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" I can't have my family in my life because they are abusive, and I don't have control over that. There is an abusive culture in my family, and I have to turn away from it. "

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" I have very non-eccentric hobbies. I like to read, to have dinner with friends, and junk out on TV like everybody else. "

Tara Westover

Friends

Out

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Tara Westover

Moon

Sun

" 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 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. "

" I have books I like very much, but I don't think there are any books that everyone should read. I prefer a world in which some people read this, and others read that. "

Tara Westover

Think

Some People

" 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. "

" Forgiveness isn't just the absence of anger. I think it's also the presence of self-love, when you actually begin to value yourself. "

" 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 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I think it's a belief that you can learn something. That's something that I really value from the upbringing I got. "

" 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.' "

" All my father's stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The things about my childhood that I really loved the most, writing about those things was hard because I knew they would never happen again. "

" 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

" 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 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? "

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

" 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. "

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