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" I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story. "

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" It's very difficult to continue to believe in yourself and that you're a good person when the people who know you best don't. "

Believe In Yourself

" Anger can be a good thing. It's a mechanism that your brain uses to get you out of situations that are bad for you. But in terms of leading a peaceful life, it is not very productive. "

" I do think we have collectively begun to conflate the institutions of education for education itself. Education is an individual's pursuit of understanding and has a lot of implications for that person, for the kind of person that they are. "

" My parents would say to me, 'You can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.' That was the whole ethos of my family. "

" I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories. "

" I didn't even have a birth certificate until I was 9 years old, which meant that, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I just didn't exist. "

" I was 17 the first time I set foot in a classroom, but 10 years later, I would graduate from Cambridge with a Ph.D. 'Educated' is the story of how I came by my education. It is also the story of how I lost my family. "

" We'd had books in my house growing up, but we had never had anything like lectures. I had never written an essay for my mother. I had never taken an exam. Because I was working a lot as a kid, I just hadn't elected to read that much. "

" There's a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain. "

" Although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. I could stand with my family or with the gentiles... but there was no foothold in between. "

" The things about my childhood that I really loved the most, writing about those things was hard because I knew they would never happen again. "

" They were a very good form for me - the way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to - and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have. "

" Things that I now recognise as just part of my personality - willfulness and assertiveness, maybe even a bit of aggressiveness - these are things that I had been raised to think of as masculine features. I always thought there was probably something wrong with me. "

" During my first semester of college, I raised my hand in a class and asked the professor to define a word I didn't know. The word was holocaust, and I had to ask because, until that moment, I had never heard of it. "

" My family always spent the warm months bottling fruit for storage, which Dad said we'd need in the Days of Abomination. "

" If you want to live a miserable life, making your life all about other people is the way to do it. "

" I think reading an audiobook is a real skill - for one thing, you have to be able to do impressions and voices, which I cannot do - and it's just not a skill I have. "

" I think if you're going to abuse someone, you really have to convince them of two things. First, you have to normalise what you're doing, convince them that it's not that bad. And the second thing is to convince them that they deserve it in some way. "

" I have books I like very much, but I don't think there are any books that everyone should read. I prefer a world in which some people read this, and others read that. "

" Anyone who grows up reading the Bible for spiritual reasons, you get accustomed to reading things that are too much for you, too profound for you... Having that belief that you should read them anyway gives you a great advantage over people who only read what they think they can understand. "

" Not knowing my birthday had never seemed strange. I knew I'd been born near the end of September, and each year I picked a day, one that didn't fall on a Sunday because it's no fun spending your birthday in church. "

" I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley, and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. "

" I didn't know if I would ever reconcile with my family, and I needed to believe that I could forgive, regardless. "

" All my father's stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. "

" You can miss someone every day and still be glad you don't have to see them. "

" I choose not to see my parents because I value myself - and they didn't value me or my mind. "

" There is a certain panic, at least if you're raised Mormon, to being single at 31. But what they don't tell you is that it can also be kinda great. "

" My older brother bought textbooks and was able to teach himself enough to go to college. When I was 16, he returned and told me to do the same thing. "

" I read a handful of memoirs to get a sense of what the genre meant. I needed to learn the fundamentals of the craft. I had never written a word of narrative. What is a tense shift, what is point of view? I didn't know any of it. "

" My brother once lit his leg on fire. And after, when the fire was finally out, his leg was covered in third-degree burns. And we made the decision - or my parents did - not to take him to the hospital but to treat that at home with a salve my mother made of comfrey and lobelia. "