, Chapter 13, Page 119

 

“Tyler stood to go. “There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 13, Page 120

 

“I believed then–and part of me will always believe–that my father’s words ought to be my own.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 19, Page 172

 

“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, Chapter 20, Page 180

 

“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, Chapter 20, Page 180

 

“I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 21, Page 181

 

“I begin to reason with myself, to doubt whether I had spoken clearly: what had I whispered and what had I screamed? I decide that if I had asked differently, been more calm, he would have stopped. I write this until I believe it, which doesn’t take long because I want to believe it. It’s comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 22, Page 195

 

“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, Chapter 22, Page 197

 

“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, Chapter 22, Page 197

 

“Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. 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, Chapter 22, Page 197

 

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 23, Page 199

 

“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, Chapter 23, Page 199

 

“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 23, Page 203

 

“Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 23, Page 203

 

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 24, Page 207

 

“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, Chapter 40, Page 229

 

“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, Chapter 28, Page 237

 

“I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement–since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected–a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 28, Page 238

 

“No comma, no period, no adjective or adverb was beneath his interest. He made no distinction between grammar and content, between form and substance. A poorly written sentence was a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction. “Tell me,” he would say, “why have you placed this comma here? What relationship between these phrases are you hoping to establish?”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 28, Page 239

 

“I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 28, Page 240

 

“It has never occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 28, Page 242

 

“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, Chapter 28, Page 242

 

“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, Chapter 28, Page 242

 

“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 28, Page 242

 

“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, Chapter 30, Page 256

 

“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, Chapter 30, Page 259

 

“Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 30, Page 259

 

“But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 31, Page 270

 

“There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 31, Page 272

 

“All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 36, Page 300

 

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 36, Page 301

 

“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, Chapter 36, Page 304

 

“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 custody of my own mind. …What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 36, Page 304

 

“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, Chapter 37, Page 307

 

“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, Chapter 37, Page 307

 

“What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves?”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 38, Page 317

 

“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, Chapter 29, Page 322

 

“When I was a child, I waited for my mind to grow, for my experiences to accumulate and my choices to solidify, taking shape into the likeness of a person. That person, or that likeness of one, had belonged. I was of that mountain, the mountain that had made me. It was only as I grew older that I wondered if how I had started is how I would end—if the first shape a person takes is their only true shape.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 40, Page 327

 

“Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 40, Pages 327-328

 

“But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 40, Pages 327-328

 

“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, Chapter 40, Page 328

 

“I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.”

~Tara Westover, Educated, Chapter 40, Page 328

 

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”

~Tara Westover, Educated, A Note On The Text, Page 334

 

Educated Short Book Summary

The book Educated by Tara Westover is an inspiring memoir of a young girl’s journey to make something of her life despite being raised in a secluded and oppressive home.

Against all odds, she decides to get an education and pursue knowledge denied to her. She faces extreme difficulties and bravely overcomes them to earn a Ph.D. from Cambridge University.

This inspiring story of self-empowerment and determination will leave readers hopeful and empowered.

Westover’s powerful story shows us all what can be achieved when we dare to challenge our circumstances and take control of our lives.

 

The Best Book Quotes With Page Numbers

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