Terry Tempest Williams - Place Quotes

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If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.

Terry Tempest Williams
I take a deep breath and sidestep my fear and begin speaking from the place where beauty and bravery meet—within the chambers of a quivering heart.

Terry Tempest Williams
We are contemporary citizens living in a technological world. Swimming in crosscultural waters can be dangerous, and if you are honest you can't stay there very long. Sooner or later you have to look at your own reflection and decide what to do with yourself. We are urban people. We make periodic pilgrimages to the country.... If we align ourselves with the spirit of place we will find humility fused with joy. The land holds stories.

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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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 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