Top 250 Terry Tempest Williams Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “But what thrilled me most was the fact that millions of meteors burn up every day as they enter our atmosphere. As a result, Earth receives ten tons of dust from outer space. Not only do we take in the world with each breath, we are inhaling the universe. We are made of stardust.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

202. “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

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

206. “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

207. “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

208. “Wilderness holds an original presence giving expression to that which we lack, the losses we long to recover, the absences we seek to fill. Wilderness revives the memory of unity. Through its protection we can find faith in our humanity.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

209. “The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

210. “All we have is time.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

211. “We are aching to come together and I think it has little to do with liberal or conservative discourse. I think it has to do with increasing disconnection with what is real and soul-serving.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

212. “I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?”

— Terry Tempest Williams

213. “I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear – of women’s voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

214. “This is an incredibly creative time. It is a difficult time. It is a disparaging time. A time of cultural and global transitions based on the realization that the Earth cannot support nonsustainable practices anymore.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

215. “I think that it’s too much to take on the world. It’s too much to take on Los Angeles. All I can do is to go back home to the canyon where we live and ask the kinds of questions that can make a difference in our neighborhoods.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

216. “Hopefully there will come a time when I have no words, when I can honor and hold that kind of stillness that I so need, crave, and desire in the natural world.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

217. “Not everything is meant for all to hear.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

218. “I still have great faith in democracy. I have great belief in the power of community.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

219. “I will never be able to say what is in my heart because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

220. “If so, then it was also here where I came to know I can survive what hurts. I believed in my capacity to stand back up and run into the waves again and again, no matter the risk.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

221. “To this day, my spiritual life is found inside the heart of the wild. I do not fear it, I court it. When I am away, I anticipate my return, needing to touch stone, rock, water, the trunks of trees, the sway of grasses, the barbs of a feather, the fur left behind by a shedding bison.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

222. “These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

223. “I appreciate all of the unexpected places, internal and external, that my writing has taken me.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

224. “I don’t set boundaries for myself when I am writing; if I did, I would be paralyzed from the start, unable to write a word on the page.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

225. “Terry, to keep hoping for life in the midst of letting go is to rob me of the moment I am in.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

226. “I worry, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

227. “We’re animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it’s what binds us as human beings.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

228. “Style is like voice, it grows organically from the truth of one’s own life experience. Not in terms of chapters, per se, but in terms of stories. It is the story itself that creates an inherent structure.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

229. “I am of this place. Family is a place, and my family s located here, those who are living and those who have passed. I am am settled in the scent of sage, Mount Moran’s reflection at Oxbow Bend is more than a mirror of memories; it is the joy found in river otters, a reminder that there are places in the world we can return for peace unchanged.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

230. “Perhaps it is not so much what we learn that matters in these moments of awe and wonder, but what we feel in relationship to a world beyond ourselves, even beyond our own species.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

231. “That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about – the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

232. “We are a tribe of fractured individuals who can now only celebrate remnants of wildness.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

233. “I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

234. “I believe the personal is the collective. One of the ironies of writing memoir is in using the “I” it becomes an alchemical “we.” This is the sorcery of literature.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

235. “Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

236. “At the heart of Mormonism is a high regard for community. That is its strength. I have great respect for that.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

237. “I grew up in a culture in which it was a sin for a woman to speak out.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

238. “Our institutions and agencies are no longer working for us. It is time to reimagine the wilderness movement as a movement of direct action, time to reimagine our public lands as sanctuaries, refuges, and sacred lands. Time to rethink what is acceptable and what is not.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

239. “I think I must be worried all the time – maybe that is the other side of joy, you know, holding that line of the full range of emotions.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

240. “We are wearing coats of trust. When one tells a story this is what happens.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

241. “I feel like we are at a time of great creativity if we choose to embrace it as such, if we choose to engage the will of our imaginations and imagine another way of being in the world.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

242. “I love the ordered mind of history because it takes us out of the chaos, momentarily, and says, “Ah, so this is the story we are engaged in.””

— Terry Tempest Williams

243. “Wilderness is not a place of privilege, but rather a place of probity, where the evolutionary processes of life are free to continue.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

244. “I think that the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the source of our power lies.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

245. “Whatever artistry may occur within the manuscript, the magic happens for me in the last draft. Whatever I have been resistant to say must finally be said. In the end, I see where my pencil has been leading me.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

246. “Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But 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

247. “I come from a culture that embodies the need to convert others to “the truth.” The Mormon Church has one of the largest missionary programs in the world. That does not interest me.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

248. “What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

249. “Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

250. “As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.”

— Terry Tempest Williams