Top 160 Tara Westover Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune.”

— Tara Westover

52. “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

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

— Tara Westover

54. “What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations – to friends, to society, to themselves?”

— Tara Westover

55. “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

56. “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.”

— Tara Westover

57. “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

58. “I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.”

— Tara Westover

59. “I thought about the Apache women. Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before – before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. 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.”

— Tara Westover

60. “You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.”

— Tara Westover

61. “Dad had always been a hard man – a man who knew the truth on every subject and wasn’t interested in what anybody else had to say. We listened to him, never the other way around: when he was not speaking, he required silence.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

63. “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

64. “In the space of a moment, he had accepted our claim to ride him, to his being ridden. He had accepted the world as it was, in which he was an owned thing. He had never been feral, so he could not hear the maddening call of that other world, on the mountain, in which he could not be owned, could not be ridden.”

— Tara Westover

65. “This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me.”

— Tara Westover

66. “I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it... The ugliness of me had to be given expression. If it were not expressed in his voice, I would need to express it it mine.”

— Tara Westover

67. “In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.”

— Tara Westover

68. “When other students asked where I was from, I said, ‘I’m from Idaho,” a phrase that, as many times as I’ve had to repeat it over the years, has never felt comfortable in my mouth. When you are part of a place, growing that moment in its soil, there’s never a need to say you’re from there. I never uttered the words ‘I’m from Idaho” until I’d left it.”

— Tara Westover

69. “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 by other, stronger currents.”

— Tara Westover

70. “There was a pause, then more words appeared – words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them.”

— Tara Westover

71. “We had been bruised and gashed and concussed, had our legs set on fire and out heads cut open. We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at any moment. Because Dad always put faith before safety.”

— Tara Westover

72. “In the valley, Faye tried to stop her ears against the constant gossip of a small town, whose opinions pushed in through the windows and crept under the doors. 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

73. “A decade later my understanding would shift, part of my heavy swing into adulthood, and after that the accident would always make me think of the Apache women, and of all the decisions that go into making a life – the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock.”

— Tara Westover

74. “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.”

— Tara Westover

75. “There is a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion.”

— Tara Westover

76. “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

77. “If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second?”

— Tara Westover

78. “I was fifteen and I felt it, felt the race I was running with time. My body was changing, bloating, swelling, stretching, bulging. I wished it would stop, but it seemed my body was no longer mine. It belonged to itself now, and cared not at all how I felt about these strange alterations, about whether I wanted to stop being a child, and become something else.”

— Tara Westover

79. “Even then I understood the truth of it: that Shawn hated himself far more than I ever could.”

— Tara Westover

80. “From my father I had learned that books were to be either adored or exiled. Books that were of God... 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.”

— Tara Westover

81. “I could have my mother’s love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.”

— Tara Westover

82. “This seemed so obvious to me now, it was difficult to understand why I had ever believed anything else.”

— Tara Westover

83. “I had come to reclaim that life, to save it. But there was nothing here to save, nothing to grasp. There was only shifting sand, shifting loyalties, shifting histories.”

— Tara Westover

84. “I believed then – and part of me will always believe – that my father’s words ought to be my own.”

— Tara Westover

85. “All my father’s stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how I’d know when it was time to come home.”

— Tara Westover

86. “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.”

— Tara Westover

87. “I walked back to the kitchen, comparing the clean, balanced equation to the mayhem of unfinished computations and dizzying sketches. I was struck by the strangeness of that page: Dad could command this science, could decipher its language, decrypt its logic, could bend and twist and squeeze from it the truth. But as it passed through him, it turned to chaos.”

— Tara Westover

88. “By the end of the semester the world felt big, and it was hard to imagine returning to the mountain, to a kitchen, or even to a piano in the room next to the kitchen. This caused a kind of crisis in me. My love of music, and my desire to study it, had been compatible with my idea of what a woman is. My love of history and politics and world affairs was not. And yet they called to me.”

— Tara Westover

89. “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.”

— Tara Westover

90. “The future could be different from the past. Even the past could be different from the past, because my memories could change:.”

— Tara Westover

91. “It would be many years before I would understand what had happened that night, and what my role in it had been. How I had opened my mouth when I should have stayed silent, and shut it when I should have spoken out. What was needed was a revolution, a reversal of the ancient, brittle roles we’d been playing out since my childhood.”

— Tara Westover

92. “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.”

— Tara Westover

93. “I half-wondered if I should return to the bathroom and climb through the mirror, then send out the other girl, the one who was sixteen. ‘She’ could handle this, I thought. She would not be afraid, like I was. She would not be hurt, like I was. She was a thing of stone, with no fleshy tenderness. I did not yet understand that it was this fact of being tender – of having lived some years of a life that allowed tenderness – that would, finally, save me.”

— Tara Westover

94. “I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “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.”

— Tara Westover

95. “Why are you like this? Why did you terrify us like that? Why did you fight so hard against made-up monsters, but do nothing about the monsters in your own house?”

— Tara Westover

96. “Clothes could not fix what was wrong with me. Something had rotted on the inside, and the stench was too powerful, the core too rancid, to be covered up by mere dressings.”

— Tara Westover

97. “A woman could never be a prophet, yet here was Tyler, telling me I reminded him of one of the greatest prophets of all. I still don’t know what he meant by it, but what I understood at the time was that I could trust myself: that there was something in me, something like what was in the prophets, and that it was not male or female, not old or young; a kind of worth that was inherent and unshakable.”

— Tara Westover

98. “The Baths of Caracalla.”

— Tara Westover

99. “The three with doctorates, and the four without high school diplomas. A chasm had appeared, and was growing.”

— Tara Westover

100. “The other girls rarely spoke to me, but I loved being there with them. I loved the sensation of conformity. Learning to dance felt like learning to belong.”

— Tara Westover