Terry Tempest Williams quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Terry Tempest Williams

Terry Tempest Williams Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Terry Tempest Williams on Wise Famous Quotes.

To write," Marguerite Duras remarked, "is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.

As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.

We mask our needs as the needs of others.

In the early days of the Mormon Church, stewardship toward the land was a priority. It was a matter of survival in the desert.

When it comes to words, rather than using our own voice, authentic and unpracticed, we steal someone else's to shield our fear.

But harboring regrets is making love to the past, and there is no movement here.

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

To hear something asks very little of us. To listen places our entire being on notice.

Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.

Democracy is an insecure landscape.

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

I care about my brother.
I care about wilderness.
To care is to lament.
My brother is a wilderness, unknowable.

We forget the nature of true power. The power within is abundance. The power without is greed.

Beware of the charismatic wolf in sheep's clothing. There is evil in the world. You can be tricked.

Through revision, I enter the realm of the unspeakable and find the words that have eluded me.

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

The unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.

Myths have a way of bringing what is unconscious to the surface and putting a face on what we cannot see.

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.

When one woman doesn't speak, other women get hurt.

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

If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.

Every day, I walked. It was not a meditation, but survival, one foot in the front of the other, with my eyes focused down, trying to stay steady.

Dare to be burned by the heat of our own ambitious hearts.

Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.

What is private belongs to me alone. What is personal belongs to all of us through the shared experience of being human.

My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.

We can try to kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs for all to see, but spirit howls and wildness endures.

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

My grandmother simply shook her head and said, You know what you saw. The bird doesn't need to be counted, and neither do you.

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.

I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.

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

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

This is a landscape that should not be sold.

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.

I think that water is a tremendous organizing principle.

What is the most important thing one learns in school? Self-esteem, support, and friendship.

Did I have the courage to forge a path

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.

Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision. Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together

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.

We are wearing coats of trust. When one tells a story this is what happens.

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.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

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.

I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.

No separation between the spiritual and the physical. It is all one.

If you waste water, you die.

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.

Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.

Story is a sacred visualization, a way of echoing experience.

There becomes little doubt as to why power chooses to support power. Rwanda becomes invisible once again. We have nothing America wants.

The climate change movement is a river overflowing seeping into every nook and cranny.

Her body was rounded like earth. Stories. Breath ... Her eyes have been painted closed. I understand. To tell a story you must travel inward.

Wilderness is the source of what we can imagine and what we cannot - the taproot of consciousness.
It will survive us.

Wilderness is not a place of privilege, but rather a place of probity, where the evolutionary processes of life are free to continue.

The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering.

The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.

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

All we have is time.

There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not as a secret, but as a prayer.

To slow down is to be taken into the soul of things.

Respect is primary.

To be numb to the world is another form of suicide.

Our national parks are memory palaces where our personal histories reside.

My spiritual life is found inside the heart of the wild.

I worry, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference.

Rituals are the formulas by which harmony is restored.

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

The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you.

Greed says there is never enough. Abundance says there is more than enough. Greed closes the door behind itself. Abundance opens the door for others.

Devil spelled backward is Lived.

I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts ... I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words.

The difference between fear and awe is a matter of our eyes adjusting.

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

Finding one's voice is a process of finding one's passion.

Roland Barthes says, That which cannot be named is a disturbance.

words are much stronger than I am.

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

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

And all your Faithless doubts Will not destroy The rising spring In me.

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

Creativity ignited a spark. In that moment, I saw that art is not peripheral, beauty is not optional, but a strategy for survival.

It is where we embrace our questions ... Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?

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

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

Greed is a deprivation of abundance, a hoarding, a constriction of energy.

I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.

Blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.

Wilderness is an antidote to the war within ourselves.

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

A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors.

Find something that matters deeply to you and pursue it. Question. Stand. Speak. Act. Make us uncomfortable. Make us think.

A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious.

There is no one true church, no one chosen people.

memory is the only way home.

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.

My body is a compass - and it does not lie.

The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.