Lee

“During the years he spent in Venezuela he thought he had once and for all overcome the solemnity that had been an essential part of his nature from childhood, as though he was in mourning for all the world's suffering, violence, and evil. Faced with so many disasters, happiness seemed to him obscene. In love with Roser in the green, warm country of Venezuela, he had vanquished the temptation to cloak himself in sadness As she would often tell him, this was less a mantle of dignity, more a contempt for life.”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“That peace did not come easily. I spent two years enumerating my father's flaws, constantly updating the tally as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified I thought the strangling guilt would release me, and I could catch my breath. 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 ones own retchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.
I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on my own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old greviences, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all.
I learned to accept my decision for my own sake. Because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it. It was the only way I could love him.
When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that life, I percieved him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. When he was before me towering, indignant, I could not remember how when I was young his laugh used to shake his gut and make his glasses shine. In his stern presence I could never recall the pleasant way his lips used to twitch, before they were burned away, when a memory tugged tears from his eyes. I can only remember those things now, with a span of miles and years between us.
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.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“There was a boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out the one page or the other. To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“No comma, no period, no adjective or adverb was beneath his interest. He made no distinction between grammar and content, between form and substance. A poorly written sentence was a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction. “Tell me,” he would say, “why have you placed this comma here? What relationship between these phrases are you hoping to establish?”
― Tara Westover, Educated