Tara Westover

"Once you arrive at your own interpretation, you leave behind anyone who refuses to contemplate your version of events"

"I had been divided so long between two worlds that I couldn't remember which was real"

"To accept a thing is not to accept it—it is to surrender to it"

"My father held the knife, and I was the blade he wielded"

"I understood that I had been raised not to think, but to obey"

"The past is a physical thing"

"I am not the child my father raised"

"What you do defines who you are"

"I had believed in a history that was not true"

"My mother had sacrificed her life to a man's delusion"

"I could not become educated and remain who I was"

"Buck Peak was a prison of the mind"

"Once you see the truth, you cannot unsee it"

"I learned that loyalty to family and loyalty to truth cannot always coexist"

"Education was my only exit"

"I had to become a stranger to my family to find myself"

"Shawn was my father's son in all the ways that mattered"

"I could not trust my own memory"

"My father had built a world and convinced us we lived in another"

"I became educated by refusing to accept what I was told"

"Some people cannot be saved if they do not wish to be"

"I had to choose between my family and my future"

"I was taught to fear the world, so the world became something to fight"

"Education gave me the language to understand my own life"

"My father was a man of contradictions"

"I had to erase myself before I could remake myself"

"The truth is that I was not raised, I was hidden"

"I learned more from my mistakes than from my triumphs"

"To forgive does not mean to forget or to accept"

"I was educated in the shadows of Buck Peak"