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" 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. "

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" The things about my childhood that I really loved the most, writing about those things was hard because I knew they would never happen again. "

Tara Westover

Writing

Childhood

Hard

" 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. "

" 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'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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 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. "

" I didn't read much in high school, maybe because I didn't go to high school. Instead, I worked. "

" Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one. "

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

" I didn't know if I would ever reconcile with my family, and I needed to believe that I could forgive, regardless. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" BYU was a really positive place for me. "

Tara Westover

Positive

Place