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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Tara Westover

Moment

Know

Class

" 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. "

" It was a quality of my childhood that everything had these two sides. Even though things could be really beautiful and peaceful one moment, they could also be a bit chaotic or maybe terrifying in another. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

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

" 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. "

" Academic writing is such a different way of writing. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" My family always spent the warm months bottling fruit for storage, which Dad said we'd need in the Days of Abomination. "

" So, I was born and raised the youngest of seven children on this really beautiful mountain in Southern Idaho. But my dad had some radical beliefs. And because of those beliefs, we were isolated. So I was never allowed to go to school or to the doctor. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

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

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

" 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 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, 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.' "