Top 40 Tara Westover Quotes

When you abuse someone, you limit their perspective, and you trap them in your view of them or your view of the world.

So, I was born and raised the youngest of seven children on this really beautiful mountain in Southern Idaho. But my dad had some radical beliefs. And because of those beliefs, we were isolated. So I was never allowed to go to school or to the doctor.

I had access to books, and I could read… but that more foundational, basic historical awareness, I didn’t have any of that.

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.

I think it’s a belief that you can learn something. That’s something that I really value from the upbringing I got.

An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

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.

I felt like I needed to come to terms with the decision I’d made to let go of my family. What do you do when you want to be loyal to your family but you feel that loyalty to them is in conflict somehow with loyalty to yourself?

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.

Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.

I had to be – I was in school for probably three or four years before I began taking courses in history and political science, and I just started to realize how big the world was. I mean, when I arrived in college, I didn’t know anything.

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.

Forgiveness isn’t just the absence of anger. I think it’s also the presence of self-love, when you actually begin to value yourself.

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 felt like we had stories about family loyalty; I didn’t feel like we had stories about what to do when you felt that loyalty to your family was in conflict with loyalty to yourself.

For a long time, I didn’t think I had the right to walk away from my family.

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

I think a lot of people have grown up with the idea that they can’t learn things themselves. They think they need an institution to provide them with knowledge and teach them how to do things. I couldn’t disagree more.

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

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

I think you can change your belief, but sometimes your behavior takes a lot longer.

I hate the the word ‘disempower,’ because it seems kind of cliche, but I do think that we take people’s ability to self-teach away by creating this idea that that someone else has to do this for you, that you have to take a course, you have to do it in some formal way.

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.

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

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.

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 used to roof hay barns for my father. It’s dangerous work. Writing is much better.

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

There was a lot of beauty in my childhoood.

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.

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.

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.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

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.

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.

I don’t really feel like I belong anywhere.

I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.

We think love is noble, and in some ways, it is. But in some ways, it isn’t. Love is just love. And sometimes people do terrible things because of it.

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.

When I came to Cambridge, I was involved in the ward for a little bit, but I did have a very gradual process of trying to work out what I thought a good life consisted of.