Educated

by Tara Westover

Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all.

Dad didn’t believe that women should work, but I suppose he thought it was all right for Mother to be paid for midwifing, because it undermined the Government. Also, we needed the money.

Money makes the world go round, even outside traditional society

Mother was determined to learn.

It felt oddly dispossessing, being handed this first legal proof of my personhood: until that moment, it had never occurred to me that proof was required.

I realize now that that night I was seeing her for the first time, the secret strength of her.

They died as heroes, their wives as slaves.

Now, every evening when he came in from the junkyard, I would be waiting for him. After he’d showered, scrubbing the day’s grime from his skin, he’d settle in at his desk and say, “W-w-what shall we l-l-listen t-t-to tonight?” Then I would choose a CD, and he would read while I lay on the floor next to

Cute as hell

She had been an expert, an uncontested power; now she had to ask her ten-year-old daughter whether she’d eaten lunch.

In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

Woah! I'm reading this highlight after I finished the book and its kinda foreshadowing! Can teach us that changing our circumstances is rarely comfortable or easy, but is often worth it (but maybe not in Tara's context because she lost her family, I hesitate to draw conclusions on the relative importances of Tara's life because she is still alive and this is her story).

The other girls rarely spoke to me, but I loved being there with them. I loved the sensation of conformity. Learning to dance felt like learning to belong. I could memorize the movements and, in doing so, step into their minds, lunging when they lunged, reaching my arms upward in time with theirs. Sometimes, when I glanced at the mirror and saw the tangle of our twirling forms, I couldn’t immediately discern myself in the crowd. It didn’t matter that I was wearing a gray T-shirt—a goose among swans. We moved together, a single flock.

This is cool

I thought they looked like tiny harlots.

Savage

There was scarcely a person in the church that Dad hadn’t called a gentile—for visiting a doctor or for sending their kids to the public school—but that day he seemed to forget about California socialism and the Illuminati.

Dare I say the power of love?

the bravado peeled off like a breastplate, and he was my brother.

All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine—that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself.

I tightened my grip on the horn, making a decision, based on another kind of instinct, not to surrender my hold.

I had started on a path of awareness,

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.

He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.

He never asked why I’d been sneaking into my own house at three in the morning, and I never asked who he’d been waiting for, sitting up in the middle of the night, with a loaded pistol.

Funny, in the context of their opposite worlds, their actions/motivations are shameful and rebellious, yet standalone, the actions are simply normal

I never uttered the words “I’m from Idaho” until I’d left it.

My friend attributed my silence to my throat and explained my symptoms. We were told to wait.

So many examples of selfless friends helping Tara survive the real world

She began talking rapidly but I didn’t hear much of it, I was so tired. When she seemed to be winding down, I said “I love you” and hung up.

Good example of not confusing conviction for compassion

“I’d like to hear more about them classes,” he rasped one morning near the end of the summer. “It sounds real interesting.”

Oh my gosh my heart

“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”

I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself.

“The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you,” he said. “Professor Steinberg says this is Pygmalion. Think of the story, Tara.” He paused, his eyes fierce, his voice piercing. “She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”

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.

I had begun to conceive of what my education might cost me, and I had begun to resent it.

Costed her her family

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.

I had retreated, fled across an ocean and allowed my father to tell my story for me, to define me to everyone I had ever known.