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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Tara Westover

Great

Spiritual

Reading

" 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

" 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. "

" 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! "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" In families like mine, there is no crime worse than telling the truth. "

" We think about education as a stepping stone into a higher socio-economic class, into a better job. And it does do those things. But I don't think that's what it really is. I experienced it as getting access to different ideas and perspectives and using them to construct my own mind. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" My loyalty to my father had increased in proportion to the miles between us. "

Tara Westover

Miles

Loyalty

" 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

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

" 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. "

" When you abuse someone, you limit their perspective, and you trap them in your view of them or your view of the world. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 was a lot of beauty in my childhoood. "

Tara Westover

Beauty

Lot

" 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 think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story. "