144 Quotes by Tara Westover

I opened it and read "Congratulations." I'd been admitted for the semester beginning January 5.Mother hugged me. Dad tried to be cheerful. "It proves one thing at least," he said. "Our home school is as good as any public education.

I write this until I believe it, which doesn't take long because I want to believe it. It is comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power.

There is a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion.

My life there was entirely new, and as near to a cliché as I could make it. I was drawn to those parts of the city where one could find the most tourists so I could throw myself into their center. It was a hectic form of forgetting, and I spent the summer in pursuit of it: of losing myself in swarms of travelers, allowing myself to be wiped clean of all personality and character, of all history. The more crass the attraction, the more I was drawn to it.

Había buscado un consejo moral, alguien que conciliara mi vocación como esposa y madre con la llamada que me llegaba de otro lugar. Y el profesor había dejado esa cuestión a un lado. Al parecer me había dicho: “Primero descubre qué eres capaz y luego decide quién eres”.

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.

When you are part of a place, growing that moment in its soil, there’s never a need to say you’re from there. I never uttered the words ‘I’m from Idaho’ until I’d left it.

There was little hope of overpowering the history my father and sister were creating for me. Their account would claim my brothers first, then it would spread to my aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole valley. I had lost an entire kinship, and for what?

You are not fool's gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself— even gold appears dull in some lighting— but that is the illusion