Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

117 Sourced Quotes

Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect too much of myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent phase.

Terry Tempest Williams
The sin we commit against each other as women is lack of support. We hurt. We hurt each other. We hide. We project. We become mute or duplicitous, and we fester like boiling water until one day we erupt like a geyser. Do we forget we unravel in grief?

Terry Tempest Williams
We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what binds us as human beings.

Terry Tempest Williams
I think community is a shared history, it's a shared experience. It's not always agreement. In fact, I think that often it isn't. It's the commitment, again, to stay with something - to go the duration. You can't walk away. It's like a marriage, only I think it's more difficult to divorce yourself from community than it is to a human being because the strands are interconnected and so various.

Terry Tempest Williams
The unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.

Terry Tempest Williams
Hopefully there will come a time when I have no words, when I can honor and hold that kind of stillness that I so need, crave, and desire in the natural world.

Terry Tempest Williams
In Utah alone, ten million acres are open for business. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests.

Terry Tempest Williams
Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility.... Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.

Terry Tempest Williams
In the early days of the Mormon Church, stewardship toward the land was a priority. It was a matter of survival in the desert.

Terry Tempest Williams
I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.

Terry Tempest Williams
I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.

Terry Tempest Williams
Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.

Terry Tempest Williams
To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

Terry Tempest Williams
A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors.

Terry Tempest Williams
I think our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other. What we perceive as non- human, outside of us, is actually in direct relationship with us.

Terry Tempest Williams
When Emily Dickinson writes, Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.

Terry Tempest Williams
I live just outside of Salt Lake City in a place called Emigration Canyon. It's on the Mormon trail. So I feel deeply connected, not only because of my Mormon roots, which are five or six generations, but because of where we live. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not mindful of the spiritual sovereignty that was sought by my people in coming to Utah.

Terry Tempest Williams
Hope radiates outward from the center of our concerns. Hope dares us to stare the miraculous in the eye and have the courage not to look away.

Terry Tempest Williams
I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home.

Terry Tempest Williams
I think we have to stand up against what is unacceptable, and to push the boundaries and reclaim a more humane way of being in the world, so that we can extend our compassionate intelligence and begin to work with a strengthened will and imagination that can take us into the future.

Terry Tempest Williams
I think my heart breaks daily living in Salt Lake City, Utah. But I still love it. And that is the richness, the texture.

Terry Tempest Williams
We are wearing coats of trust. When one tells a story this is what happens.

Terry Tempest Williams
Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

Terry Tempest Williams
There is an unraveling, a great unraveling that I believe is occurring. Not without its pain, not without its frustration. Perhaps the fundamentalism we see within America right now is in response to these changes. We fear change, and so we cling to what is known.

Terry Tempest Williams
There is something very sensual about a letter. The physical contact of pen to paper, the time set aside to focus thoughts, the folding of the paper into the envelope, licking it closed, addressing it, a chosen stamp, and then the release of the letter to the mailbox — are all acts of tenderness.

Terry Tempest Williams