Benjamin Johansson > Benjamin's Quotes

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“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

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“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

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

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

“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“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

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

“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

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

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

“But I’ve always supposed it was the music in his head, some hopeful tune the rest of us couldn’t hear, the same secret melody he’d been humming when he bought that trigonometry book, or saved all those pencil shavings.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Life is not about finding your limitations; it's about finding your infinity.”
― Herbie Hancock

“Music happens to be an art form that transcends language”
― Herbie Hancock

“I don't look at music from the standpoint of being a musician; I look at it from the standpoint of being a human being.
”
― Herbie Hancock

“I think there's a great beauty to having problems. That's one of the ways we learn”
― Herbie Hancock

“Don’t be afraid to expand yourself, to step out of your comfort zone. That’s where the joy and the adventure lie.”
― Herbie Hancock

“Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music”
― Herbie Hancock

“Man, why don’t you practice?” Tony would ask, as if there was nothing strange about a teenage drummer lecturing the greatest jazz trumpeter of his generation, a man old enough to be his father.”
― Herbie Hancock, Herbie Hancock: Possibilities

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“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