Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

117 Sourced Quotes

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

Terry Tempest Williams
Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing — faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives.

Terry Tempest Williams
I believe that when we are fully present, we not only live well, we live well for others.

Terry Tempest Williams
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.

Terry Tempest Williams
Story is a sacred visualization, a way of echoing experience.

Terry Tempest Williams
Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does.

Terry Tempest Williams
The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.

Terry Tempest Williams
Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.

Terry Tempest Williams
Sometimes you have to disclaim your country and inhabit another before you can return to your own.

Terry Tempest Williams
When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.

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
The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.

Terry Tempest Williams
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white.

Terry Tempest Williams
I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.

Terry Tempest Williams
I believe every woman should own at least one pair of red shoes.

Terry Tempest Williams
This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

Terry Tempest Williams
Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand. Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation — teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.

Terry Tempest Williams
I still have great faith in democracy. I have great belief in the power of community.

Terry Tempest Williams
Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. After the listening you become accountable for the sacred knowledge that has been shared.

Terry Tempest Williams
This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

Terry Tempest Williams
Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?

Terry Tempest Williams
I feel like we are at a time of great creativity if we choose to embrace it as such, if we choose to engage the will of our imaginations and imagine another way of being in the world.

Terry Tempest Williams
I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.

Terry Tempest Williams
What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?

Terry Tempest Williams
I really do believe if there is hope in the world, then it is to be found within our own communities with our own neighbors, and within our own homes and families.

Terry Tempest Williams
I wonder how, among the Fremont, mothers and daughters shared their world. Did they walk side by side along the lake edge? What stories did they tell while weaving strips of bulrush into baskets? How did daughters bury their mothers and exercise their grief? What were the secret rituals of women? I feel certain they must have been tied to birds.

Terry Tempest Williams
I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.

Terry Tempest Williams
John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community. I think of my family stories-Mother's in particular-how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them. The same could be said of each passing whale.

Terry Tempest Williams
It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years.

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