144 Quotes by Tara Westover

I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now, but there was something nourishing in setting aside that time each week, in the act of admitting that I needed something I could not provide for myself.

I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create.

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

... I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.

An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

A life is not a thing unalterable.

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. Dad saw every piece of scrap as the money it could be sold for, minus the time needed to sort, cut and deliver it.

In retrospect, I see that *this* was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who'd deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

College is extra school for people too dumb to learn the first time around.