Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I might just not be a big-city bug.
I don't really feel like I belong anywhere.
Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.
Academic writing is such a different way of writing.
Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.
There's a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain.
An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.
In families like mine, there is no crime worse than telling the truth.
You can miss someone every day and still be glad you don't have to see them.
My loyalty to my father had increased in proportion to the miles between us.
I think you can change your belief, but sometimes your behavior takes a lot longer.
Psychologically, when you hear something a number of times, you start to believe it.
I used to roof hay barns for my father. It's dangerous work. Writing is much better.
All my father's stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho.
If you want to live a miserable life, making your life all about other people is the way to do it.
I have a theory that all abuse, no matter what kind of abuse it is, is foremost an assault on the mind.
When I was 17, I went to Brigham Young University. That was the first time I had set foot in a classroom.
I didn't know if I would ever reconcile with my family, and I needed to believe that I could forgive, regardless.
I think it's a belief that you can learn something. That's something that I really value from the upbringing I got.
When you abuse someone, you limit their perspective, and you trap them in your view of them or your view of the world.
When you write, you are alone. It can be a bit of a shock later to discover that people have read what you've written!
My family always spent the warm months bottling fruit for storage, which Dad said we'd need in the Days of Abomination.
I have very non-eccentric hobbies. I like to read, to have dinner with friends, and junk out on TV like everybody else.
I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood.
I had access to books, and I could read... but that more foundational, basic historical awareness, I didn't have any of that.
It's very difficult to continue to believe in yourself and that you're a good person when the people who know you best don't.
Forgiveness isn't just the absence of anger. I think it's also the presence of self-love, when you actually begin to value yourself.
I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.
My parents would say to me, 'You can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.' That was the whole ethos of my family.
There is a certain panic, at least if you're raised Mormon, to being single at 31. But what they don't tell you is that it can also be kinda great.
My older brother bought textbooks and was able to teach himself enough to go to college. When I was 16, he returned and told me to do the same thing.
We think love is noble, and in some ways, it is. But in some ways, it isn't. Love is just love. And sometimes people do terrible things because of it.
My mother was a midwife and a herbalist, so we would go on these long walks, looking for yarrow or rosehips or whatever she needed to make her tinctures.
I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.
I didn't even have a birth certificate until I was 9 years old, which meant that, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I just didn't exist.
I think reading an audiobook is a real skill - for one thing, you have to be able to do impressions and voices, which I cannot do - and it's just not a skill I have.
I have books I like very much, but I don't think there are any books that everyone should read. I prefer a world in which some people read this, and others read that.
I can't have my family in my life because they are abusive, and I don't have control over that. There is an abusive culture in my family, and I have to turn away from it.
When I came to Cambridge, I was involved in the ward for a little bit, but I did have a very gradual process of trying to work out what I thought a good life consisted of.
I think for people who are inside these relationships that are really hard to leave, there is always a compelling reason to stay. It's not that they are wholly bad people.
I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.
I taught myself algebra and a little grammar, and somehow I scraped a high enough score on the ACT to be admitted to Brigham Young University, even though I had no formal education.
Anger can be a good thing. It's a mechanism that your brain uses to get you out of situations that are bad for you. But in terms of leading a peaceful life, it is not very productive.
I felt like we had stories about family loyalty; I didn't feel like we had stories about what to do when you felt that loyalty to your family was in conflict with loyalty to yourself.
I had been raised in the mountains of Idaho by a father who distrusted many of the institutions that people take for granted - public education, doctors and hospitals, and the government.
Although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. I could stand with my family or with the gentiles... but there was no foothold in between.
It was a quality of my childhood that everything had these two sides. Even though things could be really beautiful and peaceful one moment, they could also be a bit chaotic or maybe terrifying in another.
During my first semester of college, I raised my hand in a class and asked the professor to define a word I didn't know. The word was holocaust, and I had to ask because, until that moment, I had never heard of it.
Not knowing my birthday had never seemed strange. I knew I'd been born near the end of September, and each year I picked a day, one that didn't fall on a Sunday because it's no fun spending your birthday in church.
I was 17 the first time I set foot in a classroom, but 10 years later, I would graduate from Cambridge with a Ph.D. 'Educated' is the story of how I came by my education. It is also the story of how I lost my family.