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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Tara Westover

Yourself

Conflict

Family

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

" 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. "

Tara Westover

Mother

Her

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" I choose not to see my parents because I value myself - and they didn't value me or my mind. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 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 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 don't really feel like I belong anywhere. "

Tara Westover

Really

Feel

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

" 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! "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Learning in our family was entirely self-directed. "

" I didn't read much in high school, maybe because I didn't go to high school. Instead, I worked. "

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

" 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? "

" There's a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain. "

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

" There was a lot of beauty in my childhoood. "

Tara Westover

Beauty

Lot