Top 250 Terry Tempest Williams Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “We mask our needs as the needs of others.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

153. “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

154. “If you waste water, you die.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

155. “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

156. “Silence introduced in a society that worships noise is like the Moon exposing the night. Behind darkness is our fear. Within silence our voice dwells. What is required from both is that we be still. We focus. We listen. We see and we hear. The unexpected emerges.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

157. “I can’t imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn’t we?”

— Terry Tempest Williams

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

164. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

166. “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

167. “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

168. “I love the interrelatedness of things.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

173. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “Agitation gives birth to creation.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

183. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

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

— 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. “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

190. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

195. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

197. “My family lives all around me. We see each other daily. It’s very, very complicated. I think that families hold us together and they split us apart.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

198. “Democracy is an insecure landscape.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

200. “This is what we can promise the future: a legacy of care. That we will be good stewards and not take too much or give back too little, that we will recognize wild nature for what it is, in all its magnificent and complex history – an unfathomable wealth that should be consciously saved, not ruthlessly spent.”

— Terry Tempest Williams