Tara Westover

"I was raised to believe I was not a real person."

"The metamorphosis I had undergone made it impossible to ignore the contradictions in my upbringing."

"My life was a string of choices I didn't understand that I had made."

"I had spent so long running from what I was that I had never taken time to figure out what I might be."

"I had to learn to think for myself, which meant unlearning everything I had been taught to believe."

"I was not my father's scholar, and I was not my mother's rebel."

"That was when I realized something important: that I had been educated, just not in the way I had imagined."

"You can love someone and still choose to leave them."

"Everything I had worked for, all of my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and to think."

"I am not the child my father raised, but neither am I the person he tried to destroy."

"Perhaps it is natural to remember only the good, to let it grow with time, while the bad fades away."

"I had never been to school. I had never been to a doctor."

"We were not controlled by law. We were controlled by Dad."

"He wanted a pure mind, unspoiled by the influence of the outside world."

"I was my father's daughter. That was something I could not change."

"Some people are told to read between the lines, but I had to learn to read the lines themselves."

"I had inherited my father's distrust of the outside world."

"To me, education was the only option, the only way out."

"I realized that the past does not have to dictate the future."

"My father believed that the only true education came from God."

"I became someone else. Someone who could read and write and think."

"You can't make up for lost time, but you can decide what to do with the time ahead."

"I did not know myself. I had to invent myself."

"The person I became could not have existed in the family I came from."

"I learned that there is a world beyond the mountains."

"My brothers and I were born into a radical Christian family."

"Education became my passport to a different life."

"I had to choose between my family and myself."

"Memory is unreliable. The past is a foreign country."

"I was taught that the government was evil, but I learned the truth was more complicated."