Top 160 Tara Westover Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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. “Who writes history? I thought. I do.”

— Tara Westover

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “There was a boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out either the one page or the other. To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

— Tara Westover

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak.”

— Tara Westover

68. “All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Tara Westover

78. “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

79. “Given the choice between seeing an evil socialist doctor, and admitting to my boyfriend that I believed doctors were evil socialists, I chose to see the doctor.”

— Tara Westover

80. “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...”

— Tara Westover

81. “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

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

— Tara Westover

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

88. “I had begun to conceive of what my education might cost me, and I had begun to resent it.”

— Tara Westover

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

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

— Tara Westover

94. “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

95. “The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads.”

— Tara Westover

96. “For years my father and I had been locked in conflict, an endless battle of wills. I thought I had accepted it, accepted our relationship for what it was. But in that moment, I realized how much I’d been counting on that conflict coming to an end, how deeply I believed in a future in which we would be a father and daughter at peace.”

— Tara Westover

97. “Dad lived in fear of time. He felt it stalking him. I could see it in the worried glances he gave the sun as it moved across the sky, in the anxious way he appraised every length of pipe or cut of steel.”

— Tara Westover

98. “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

99. “Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”

— Tara Westover

100. “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.”

— Tara Westover