Top 250 Terry Tempest Williams Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “I would like to hear the words “public lands” spoken in every election debate, with candidates holding both government and corporations accountable in their oversight and use. The fact of more than three hundred million visits to our national parks last year tells me I am not alone.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

153. “By definition, our national parks in all their particularity and peculiarity show us as much about ourselves as the landscapes they honor and protect. They can be seen as holograms of an America born of shadow and light; dimensional; full of contradictions and complexities. Our dreams, our generosities, our cruelties and crimes are absorbed into these parks like water. The poet Rumi says, “Water, stories, the.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

154. “How do we create beauty in a broken world? How do we create a view of sustainability in an economy that is crashing? How do we reconfigure our lives, how do we pick up the pieces and create a meaningful life? So, yes, we have a different form of leadership but the questions remain the same.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

155. “I love the interrelatedness of things.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

156. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

157. “We write out of our humanity by writing through our direct experience. That which is most personal is most general, which becomes both our insight and protection as a writers. This is our authority as women, as human beings.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

158. “Mother had one quilt square made by a friend of hers framed, and hung it in her bathroom, where she saw it first thing in the morning. When I asked her why this mattered, she said, “It represents how women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

159. “The question I’m constantly asking myself is: what are we afraid of? I think it’s important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of growth.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

160. “What every woman knows is that we are remade each time we make love, each time we give birth; each time we feel the blood making its way through our body into our cupped hands, we remember it is our destiny to make change.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

162. “This is the Hour of Land, when our mistakes and shortcomings must be placed in the perspective of time. The Hour of Land is where we remember what we have forgotten: We are not the only species who lives and dreams on the planet. There is something enduring that circulates in the heart of nature that deserves our respect and attention.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

164. “What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?”

— Terry Tempest Williams

165. “When Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

166. “Space is the twin sister of time. If we have open space then we have open time to breathe, to dream, to dare, to play, to pray to move freely, so freely, in a world our minds have forgotten, but our bodies remember.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

169. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

170. “Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

172. “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

173. “I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

174. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

176. “To acknowledge that which we cannot see, to give definition to that which we don’t know, to create divine order out of chaos, is the religious dance.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

178. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

179. “I remember as a child, my grandmother read to me Silent Spring. It was incomprehensible to me that there could be a world without birdsong.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

180. “We borrow. We steal. We purchase what we need and buy what we don’t. We acquire things, people, places, all in the process of losing ourselves. Busyness is the religion of distraction. I cannot talk to you, because I have too much to do.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

181. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

182. “I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

183. “It is a day of angled light and flat-bottomed clouds floating in a turquoise sky.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

184. “Wilderness offers us a template to an enlightened citizenship. Instead of only caring for ourselves, we are invited to care for species other than our own.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

185. “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.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

186. “I can tell that in Refuge the question that was burning in me was, how do we find refuge in change? Everything around me that was familiar had been turned inside out with my mother’s diagnosis of ovarian cancer and with the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge being flooded.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

187. “Wilderness is an antidote to the war within ourselves.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

188. “Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?”

— Terry Tempest Williams

189. “When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It’s an act of faith. I just follow my heart.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

190. “I believe capitalism will eventually be replaced by a communitarian ethic where the rights and care of all beings will be taken into consideration, not just the greed of a corporate few.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

191. “This is a landscape that should not be sold.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

192. “I believe that spiritual resistance – the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions when everything around us asks us to concede, that our capacity to face the harsh measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river the rocks. There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is the best retrieved in solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

193. “Boundaries are fears made manifest, designed to protect us. I don’t want protection, I want freedom.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

194. “Without manners, violence enters the room. Without the decency of imagination, narcissism leads.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

195. “These valleys, these rivers- creased, folded, and pushed. What wisdom mountains house. My God- they are Gods. My God has feet of Earth. We are flickering moths in migration.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

196. “I trace my genealogy back to the land. Human and wild, I can see myself whole, not isolated but integrated in time and place. Our genetic makeup is not so different from the collared lizard, the canyon wren now calling, or the great horned owl who watches from the cottonwood near the creek. Mountain lion is as mysterious a creature as any soul I know. Is not the tissue of family always a movement between harmony and distance?”

— Terry Tempest Williams

197. “Every time we make love to a human being, fully, we are making love to everything that lives and breathes. In that sense it becomes communion. It is a sacrament.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

198. “Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in a concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen home and the bird-worms are calmed into an ars poetica.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

199. “I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

200. “Democracy is an insecure landscape.”

— Terry Tempest Williams