Top 250 Terry Tempest Williams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Storytelling is the oldest form of education.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

Featured in: Storytelling Quotes

2. “Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn, and to sing at dusk, was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

3. “Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

6. “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

7. “Rituals are the formulas by which harmony is restored.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

8. “Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

9. “Grief dares us to love once more.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

10. “Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

11. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

13. “My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

14. “Abundance is an expansion of energy. Abundance is a form of gratitude, a generosity, a modesty, a bow toward others – what we can give, what we can share, rather than what we can take.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

17. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

18. “An individual doesn’t get cancer, a family does.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

19. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

20. “I am interested and deeply curious about our need for a spiritual life, a life of greater meaning, and how we come to a more ethical view of life within our communities that is more inclusive than exclusive, one that is extended even beyond our own species.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

21. “The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the presence of power.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

22. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

24. “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

25. “CONVERSATION is the vehicle for change.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

27. “A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don’t want to see.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

29. “If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

31. “We find our voice, we lose our voice, we retrieve it, honor it, and hopefully, learn how to share it with others and stand in the center of our power. Translation is a theme. Fear and courage are a theme.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

32. “I am a woman with wings,′ I once wrote and will revise these words again. ‘I am a woman with wings dancing with other women with wings.’ In a voiced community, we all flourish.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

33. “Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing – faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

34. “The discipline of writing a memoir comes in the editing. This is where I cut, slash, and burn – where my creative mind is transformed into a ruthless one. No word escapes my scrutiny. It is here where I see what boundaries need to be set.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

35. “The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words – without locks, open on my shelves.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

37. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

39. “What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

40. “Abundance is a dance with reciprocity – what we can give, what we can share, and what we receive in the process.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

41. “The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

42. “I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

43. “The act of civil disobedience is the act of taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistance.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

44. “I have a sequence to my creative life. In spring and fall, I am above ground and commit to community. In the summer, I’m outside. It is a time for family. And in the winter, I am underground. Home. This is when I do my work as a writer – in hibernation. I write with the bears.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

45. “My body is a compass – and it does not lie.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

46. “It is important to remember all true change begins at the margins and moves toward the center. This does not make the climate change movement marginal, it makes it muscular, organic, with a true movement toward the center.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

48. “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

49. “Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. After the listening you become accountable for the sacred knowledge that has been shared.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

50. “Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind.”

— Terry Tempest Williams