Bilgiler > Quotes from Tara Westover- Educated
Quotes from Tara Westover- Educated
1. 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.
2. God couldn’t abide faithlessness, Dad said. That’s why the most hateful sinners were those who wouldn’t make up their minds, who used herbs and medication both, who came to Mother on Wednesday and saw their doctor on Friday— or, as Dad put it, “Who worship at the altar of God one day and offer a sacrifice to Satan the next.” These people were like the ancient Israelites because they’d been given a true religion but hankered after false idols.
3. The word “slaughter” came to mind, because slaughter is the word for it, for a battle
4. when one side mounts no defense. It’s the word we used on the farm. We slaughtered chickens, we didn’t fight them.
5. It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler.
6. I should have known that one day Tyler would leave.
7. Dad said no one worth our respect would have worked for the Government.
8. Dad had said Grandma could keep her carpet so white only because Grandpa had never done any real work.
9. There was something in the hard line of my father’s face, in the quiet sigh of supplication he made every morning before he began family prayer, that made me think my curios-
10. ity was an obscenity, an affront to all he’d sacrificed to raise me.
11. When Dad saw me with one of those books, he’d try to get me away from them. Perhaps he was remembering Tyler. Perhaps he thought if he could just distract me for a few years, the danger would pass.
12. I watched them wiggle and leap through the aisles, their thin legs covered only by sheer tights. I thought they looked like tiny harlots.
13. “If I had tonsils like yours, I’d go outside every morning and stand in the sun with
14. How could an inch of skin matter?
15. Before the accident, he had worn the hat only when riding horses, but now he kept it on all the time, even in the house, which Dad said was disrespectful.
16. He had fallen because God wanted him to fall; there was no deeper meaning in it than that.
17. What was important to me wasn’t love or friendship, but my ability to lie convincingly to myself: to believe I was strong. I could never forgive Charles for knowing I wasn’t.
18. It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you,
19. Dad always put faith before safety.
20. “The devil tempts him more than other men,” Emily said. “Because of his gifts, because he’s a threat to Satan. That’s why he has problems. Because of his righteousness.”
21. “It was a blessing,” he said. “A miracle. God spared my life and extended to me a great calling. To testify of His power. To show people there’s another way besides the Medical Establishment.”
22. The number of my sister wives would depend on my husband’s righteousness: the more nobly he lived, the more wives he would be given.
23. When she finished singing, her father had tears in his eyes. He said that any religion with music so beautiful must be the work of God. They were baptized together.”
24. “The Lord has a few choice rebukes for me to give them professors.”
25. “You will not,” I said quietly. “If the Lord moves me, I will stand and speak.” “You will not,” I repeated. “I won’t go anywhere that the Lord’s spirit isn’t welcome.”
26. 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.
27. Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.
28. Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: it wasn’t that I hadn’t studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn’t a diplomat. It wasn’t that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.
29. I began to reread the letters of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. As a child I’d read those letters as an act of worship; now I read them with different eyes, not the eyes of a critic,
30. became obsessed with their ideas about the family—with how a person ought to weigh their special obligations to kin against their obligations to society as a whole.
31. Sancho Panza: An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor.
32. When I reflect on that moment now, the image blurs, reconstituting itself into that of a zealous knight astride a steed, charging into an imaginary battle, striking at shadows, hacking into thin air. His jaw is set, his back straight. His eyes blaze with conviction, throwing sparks that burn where they lay. My mother gives me a pale, disbelieving look, but when he turns his gaze on her they become of one mind, then they are both tilting at windmills.
33. “Grandma’s sin was serious,” Dad said. “But your sins are more serious still, because you were given the truth and have turned from it.”
34. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.
Educated_ A Memoir by Tara Westover
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