Top 160 Tara Westover Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Tara Westover

154. “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

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

— Tara Westover

156. “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

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

— Tara Westover

158. “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

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

— Tara Westover

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Tara Westover

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

— Tara Westover

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Tara Westover

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Tara Westover

176. “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

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

— Tara Westover

178. “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

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

— Tara Westover