Educated: A Memoir

But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.

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

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 retai

It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you,

Sancho Panza: An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor.

that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.

Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure:

what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others.

The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow.