Top 160 Tara Westover Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The odds are better if you rely only on yourself.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

3. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”

— Tara Westover

4. “Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind.”

— Tara Westover

5. “But God will provide either trials for growth or the means to succeed.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

7. “I worry that education is becoming a stick that some people use to beat other people into submission, or becoming something that people feel arrogant about. I think education is really just a process of self-discovery – of developing a sense of self and what you think. I think of it as this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing.”

— Tara Westover

8. “The longer you stay, the less likely you will ever leave.”

— Tara Westover

9. “All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine – that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself.”

— Tara Westover

10. “Despite the singularity of her childhood, the questions her book poses are universal: How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”

— Tara Westover

11. “He said positive liberty is self-mastery – the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.”

— Tara Westover

12. “It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal.”

— Tara Westover

13. “The counseling did nothing at first – I can’t think of a single session I would describe as “helpful” – but their collective power over time was undeniable. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now, but there was something nourishing in setting aside that time each week, in the act of admitting that I needed something I could not provide for myself.”

— Tara Westover

14. “Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.”

— Tara Westover

15. “Tyler stood to go. “There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.”

— Tara Westover

16. “My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

— Tara Westover

17. “That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.”

— Tara Westover

18. “I remembered the words of Sancho Panza: An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor.”

— Tara Westover

19. “We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”

— Tara Westover

20. “I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”

— Tara Westover

21. “That peace did not come easily. I spent two years enumerating my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath.”

— Tara Westover

22. “For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.”

— Tara Westover

23. “Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”

— Tara Westover

24. “Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by the women themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.”

— Tara Westover

25. “Sometimes our ideas about love are really simplistic. We think of it as something that fixes everything, or, if the love is real, then you definitely have to stay in the relationship. The only way to really respect love is to respect its limits, and respect that it doesn’t give you the power to change other people. That’s why you can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them. It’s not necessarily a question of whether you love them, it’s a question of whether they belong in your life.”

— Tara Westover

26. “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. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman.”

— Tara Westover

27. “The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow.”

— Tara Westover

28. “The past was a ghost, insubstantial, unaffecting. Only the future had weight.”

— Tara Westover

29. “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. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind.”

— Tara Westover

30. “Mom said Dad was wasting his time, that nobody could talk Tyler out of anything once his mind was made up. ‘You may as well take a broom and start sweeping dirt off the mountain,’ she said.”

— Tara Westover

31. “I became obsessed with their ideas about the family – with how a person ought to weigh their special obligations to kin against their obligations to society as a whole.”

— Tara Westover

32. “But I’ve always supposed it was the music in his head, some hopeful tune the rest of us couldn’t hear, the same secret melody he’d been humming when he bought that trigonometry book, or saved all those pencil shavings.”

— Tara Westover

33. “The word and the way Shawn had said it hadn’t changed; only my ears were different. They no longer heard the jingle of a joke in it. What they heard was a signal, a call through time, which was answered with a mounting conviction: that never again would I allow myself to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.”

— Tara Westover

34. “I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.”

— Tara Westover

35. “Her gaze shifted to me. I hadn’t felt its strength in years and I was stunned by it. “Of all my children,” she said, “you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze. I didn’t expect it from Tyler – that was a surprise – but you. Don’t you stay. Go. Don’t let anything stop you from going.”

— Tara Westover

36. “But what has come between me and my father is more than time and distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.”

— Tara Westover

37. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself – even gold appears dull in some lighting – but that is the illusion. And it always was.”

— Tara Westover

38. “I don’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to get a decent education as a child.”

— Tara Westover

39. “The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter.”

— Tara Westover

40. “My family was splitting down the middle – the three who had left the mountain, and the four who had stayed. The three with doctorates, and the four without high school diplomas. A chasm had appeared, and was growing.”

— Tara Westover

41. “I began to read – Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. I lost myself in the world they had lived in, the problems they had tried to solve. I became obsessed with their ideas about the family – with how a person ought to weigh their special obligations to kin against their obligations to society as a whole.”

— Tara Westover

42. “It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler. He was waltzing while the rest of us hopped a jig; he was deaf to the raucous music of our lives, and we were deaf to the serene polyphony of his.”

— Tara Westover

43. “It took weeks for me to come to terms with this fact, but as I did, I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”

— Tara Westover

44. “It has never occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone.”

— Tara Westover

45. “I’d come to BYU to study music, so that one day I could direct a church choir. But that semester – the fall of my junior year – I didn’t enroll in a single music course. I couldn’t have explained why I dropped advanced music theory in favor of geography and comparative politics, or gave up sight-singing to take History of the Jews. But when I’d seen those courses in the catalog, and read their titles aloud, I had felt something infinite, and I wanted a taste of that infinity.”

— Tara Westover

46. “It’s strange how you give people you love so much power over you... he had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.”

— Tara Westover

47. “Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their.”

— Tara Westover

48. “Mother often described herself as a pleaser: she said she couldn’t stop herself from speculating what people wanted her to be, and from contorting herself, compulsively, unwillingly, into whatever it was.”

— Tara Westover

49. “The word “slaughter” came to mind, because slaughter is the word for it, for a battle when one side mounts no defense. It’s the word we used on the farm. We slaughtered chickens, we didn’t fight them. A slaughter was the likely outcome of the warriors’ bravery. They died as heroes, their wives as slaves.”

— Tara Westover

50. “Why did you fight so hard against made-up monsters, but do nothing about the monsters in your own house?”

— Tara Westover