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" 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. "

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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. "

Tara Westover

Family

My Life

Control

" 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 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

" 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. "

" My family was, I think, a bit more radical than most Mormons, especially on the question of gender. So in my mind, growing up, there wasn't ever any question of what my future would look like. I would get married when I was 17 or 18. And I would be given some corner of the farm, and my husband would put a house on it, and we would have kids. "

" 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. "

" I don't really feel like I belong anywhere. "

Tara Westover

Really

Feel

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Tara Westover

Way

Good

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

" I think you can change your belief, but sometimes your behavior takes a lot longer. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "