Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing -- faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

There is no one true church, no one chosen people.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

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

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

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

I am a woman with wings,' I once wrote and will revise these words again. 'I am a woman with wings dancing with other women with wings.' In a voiced community, we all flourish.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

The nature of living and loving is the act of reciprocity. As women, we are told that to be the guest is to receive. We are told that to be the host is to give. But what if it is the reverse? What if it is the guest who gives to the host and it is the host who receives from the guest each time she sets her table to welcome and feed those she loves? To be the guest and the host simultaneously is to imagine a mutual exchange of gifts predicated on respect and joy. If we could adopt this truth, perhaps we as women would be less likely to become martyrs.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

~ Terry Tempest Williams

How we treat our land, how we build upon it, how we act toward our air and water, in the long run, will tell what kind of people we really are.-Laurance S. Rockefeller

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

The mind creates those things that exist.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

When it comes to words, rather than using our own voice, authentic and unpracticed, we steal someone else's to shield our fear.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

~ Terry Tempest Williams

words are much stronger than I am.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

To be read. To be heard. To be seen. I want to be read, I want to be heard. I don't need to be seen. 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. Words have a weight to them. How you choose to present them and to whom is a matter of style and choice.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

~ Terry Tempest Williams

I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don't want to see. If we refuse to face our shadow, it will project itself on someone else so we have no choice but to engage.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don’t want to see

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Grief dares us to love once more.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

I have found what I need most to heal a broken bond is time together—the very thing I avoid is the thing most desired.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are.A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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