Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

117 Sourced Quotes

I will never be able to say what is in my heart because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned.

Terry Tempest Williams
I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep.

Terry Tempest Williams
When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.

Terry Tempest Williams
I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love.

Terry Tempest Williams
Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.

Terry Tempest Williams
When I said, "I am my mother, but I'm not," I was saying my path would be my own.

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 believe capitalism will eventually be replaced by a communitarian ethic where the rights and care of all beings will be taken into consideration, not just the greed of a corporate few.

Terry Tempest Williams
Downwinders, meaning those people, individuals, communities that were downwind of the nuclear test site. During those years when we were testing atomic bombs above ground, when we watched them for entertainment from the roofs of our high schools, little did we know what was raining down on us, little did we know what would appear years later.

Terry Tempest Williams
I have spoken about what we can do as citizens, what we can do as a responsive citizenry, and this is where we have to shatter our complacency and become "active souls,"and be prepared to engage in aware - that personal struggle between our grief and our sorrow. But I don't think we have any choice.

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

Terry Tempest Williams
I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.

Terry Tempest Williams
If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.

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 remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the MacKenzie River. She said, "This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have not returned." This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a place. And she sounded the alarm.

Terry Tempest Williams
Having lived in Utah all of my life, I can tell that in many ways I know of no place more lonely, no place more unfamiliar. When I talk about how it is both a blessing and a burden to have those kinds of roots, it can be terribly isolating, because when you are so familiar, you know the shadow.

Terry Tempest Williams
When you are with a landscape or a human being where there is no need to speak, but simply to listen, to perceive, to feel.

Terry Tempest Williams
I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time.

Terry Tempest Williams
I can't imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?

Terry Tempest Williams
I think we have powerful role-models among us in the American West. Certainly the Hopis, a timeless civilization that understands sustainability and what that means about living in harmony, in tandem with the natural world. We have much to learn from them, and they will survive us, I feel certain about that.

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 write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in the world that often appears black and white. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.

Terry Tempest Williams
At the heart of Mormonism is a high regard for community. That is its strength. I have great respect for that.

Terry Tempest Williams
I think that it's too much to take on the world. It's too much to take on Los Angeles. All I can do is to go back home to the canyon where we live and ask the kinds of questions that can make a difference in our neighborhoods.

Terry Tempest Williams
Every time we make love to a human being, fully, we are making love to everything that lives and breathes. In that sense it becomes communion. It is a sacrament.

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
I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern... : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.

Terry Tempest Williams
What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.

Terry Tempest Williams
I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.

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