Heather Ferris

“I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I'd felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement--since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected--a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“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

“To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else's. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don't know. I just don't know.

Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself.”
― Tara Westover

“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”
― Tara Westover, Educated