Quotes from Tara Westover

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.

It was a quality of my childhood that everything had these two sides. Even though things could be really beautiful and peaceful one moment, they could also be a bit chaotic or maybe terrifying in another.

Psychologically, when you hear something a number of times, you start to believe it.

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

I do think we have collectively begun to conflate the institutions of education for education itself. Education is an individual's pursuit of understanding and has a lot of implications for that person, for the kind of person that they are.

When I was 17, I went to Brigham Young University. That was the first time I had set foot in a classroom.

I have a theory that all abuse, no matter what kind of abuse it is, is foremost an assault on the mind.

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.

My older brother bought textbooks and was able to teach himself enough to go to college. When I was 16, he returned and told me to do the same thing.

My family was, I think, a bit more radical than most Mormons, especially on the question of gender. So in my mind, growing up, there wasn't ever any question of what my future would look like. I would get married when I was 17 or 18. And I would be given some corner of the farm, and my husband would put a house on it, and we would have kids.

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.

I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.

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.

I think, initially, my rebellion, my rebellion of going to college when my dad would have liked me to stay home and work in the herbs, I think that it was a pretty mild rebellion in the sense that I thought, 'Well, I'm going to go learn how to be a music teacher so that I can come home and do choir.'

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

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

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 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.

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 you write, you are alone. It can be a bit of a shock later to discover that people have read what you've written!

I was 17 the first time I set foot in a classroom, but 10 years later, I would graduate from Cambridge with a Ph.D. 'Educated' is the story of how I came by my education. It is also the story of how I lost my family.

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.