Quotes from Megan Phelps-Roper

I liked 'The Sun Also Rises.'

At Westboro, the depictions of hell are extremely vivid. The only thing that changes in hell, according to the church, is your capacity to feel pain. As the capacity to feel pain increases, so does the pain. It's absolutely terrifying. I believed God was going to curse me for having left this group of people.

My family thought - and thinks - very seriously about words. About language and what it means and how it shapes us and how it should shape us and change us.

Take heart, and be patient; change takes time but it is possible, and it's way more likely if we can reach out and disagree without demonizing.

I always joke about how I get excited to go to the grocery store without permission.

Empathy is not a betrayal of one's cause.

As happy as we were in our backyard jumping on trampolines, it was the same general feeling, often euphoria, on the picket line, because we felt like the way our lives were falling on to us contorted with the people of God and the scriptures. It all felt very normal.

As a member of Westboro Baptist Church, I became a fixture on picket lines across the country.

We thought it was our duty to go and warn people of the consequences of their sins, and I understood that to be the definition of loving our neighbour.

I try to focus on using my energy to change things, but there are times when I feel so bad.

When people are in the thrall of poisonous ideology, it's really not all about deliberate ill will, or inherent hatred, or a lack of intelligence. It's about the unbelievable destructiveness and staying power of bad ideas and about finding ways to equip people with the tools they need to fight them.

The idea that people feel that they have to be sympathetic to me? It's a funny concept.

There's a rich history at Westboro of parodying pop culture. The thing about pop culture is that it gives us a shared language. We were constantly trying to co-opt things that were popular to deliver our own message.

There's so much power in seeing the possibility of change.

We know that we dearly love our family. They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned. We will never not love them.

There's a learned helplessness for a lot of people who are leaving Westboro because you're not allowed to have any kind of independence when you are there so a lot of people don't have practical life skills.

There are aspects of Westboro that are, of course, more extreme in the way that certain religious practices manifest. But the idea that the Bible is the infallible word of God, that it's unquestionable - this is common.

How could we claim to love our neighbour while at the same time praying for God to destroy them?

Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn't pretend otherwise.

I don't like to say I'm not a believer because I still feel like a believer in a lot of things, primarily hope and grace and the power of human connection.

I will say, this is something, this praying for people to die thing, that's something that I came to believe was unscriptural. And for years, I made these arguments to my family, in writing, privately in letters that didn't get responses and in interviews. And for a while, they just doubled down. Eventually, they came to stop doing it.

Loving someone whose ideas we find detestable can seem impossible, and empathizing with them isn't much easier - but it's so important to remember that listening is not agreeing.

For my grandfather, there was no distinction. There was no tension between his support for civil rights for black people and his animus toward gay people because both of those positions were scripturally derived.

In 2014, as a Christmas gift, I wrote an essay for my husband, about our story. Writing that showed me there was value in interrogating my experiences while they were fresh - especially because I was terrified of forgetting.