Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

memory is the only way home.

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.

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

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.

Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find. For me, we find this beauty through relationships, with people in place with other species. Integrity is the word that comes to mind. Integrity and presence.

Grief dares us to love once more.

There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.

Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.

I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.

Each horizon, each place holds its own evolutionary power be it the prairie or the plateaus, the mountains or the marshes at Great Salt Lake. For me, this is the nature of peace. Our task is to learn how to see it, feel it, hear it, and care for these places as our own home ground.

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.

Style is like voice, it grows organically from the truth of one's own life experience. Not in terms of chapters, per se, but in terms of stories. It is the story itself that creates an inherent structure.

We are aching to come together and I think it has little to do with liberal or conservative discourse. I think it has to do with increasing disconnection with what is real and soul-serving.

There are things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's not just peculiar to Mormonism - it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our creativity.

To engage in civil disobedience is to feel the abundance of courage, the gratitude for a democracy that still invites us to speak from our hearts, to act from our conscience and have faith in the consequences of moral action. Abundance is a form of consciousness.

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.

Not everything is meant for all to hear.

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.

I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

I think wherever we are, we can create an atmosphere of openness and trust, where women and those who feel marginalized feel safe to speak the truth of their lives.

Home is where we have a history.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I love the interrelatedness of things.

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

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

There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.

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.

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.

My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.

When we really need to work hard to make sure that these ideas about constructive social change culturally, ecologically and politically, come to pass. And that's only going to happen if people support the leadership, because the same power structures are still in place, and it's not in their best interests to change.

I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time.

There is something very sensual about a letter. The physical contact of pen to paper, the time set aside to focus thoughts, the folding of the paper into the envelope, licking it closed, addressing it, a chosen stamp, and then the release of the letter to the mailbox - are all acts of tenderness.

CONVERSATION is the vehicle for change.

...if we allow ourselves contemplative time in nature-whether it's gardening, going for a walk with the dog, or being in the heart of the southern Utah wilderness-then we can hear the voice of our conscience. If we listen to that voice, it asks us to be conscious. And if we become conscious we choose to live lives of consequence.

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.