Tara Westover

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Academic writing is such a different way of writing.”

“I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley, and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring.”

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

“Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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'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.”