144 Quotes by Tara Westover

I fumbled with the cables while Dad stood over me, shouting. I kept dropping them. My mind pulsed with panic, which overpowered every thought, so that I could not even remember how to connect red to red, white to white.Then it was gone. I looked up at my father, at his purple face, at the vein pulsing in his neck. I still hadn't managed to attach the cables. I stood, and once on my feet, didn't care whether the cables were attached. I walked out of the room.

.. life - the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event.

It was only as I grew older that I wondered if how I had started is how I would end - if the first shape a person takes is their only true shape.

Positive liberty," another student said, "is freedom from internal constraints.

I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.

A poorly written sentence was a poorly formed idea.

I believed then--and part of me will always believe--that my father's words ought to be my own.

But Dr. Kerry was right: it wasn't the clothes that made this face, this woman, different. It was something behind her eyes, something in the set of her jaw-a hope or belief or conviction-that a life is not a thing unalterable. I don't have a word for what it was I saw, but I suppose it was something like faith.

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