Top 250 Terry Tempest Williams Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 6

51. “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

52. “Our correspondences have wings – paper birds that fly from my house to yours – flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

53. “Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

54. “Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

55. “I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

56. “Dying doesn’t cause suffering. Resistance to dying does.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

57. “To hold silence and to be silenced are two very different experiences. And so another theme emerges, that of light and shadow. When we share our voice, who benefits? When we withhold, who benefits? And what are the consequences and costs of both?”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

59. “True eloquence has an edge, sharp and clean.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

60. “To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

61. “Greed is a deprivation of abundance, a hoarding, a constriction of energy.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

62. “How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

63. “Literature was life, and reading became an open door to a world beyond the familiar.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

64. “There is no one true church, no one chosen people.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

65. “The choices and decisions we make in terms of how we use the land ultimately affect our very DNA. Environmental issues are life issues.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

66. “I don’t think of myself as an American; I see myself as a human being.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

67. “I write about nuclear tests in Refuge – “The Clan of One-Breasted Women.” With so many of the women in my family being diagnosed with breast cancer, mastectomies led to one-breasted women. I believe it is the result of nuclear fallout.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

69. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

71. “I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

72. “We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing. Neither does power. What is positive and what is negative is not absolute.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

73. “The Japanese have a word – aware – which, in my understanding is, again, that full range – both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

74. “Artifacts are alive. Each has a voice. They remind us what it means to be human – that it is our nature to survive, to create works of beauty to be resourceful, to be attentive to the world we live in.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

75. “Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It’s hard sometimes.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

76. “For me, it always comes back to the land, respecting the land, the wildlife, the plants, the rivers, mountains, and deserts, the absolute essential bedrock of our lives. This is the source of where my power lies, the source of where all our power lies.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

77. “We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

78. “We hold the moon in our bellies and fire in our hearts. We bleed We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words grow. They are our children. They are our stores and poems.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

79. “What I mean by “An Unspoken Hunger.” It’s a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It’s a hunger that cannot be quelled by the constant denial.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

81. “Our ability to travel is a privilege. But it is also a choice. Money is time. Where do we spend out time? Wilderness is not my leisure or my recreation. It is my sanity.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

82. “I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in the world that often appears black and white. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

83. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

85. “Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

86. “I know, that Rilke quote – “Beauty is the beginning of terror” – I think about that a lot. It’s that realization that we are so small, and yet we are so large in our capacity to relate to the beauty of things.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

87. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

88. “When one woman doesn’t speak, other women get hurt.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

89. “I really do believe if there is hope in the world, then it is to be found within our own communities with our own neighbors, and within our own homes and families.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

90. “Beauty is transformed over time, and not without destruction.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

91. “I can only tell where I feel most at home, which is in the erosional landscape of the red rock desert of southern Utah, where the Colorado River cuts through sandstone and the geologic history of the Earth is exposed: our home in Castle Valley.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

93. “Perhaps the Wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silence that reminds us we live by grace.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

94. “Abundance is rooted in community, not individualism. Abundance is what is before our eyes, but we cannot see when we are blinded by greed.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

95. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

96. “I return to the wilderness to remember what I have forgotten, that the world can be wholesome and beautiful, that the harmony and integrity of ecosystems at peace is a mirror to what we have lost.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

97. “In the dark of the moon there is growth. Plants do not flourish in the noonday sun, but rather in the privacy of the new moon.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

99. “I could walk forever with beauty. Our steps are not measured in miles but in the amount of time we are pulled forward by awe. This is another gift from our national parks, to be led by the vistas, to forget what nags us at home and remember what sustains us, the horizon.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

100. “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