Tara Westover

"I had spent so much energy trying to forget who I was that I had forgotten who I might become."

"I had been taught to distrust my own mind. Now I had to learn to trust it."

"My father believed the government was our enemy. But I learned that ignorance was the real threat."

"Knowledge is power, but only if you're brave enough to use it."

"I had been told that questioning was a sin. I learned that not questioning was the real tragedy."

"My past was a weight I carried, but education gave me the strength to set it down."

"To become someone new, I had to first understand who I had been."

"I was homeschooled by people who didn't believe in history. So I had to teach myself."

"The most radical thing I could do was think for myself."

"My father's world was small. Education showed me how much larger the world could be."

"I had to learn that being educated meant learning to be comfortable with uncertainty."

"Isolation had been my entire world. Then I discovered there were other worlds."

"I learned that you can love someone and still recognize that they were wrong."

"The person I became in college was not a rejection of my past. She was a continuation of it—but conscious."

"Forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting. It means deciding that the past doesn't have to control your future."

"To become myself, I had to first become a stranger to myself."

"I chose education because it was the only way out I could see."

"I had to unlearn everything in order to learn anything."

"I realized that my trauma wasn't something to be ashamed of. It was something to be understood."

"I was taught to fear the world outside. But the world inside my home was what I should have feared."

"The pursuit of knowledge became my salvation."

"I had to learn to trust my own judgment, even when it contradicted everything I had been taught."

"I chose a different path, even though it meant losing my family."

"I learned that the person you become is not predetermined. It's a choice you make, over and over again."

"I discovered that I had more power than I ever imagined—the power to redefine myself."

"I realized that the reason I had never been able to believe in myself was that I had been raised in a world where belief itself was dangerous."

"You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them."

"The deciding factor is always the self—the character, the habit of mind that was created in childhood and adolescence."

"When you're young, you don't always understand that the person you most need to leave is the person you most want to save."

"I was not in control of my life. I was not in control of my mind."