Terry Tempest Williams - Human Quotes

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To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.

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
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions: Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinion? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up, trusting our fellow citizens to join us in our determined pursuit-a living democracy?

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

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

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

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
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