Best 38 quotes of Tara Westover on MyQuotes

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

Dad seemed eager to fight, to prove who was in charge.

Don't want your boyfriend to see you looking so glamorous?" He smiles and jabs me with his finger. He is looking at me strangely, as if to say, This is who you are. You've been pretending that you're someone else. Someone better. But you are just this.

Don't want your boyfriend to see you looking so glamorous?" He smiles and jabs me with ihs finger. He is looking at me strangely, as it to say, This is who you are. You've been pretending that you're someone else. Someone better. But you are just this.

First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.

From my father I had learned that books were to be either adored or exiled. Books that were of God—books written by the Mormon prophets or the Founding Fathers—were not to be studied so much as cherished, like a thing perfect in itself. I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind, to be reshaped according to the contours of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself. Books that were not of God were banished; they were a danger, powerful and irresistible in their cunning. To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration. Because Burke had defended the British monarchy, Dad would have said he was an agent of tyranny. He wouldn’t have wanted the book in the house. There was a thrill in trusting myself to read the words. I felt a similar thrill in reading Madison, Hamilton and Jay, especially on those occasions when I discarded their conclusions in favor of Burke’s, or when it seemed to me that their ideas were not really different in substance, only in form. There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble.

Había buscado un consejo moral, alguien que conciliara mi vocación como esposa y madre con la llamada que me llegaba de otro lugar. Y el profesor había dejado esa cuestión a un lado. Al parecer me había dicho: “Primero descubre qué eres capaz y luego decide quién eres”.

He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark. But God withheld the flood.

... I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.

I begin to reason with myself, to doubt whether I had spoken clearly: what had I whispered and what had I screamed? I decide that if I had asked differently, been more calm, he would have stopped. I write this until I believe it, which doesn't take long because I want to believe it. It's comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power.

I believed then--and part of me will always believe--that my father's words ought to be my own.

I can help," he said, "but you'll need to tell me what's bothering you." His voice was gentle, and that gentleness was cruel. I wished he would yell. If he yelled, it would make me angry, and when angry I felt powerful. I didn't know if I could do this without feeling powerful.

I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it....The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head. I’m just standing....You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.

I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place, that word transported me. Every time he said it—“Hey Nigger, raise the boom” or “Fetch me a level, Nigger”—I returned to the university, to that auditorium, where I had watched human history unfold and wondered at my place in it. The stories of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were called to my mind every time Shawn shouted, “Nigger, move to the next row.” I saw their faces superimposed on every purlin Shawn welded into place that summer, so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested. I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will ever think of him that way. But something had shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.

I could stay, and search for what had been home, or I could go, now, before the walls shifted and the way out was shut.

I’d always known that my father believed in a different God. As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. They believed in modesty; we practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal; we left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the Second Coming; we were actually prepared. For as long as I could remember, I’d known that the members of my own family were the only true Mormons I had ever known, and yet for some reason, here at this university, in this chapel, for the first time I felt the immensity of the gap. I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between.

I fumbled with the cables while Dad stood over me, shouting. I kept dropping them. My mind pulsed with panic, which overpowered every thought, so that I could not even remember how to connect red to red, white to white. Then it was gone. I looked up at my father, at his purple face, at the vein pulsing in his neck. I still hadn't managed to attach the cables. I stood, and once on my feet, didn't care whether the cables were attached. I walked out of the room.

I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create.

I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I'd felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement--since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected--a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught.

I have a birthday, same as you,” I wanted to tell the voices. “It just changes. Don’t you wish you could change your birthday?

In that moment part of me believed, as I had always believed, that it would be me who broke the spell, who caused it to break. When the stillness shattered and his fury rushed at me, I would know that something I had done was the catalyst, the cause. There is hope in such a superstition; there is the illusion of control.

I opened it and read "Congratulations." I'd been admitted for the semester beginning January 5. Mother hugged me. Dad tried to be cheerful. "It proves one thing at least," he said. "Our home school is as good as any public education.

I returned to the internet and then to the shelves, where i exchanged the books of the second wave that preceded the first- Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. I read through the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I'd felt since childhood.

I tried to imagine what it would have been like to study at such a place, to walk across marble floors each morning and, day after day, come to associate learning with beauty. But my imagination failed me. I could only imagine the school as I was experiencing it now, as a kind of museum, a relic from someone else’s life

It was crucial that I not look at him. As long as I kept my eyes on the spire, I almost believed he couldn’t touch me. Almost. Because even while I clung to this belief, I waited to feel his hands on my neck. I knew I would feel them, and soon, but I didn’t dare do anything that might break the spell of waiting. In that moment part of me believed, as I had always believed, that it would me to break the spell, who caused it to break. When the stillness shattered and his fury rushed at me, I would know that something I had done was the catalyst, the cause. There is hope in such superstition; there is the illusion of control. I stayed still, without thought or motion.

it wasn't the clothes that made this face, this woman, different. It was something behind her eyes, something in the set of her jaw--a hope or belief or conviction--that a life is not a thing unalterable....I suppose it was something like faith.

It was only as I grew older that I wondered if how I had started is how I would end - if the first shape a person takes is their only true shape.

I wanted the mind of a scholar, but it seemed that Dr. Kerry saw in me the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in the library; I belonged in a crane.

LaRue's father was an alcoholic in a time befor the language of addiction and empathy had been invented, when alcoholics weren't alcoholics, they were called drunks.

Mentre tornavo a casa a piedi col pesante manoscritto, ripensai a quella volta che il professor Kerry aveva cominciato una lezione scrivendo alla lavagna: "Chi scrive la storia?". Lì per lì mi era sembrata una domanda strana. L'idea che avevo degli storici non era umana: erano personaggi simili a mio padre, più profeti che uomini, le cui concezioni sul passato così come sul futuro non potevano essere messe in discussione né tantomeno ampliate. Adesso, mentre attraversavo il King's College all'ombra dell'enorme cappella, la mia vecchia diffidenza mi sembrò quasi buffa. Chi scrive la storia? Pensai. La scrivo io.

My friends in Cambridge has become a kind of family, and I felt a sense of belonging with them, that for many years, had been absent.... I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given....

Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge.

Positive liberty," another student said, "is freedom from internal constraints.

[She] told me to imagine myself, whole and healthy, protected by a white bubble. Inside the bubble I was to place all the objects that I loved, all the colors that made me feel at peace. [...] "Imagine the bubble for a few hours every day," she said, "and you will heal.

The conversation was slow, halting. Audrey asked me no questions about England or Cambridge. She had no frame of reference for my life, so we talked about hers

Then I wonder if perhaps my mother, who had always reflected so perfectly the will of my father, had that night merely been reflecting mine. No, I tell myself. They were her words. But hers or not, those words, which had so comforted and healed me, were hollow. I don't believe they were faithless, but sincerity failed to give them substance, and they were swept away...

There was little hope of overpowering the history my father and sister were creating for me. Their account would claim my brothers first, then it would spread to my aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole valley. I had lost an entire kinship, and for what?

What kind of lunatic would come back here once he'd escaped? There were now so many pink and yellow specks in my vision, it was as if I were inside a snow globe.