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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

" I didn't even have a birth certificate until I was 9 years old, which meant that, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I just didn't exist. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 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? "

" 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. "

" Anger can be a good thing. It's a mechanism that your brain uses to get you out of situations that are bad for you. But in terms of leading a peaceful life, it is not very productive. "

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

" I might just not be a big-city bug. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

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" You can miss someone every day and still be glad you don't have to see them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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" They were a very good form for me - the way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to - and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have. "

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" 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. "

" 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 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. "