Top 250 Terry Tempest Williams Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

103. “The legacy of the Wilderness Act is a legacy of care. It is the act of loving beyond ourselves, beyond our own species, beyond our own time. To honor wildlands and wild lives that we may never see, much less understand, is to acknowledge the world does not revolve around us. The Wilderness Act is an act of respect that protects the land and ourselves from our own annihilation.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

104. “Story is a sacred visualization, a way of echoing experience.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

105. “Desert strategies are useful: In times of drought, pull your resources inward; when water is scarce, find moisture in seeds; to stay strong and supple, send a taproot down deep; run when required, hide when necessary; when hot go underground; do not fear darkness, it’s where one comes alive.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

106. “Our public lands – whether a national park or monument, wildlife refuge, forest or prairie – make each one of us land-rich. It is our inheritance as citizens of a country called America.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

108. “Sorrow has a voice. It is the cold scream of silence turned inward.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

109. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

113. “The story of the Utah prairie dog is the story of the range of our compassion. If we can extend our idea of community to include the lowliest of creatures, call them ‘the untouchables’, then we will indeed be closer to a path of peace and tolerance. if we cannot accommodate ‘the other’, the shadow we will see on our own home ground will be the forecast of our own species’ extended winter of the soul.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

114. “Our family has made its livelihood from the land, digging trenches for hundreds of miles cross-country. You could say this is a real paradox, to destroy the land, yet love it at the same time. This is a typical story of Westerners, how we build community through change.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

115. “Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

116. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

117. “I think we have to stand up against what is unacceptable, and to push the boundaries and reclaim a more humane way of being in the world, so that we can extend our compassionate intelligence and begin to work with a strengthened will and imagination that can take us into the future.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

118. “I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don’t know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor’s clay.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

119. “Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

121. “The courage to continue before the face of despair is the recognition in those eyes of darkness we find our own night vision. Women blessed with death-eyes are fearless.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

122. “I was extremely close with my mother and my grandmothers, we shared our lives – fully, honestly – and it was heightened as each succumbed to cancer. Little was hidden between us. No time. And what was hidden, turned inward. I made a vow to speak. Speak or die.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

124. “I think my heart breaks daily living in Salt Lake City, Utah. But I still love it. And that is the richness, the texture.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

125. “I think about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said that it’s the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer, I believe that it’s our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

126. “Awe is the moment when ego surrenders to wonder. This is our inheritance – the beauty before us. We cry. We cry out. There is nothing sentimental about facing the desert bare. It is a terrifying beauty.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

128. “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

129. “Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand. Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation – teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

130. “My mother’s journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth. Without a shadow there is no substance. If we have no shadow, it means we are invisible. As long as I have a shadow, I am alive.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

131. “When I look in the mirror, I see a woman with secrets. When we don’t listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don’t, others will abandon us.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

132. “Perhaps this is what our national parks hold for us: stories, of who we have been and who we might become- a reminder that as human beings our histories harbor both darkness and light. To live in the United States of America and tell only one story, from one point of view, diminishes us all.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

133. “This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

134. “Landscape shapes culture.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

135. “Home is where we have a history.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

137. “I can only say that I believe the Mormon Church is changing because the people inside the church are changing, particularly, the women. And if the women in the Mormon Church are changing, that means the men in the Mormon Church will change – slowly, reluctantly to be sure, but inevitably.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

138. “Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect too much of myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent phase.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

139. “Pico Iyer describes his writing as “intimate letters to a stranger,” and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

140. “When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

142. “When I said, “I am my mother, but I’m not,” I was saying my path would be my own.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

144. “These are difficult time, transformative times- times of extreme actions especially within our national parks. Extreme drought. Extreme fires. Extreme development with extreme policy shifts needed in the name of global warming. The world is changing dramatically, both ecologically as well as politically. But I believe our greatest transformation as a species will be spiritual. The word “we” must include all species.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

145. “What needs to be counted on to have a voice? Courage. Anger. Love. Something to say; someone to speak to; someone to listen.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

147. “We mask our needs as the needs of others.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

148. “Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis of our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?”

— Terry Tempest Williams

149. “If you waste water, you die.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams