Top 160 Tara Westover Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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.”

— Tara Westover

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “The Baths of Caracalla.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Tara Westover

116. “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

117. “Reality became fluid. The ground gave way beneath my feet, dragging me downward, spinning fast, like sand rushing through a hole in the bottom of the universe.”

— Tara Westover

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “I hear of the ongoing drama on the mountain – the injuries, violence and shifting loyalties. But it comes to me now as distant hearsay, which is a gift.”

— Tara Westover

124. “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

125. “There was a boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out the one page or the other. To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both.”

— Tara Westover

126. “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

127. “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

128. “The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”

— Tara Westover

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Tara Westover

132. “They see change as dangerous and will exile anyone who asks for it. This is a perverted idea of family loyalty.”

— Tara Westover

133. “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

134. “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

135. “It was difficult to imagine a man like Dad – proud, strong, physical – permanently impaired.”

— Tara Westover

136. “I just didn’t feel like seeing him, or hearing his voice, so I didn’t.”

— Tara Westover

137. “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

138. “Mother never delivered lectures or administered exams. She never assigned essays. There was a computer in the basement with a program called Mavis Beacon, which gave lessons on typing.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

145. “I did not study. I tried to read but the sentences meant nothing. I needed them to mean nothing. I couldn’t bear to string sentences into strands of thought, or to weave those strands into ideas. Ideas were too similar to reflection.”

— Tara Westover

146. “I left the bathroom carrying that calmness delicately, as if it were a china plate balancing on my head.”

— Tara Westover

147. “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

148. “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

149. “A kind of worth that was inherent and unshakable.”

— 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