Educated

"I realized that the past does not have to dictate the future."

"To me, education was the only option, the only way out."

"I had inherited my father's distrust of the outside world."

"Some people are told to read between the lines, but I had to learn to read the lines themselves."

"I was my father's daughter. That was something I could not change."

"He wanted a pure mind, unspoiled by the influence of the outside world."

"We were not controlled by law. We were controlled by Dad."

"I had never been to school. I had never been to a doctor."

"Perhaps it is natural to remember only the good, to let it grow with time, while the bad fades away."

"I am not the child my father raised, but neither am I the person he tried to destroy."

"Everything I had worked for, all of my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and to think."

"You can love someone and still choose to leave them."

"That was when I realized something important: that I had been educated, just not in the way I had imagined."

"I was not my father's scholar, and I was not my mother's rebel."

"I had to learn to think for myself, which meant unlearning everything I had been taught to believe."

"I had spent so long running from what I was that I had never taken time to figure out what I might be."

"My life was a string of choices I didn't understand that I had made."

"The metamorphosis I had undergone made it impossible to ignore the contradictions in my upbringing."

"I was raised to believe I was not a real person."

"I was not in control of my life. I was not in control of my mind."

"When you're young, you don't always understand that the person you most need to leave is the person you most want to save."

"The deciding factor is always the self—the character, the habit of mind that was created in childhood and adolescence."

"You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them."

"I realized that the reason I had never been able to believe in myself was that I had been raised in a world where belief itself was dangerous."

"I discovered that I had more power than I ever imagined—the power to redefine myself."

"I learned that the person you become is not predetermined. It's a choice you make, over and over again."

"I chose a different path, even though it meant losing my family."

"I had to learn to trust my own judgment, even when it contradicted everything I had been taught."

"The pursuit of knowledge became my salvation."

"I was taught to fear the world outside. But the world inside my home was what I should have feared."