Quotes from Tara Westover

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.

I think reading an audiobook is a real skill - for one thing, you have to be able to do impressions and voices, which I cannot do - and it's just not a skill I have.

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

I don't really feel like I belong anywhere.

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

I get up when I feel like getting up. That's the deal I've made with myself: I can stay in bed as long as my dog's bladder holds. The other half of that deal is that once the dog is walked, the very next thing I do is write. It's mechanical. It's programming, very nearly brainwashing.

My mother was a midwife and a herbalist, so we would go on these long walks, looking for yarrow or rosehips or whatever she needed to make her tinctures.

I might just not be a big-city bug.

I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Because I never attended elementary schools of any kind, I missed most of the books that were popular with other kids my age. There was an exception, however, which was 'Harry Potter.' My grandmother gave me the first book when I was about 13, and I read it, then read all the rest.

I had a mental breakdown while doing my Ph.D. at Cambridge, soon after I cut off contact with my parents, and I started seeing the university counsellor, one of the best decisions I ever made. There's something very nourishing in setting aside an hour a week to talk.

I had been raised in the mountains of Idaho by a father who distrusted many of the institutions that people take for granted - public education, doctors and hospitals, and the government.

I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.

Academic writing is such a different way of writing.

In families like mine, there is no crime worse than telling the truth.

Anyone who grows up reading the Bible for spiritual reasons, you get accustomed to reading things that are too much for you, too profound for you... Having that belief that you should read them anyway gives you a great advantage over people who only read what they think they can understand.

I think for people who are inside these relationships that are really hard to leave, there is always a compelling reason to stay. It's not that they are wholly bad people.

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.

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?