Top 160 Tara Westover Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I talked and he listened, drawing the shame from me like a healer draws infection from a wound.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

104. “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

105. “We arrived and Mother transformed. She issued a string of commands, to the father, to the mother, and to me. I almost forgot to do what she asked, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I realize now that that night I was seeing her for the first time, the secret strength of her.”

— Tara Westover

106. “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

107. “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

108. “I had discerned the ways in which we have 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.”

— Tara Westover

109. “I tried to imagine what it would have been like to study in such a place, to walk across marble floors each morning and, day after day, come to associate learning with beauty.”

— Tara Westover

110. “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

111. “From what I could tell, Dad was on track to become the best-funded lunatic in the Mountain West.”

— Tara Westover

112. “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?”

— Tara Westover

113. “Learning to dance felt like learning to belong.”

— Tara Westover

114. “In class I had been taught about neurotransmitters and their effect on brain chemistry; I understood that disease is not a choice. This knowledge might have made me sympathetic to my father, but it didn’t. I felt only anger. WE were the ones who paid for it, I thought. We had been bruised and gashed and concussed, had our legs set on fire and our heads cut open.”

— Tara Westover

115. “Journaling is contemplative, and I didn’t want to contemplate anything.”

— Tara Westover

116. “I found I could read with focus. I could hold thoughts in my head besides anger and self-accusation. I returned to the chapter I had written nearly two years before at Harvard. Again I read Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. Again I thought about the family. There was a puzzle in it, something unresolved. 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

117. “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.”

— Tara Westover

118. “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.”

— Tara Westover

119. “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.”

— Tara Westover

120. “I hung up, not sure what I’d just heard. I knew it wouldn’t last, that the next time we spoke everything would be different, the tenderness of this moment forgotten, the endless struggle between us again in the foreground. But tonight he wanted to help. And that was something.”

— Tara Westover

121. “That’s all that was left of the life I’d had here: a puzzle whose rules I would never understand, because they were not rules at all but a kind of cage meant for what had been home, or I could go, now, before the walls shifted and the way out was shut.”

— Tara Westover

122. “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.”

— Tara Westover

123. “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

124. “My father and I looked at the temple. He saw God; I saw granite... He saw a woman damned; I saw an unhinged old man, literally disfigured by his beliefs.”

— Tara Westover

125. “There’s no telling what kind of cavorting takes place in that theater,” he said. “It’s probably a den of adulterers and fornicators.”

— Tara Westover

126. “He gave me a stiff hug and said, “I love you, you know that?” “I do,” I said. “That has never been the issue.”

— Tara Westover

127. “Seeing sunshine, I suspected rain. I felt a relentless desire to ask people to verify whether they were seeing what I was seeing. Is this book blue? I wanted to ask. Is that man tall?”

— Tara Westover

128. “I told her she shouldn’t marry someone who scares her, that no one should, but the words left my lips stillborn. I believed them, but I didn’t understand them well enough to make them live.”

— Tara Westover

129. “The days slipped away quickly, as days do when you’re dreading something.”

— Tara Westover

130. “Suddenly that worth felt conditional, like it could be taken or squandered. It was not inherent; it was bestowed. What was of worth was not me, but the veneer of constraints and observances that obscured me.”

— Tara Westover

131. “He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.”

— Tara Westover

132. “He can’t explain where the conviction came from, or how it burned brightly enough to shine through the black uncertainty. 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

133. “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.”

— Tara Westover

134. “But my father had taught me that there are not two reasonable opinions to be had on any subject: there is Truth and there are Lies.”

— Tara Westover

135. “I imagined myself in Emily’s place, which was easy to do – I couldn’t stop myself from doing it – and in a moment I was in a parking lot, laughing my high-pitched cackle, trying to convince the world that my wrist wasn’t breaking.”

— Tara Westover

136. “I would remain a child, in perpetuity, always, or I would lose him.”

— Tara Westover

137. “Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known.”

— Tara Westover

138. “So what are Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts?” the lecturer asked. Nearly everyone raised a hand. The lecturer called on the student who had studied at Oxford. “Negative liberty,” he said, “is the freedom from external obstacles or constraints. An individual is free in this sense if they are not physically prevented from taking action.”

— Tara Westover

139. “At the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, I stood before Carrivagio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and did not once think about chickens.”

— Tara Westover

140. “I don’t know if the separation is permanent, if one day I will find a way back, but it has brought me peace.”

— Tara Westover

141. “A witness. An impartial account. The fever of self doubt had broken long ago. That’s not to say I trusted my memory absolutely, but I trusted it as much as I trusted anybody else’s, and more than some people’s.”

— Tara Westover

142. “I wondered if perhaps I had changed too much. All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere?”

— Tara Westover

143. “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.”

— Tara Westover

144. “It was as if I had stepped through a mirror and was living a day in the life I might have had, if I’d stayed on the mountain. My life had diverged from my sister’s, and it felt as though there was no common ground between us. The hours passed; it was late afternoon; and still she felt distant from me, still she refused to meet my gaze.”

— Tara Westover

145. “I didn’t know why I couldn’t tell them. I just couldn’t stand the thought of people patting me on the back, telling me how impressive I was.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

147. “I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.”

— Tara Westover

148. “The room suited my father perfectly: it was larger than life and wonderfully incongruous.”

— Tara Westover

149. “It’s astonishing that I used to believe all this without the slightest suspicion, I wrote. The whole world was wrong; only Dad was right.”

— Tara Westover

150. “Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life.”

— Tara Westover