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" I didn't read much in high school, maybe because I didn't go to high school. Instead, I worked. "
Tara Westover
Because
School
High School
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" There was a lot of beauty in my childhoood. "
Tara Westover
Beauty
Lot
" 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! "
Tara Westover
Bit
You
Write
" I had access to books, and I could read... but that more foundational, basic historical awareness, I didn't have any of that. "
Tara Westover
Awareness
Read
More
" I choose not to see my parents because I value myself - and they didn't value me or my mind. "
Tara Westover
Mind
Parents
Value
" 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. "
Tara Westover
Good
Work
Thought
" My family always spent the warm months bottling fruit for storage, which Dad said we'd need in the Days of Abomination. "
Tara Westover
Fruit
Always
Family
" 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
Go
Her
" I think if you're going to abuse someone, you really have to convince them of two things. First, you have to normalise what you're doing, convince them that it's not that bad. And the second thing is to convince them that they deserve it in some way. "
Tara Westover
Doing
Someone
Way
" I might just not be a big-city bug. "
Tara Westover
Bug
Just
Might
" 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
Up
" I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected. "
Tara Westover
Continue
World
Peaches
" 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. "
Tara Westover
History
Science
World
" 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. "
Tara Westover
Mountains
People
Father
" 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. "
Tara Westover
Brother
Fire
Home
" 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. "
Tara Westover
Education
Understanding
Think
" I think you can change your belief, but sometimes your behavior takes a lot longer. "
Tara Westover
Change
Belief
You
" An education is not so much about making a living as making a person. "
Tara Westover
Education
Person
Much
" When I was 17, I went to Brigham Young University. That was the first time I had set foot in a classroom. "
Tara Westover
Classroom
Time
University
" I used to roof hay barns for my father. It's dangerous work. Writing is much better. "
Tara Westover
Better
Writing
Work
" 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. "
Tara Westover
Long
Myself
I Can
" 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. "
Tara Westover
Fun
Fall
End
" 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. "
Tara Westover
Point Of View
Craft
Know
" BYU was a really positive place for me. "
Tara Westover
Positive
Place
Me
" Learning in our family was entirely self-directed. "
Tara Westover
Family
Our
Entirely
" There's a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain. "
Tara Westover
Life
Mountain
Sense
" At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations. "
Tara Westover
Past
Remember
Changes
" I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing. "
Tara Westover
Write
Writing
Like
" 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. "
Tara Westover
Think
Thought
Personality
" My loyalty to my father had increased in proportion to the miles between us. "
Tara Westover
Miles
Us
Loyalty
" 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. "
Tara Westover
Yourself
You
Anger