Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Tara Westover - Page 2

I used to roof hay barns for my father. It's dangerous work. Writing is much better.

Things that I now recognise as just part of my personality - willfulness and assertiveness, maybe even a bit of aggressiveness - these are things that I had been raised to think of as masculine features. I always thought there was probably something wrong with me.

I adore Toni Morrison. I think we would all be better writers if we read more of her.

I do think we have collectively begun to conflate the institutions of education for education itself. Education is an individual's pursuit of understanding and has a lot of implications for that person, for the kind of person that they are.

When I came to Cambridge, I was involved in the ward for a little bit, but I did have a very gradual process of trying to work out what I thought a good life consisted of.

I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.

BYU was a really positive place for me.

I might just not be a big-city bug.

I have very non-eccentric hobbies. I like to read, to have dinner with friends, and junk out on TV like everybody else.

I can't have my family in my life because they are abusive, and I don't have control over that. There is an abusive culture in my family, and I have to turn away from it.

My mother was a midwife and a herbalist, so we would go on these long walks, looking for yarrow or rosehips or whatever she needed to make her tinctures.

I think it's a belief that you can learn something. That's something that I really value from the upbringing I got.

Academic writing is such a different way of writing.

They were a very good form for me - the way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to - and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have.

If you want to live a miserable life, making your life all about other people is the way to do it.

There is a certain panic, at least if you're raised Mormon, to being single at 31. But what they don't tell you is that it can also be kinda great.

I had to be - I was in school for probably three or four years before I began taking courses in history and political science, and I just started to realize how big the world was. I mean, when I arrived in college, I didn't know anything.

I think you can change your belief, but sometimes your behavior takes a lot longer.

I hate the the word 'disempower,' because it seems kind of cliche, but I do think that we take people's ability to self-teach away by creating this idea that that someone else has to do this for you, that you have to take a course, you have to do it in some formal way.