Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

117 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
I think that the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the source of our power lies.

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
Water is nothing if not ingemination, an encore to the tenacity of life.

Terry Tempest Williams
I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear - of women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.

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
I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a "conspiracy" against higher thoughts.

Terry Tempest Williams
This is an incredibly creative time. It is a difficult time. It is a disparaging time. A time of cultural and global transitions based on the realization that the Earth cannot support nonsustainable practices anymore.

Terry Tempest Williams
To me, writing is about how we see. The writers I want to read teach me how to see-see the world differently. In my writing there is no separation between how I observe the world and how I write the world. We write through our eyes. We write through our body. We write out of what we know.

Terry Tempest Williams
My activism is a result of my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse - to try to make sense of the world, to try to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries of what is acceptable.

Terry Tempest Williams
I don't think of myself as an American; I see myself as a human being.

Terry Tempest Williams
The time had come to protest with the heart, that to deny one's genealogy with the earth was to commit treason against one's soul.

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
I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think, "Ah, yes, evolution." It's there, we just forget.

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
There are times we have to put our body on the line for what we believe, for the injustices we see even within our own families.

Terry Tempest Williams
A mother and daughter are an edge.
Edges are ecotones, transitional zones,
places of danger or opportunity.
House-dwelling tension.
When I stand on the edge of the land and sea,
I feel this tension, this fluid line of transition.
High tide. Low tide.
It is the sea's reach and retreat
that reminds me
we have been human
for only a very short time.

Terry Tempest Williams
That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about - the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible

Terry Tempest Williams
My family lives all around me. We see each other daily. It's very, very complicated. I think that families hold us together and they split us apart.

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
I can only say that I believe the Mormon Church is changing because the people inside the church are changing, particularly, the women. And if the women in the Mormon Church are changing, that means the men in the Mormon Church will change - slowly, reluctantly to be sure, but inevitably.

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 think I must be worried all the time - maybe that is the other side of joy, you know, holding that line of the full range of emotions.

Terry Tempest Williams
Community is extremely intimate. When we talk about humor, I love that you know when you're home because there is laughter in the room, there is humor, there is shorthand. That is about community.

Terry Tempest Williams
Stories have the power to create social change and inspire community.

Terry Tempest Williams