Nicole’s Reviews > Educated > Status Update

“All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere?”

“I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon, it was me.”

“The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you,” he said. “Professor Steinberg says this is Pygmalion. Think of the story, Tara.” He paused, his eyes fierce, his voice piercing. “She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”

“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.”

“I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind to be reshaped according to the contours of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself.”

“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.”

“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.”