Tara Westover

“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation....”

“Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge.”

“I wanted the mind of a scholar, but it seemed that Dr. Kerry saw in me the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in the library; I belonged in a crane.”

“it wasn't the clothes that made this face, this woman, different. It was something behind her eyes, something in the set of her jaw--a hope or belief or conviction--that a life is not a thin...”

“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”

“Dad lived in fear of time. He felt it stalking him. I could see it in the worried glances he gave the sun as it moved across the sky, in the anxious way he appraised every length of pipe or...”

“From my father I had learned that books were to be either adored or exiled. Books that were of God—books written by the Mormon prophets or the Founding Fathers—were not to be studied so much...”

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

“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...”

“I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place, that word transported me...”

“I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I'd felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement--sin...”

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

“Academic writing is such a different way of writing.”

“I taught myself algebra and a little grammar, and somehow I scraped a high enough score on the ACT to be admitted to Brigham Young University, even though I had no formal education.”

“I adore Toni Morrison. I think we would all be better writers if we read more of her.”

“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 mascul...”

“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 isola...”

“I don't really feel like I belong anywhere.”

“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 behin...”

“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, wh...”