Top 160 Tara Westover Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

158. “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

159. “No comma, no period, no adjective or adverb was beneath his interest. He made no distinction between grammar and content, between form and substance. A poorly written sentence was a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction. “Tell me,” he would say, “why have you placed this comma here? What relationship between these phrases are you hoping to establish?”

— Tara Westover

160. “To convince myself that there was some dignity in what I planned to do, in surrendering my own perceptions of right and wrong, of reality, of sanity itself, to earn the love of my parents. For them I believed I could don armor and charge at giants, even if I saw only windmills.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

162. “I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.”

— Tara Westover

163. “I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself.”

— Tara Westover

164. “Books that were of God – books written by the Mormon prophets or the Founding Fathers – 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.”

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

167. “He said I owed him for the car. He really only mentioned it but I became crazed, hysterical. For the first time in my life, I shouted at my father – not about the car but about the Weavers. I was so suffocated by rage, my words didn’t come out as words, but as choking, sputtering sobs. 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

168. “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

169. “I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it. I wanted the professor to shout at me, wanted it so deeply I felt dizzy from the deprivation. The ugliness of me had to be given expression. If it was not expressed in his voice, I would need to express it in mine.”

— Tara Westover

170. “I felt exposed by the elegance and yet somehow made invisible by it.”

— Tara Westover

171. “I didn’t think I was dreaming, but only because my imagination had never produced anything so grand.”

— Tara Westover

172. “I couldn’t tell him that the reason I couldn’t return to Cambridge was that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life.”

— Tara Westover

173. “I could take it all back – blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.”

— Tara Westover

174. “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

175. “A poorly written sentence was a poorly formed idea.”

— Tara Westover

176. “I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement – since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others.”

— Tara Westover

177. “I left the hall the moment dessert was served. It was a relief to escape all that refinement and beauty – to be allowed to be unlovely and not a point of contrast.”

— Tara Westover

178. “Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars.”

— Tara Westover

179. “I lived alone in a quiet apartment.”

— Tara Westover