Serena Jampel > Serena's Quotes

“There is nothing more terrifying than the absoluteness of one who believes he's right.”
― Libba Bray, The Diviners

“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

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. 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.”
― 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

“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

“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”
― 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.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“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

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

“I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“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.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. “What if…” “If only…” “I wonder what would have…” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“If you're Native American and you pray to the wolves, you're a savage. If you're African and you pray to your ancestors, you're a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that's just common sense.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“The world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“...what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow