110+ Terry Tempest Williams Quotes On Education, Nature And World

Terry Tempest Williams is an American author, environmentalist, and activist. She is best known for her books that explore the connection between humanity and the natural world. Her works often focus on the American Southwest and the area of the Great Basin Desert, where she was born and raised. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Terry Tempest Williams on education, nature, love.

Top 10 Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

1. To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.
2. The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.
3. Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.
4. Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.
5. The unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.
6. There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.
7. Our power lies in our love of our homelands.
8. I take a deep breath and sidestep my fear and begin speaking from the place where beauty and bravery meet--within the chambers of a quivering heart.
9. Abundance is a dance with reciprocity - what we can give, what we can share, and what we receive in the process.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.
• This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.
• Greed is a deprivation of abundance, a hoarding, a constriction of energy.
• I still have great faith in democracy. I have great belief in the power of community.
• Through revision, I enter the realm of the unspeakable and find the words that have eluded me.
• My body is a compass - and it does not lie.
• What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?
• Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.
• As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.
• The human heart is the first home of democracy.

Terry Tempest Williams Quotes About Nature

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

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

I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels. — Terry Tempest Williams

The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse. — Terry Tempest Williams

If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.... This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future. — Terry Tempest Williams

We forget the nature of true power. The power within is abundance. The power without is greed. — 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

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

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

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

Terry Tempest Williams Quotes About Love

I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change. — Terry Tempest Williams

I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a "conspiracy" against higher thoughts. — Terry Tempest Williams

I love the interrelatedness of things. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

Community is extremely intimate. When we talk about humor, I love that you know when you're home because there is laughter in the room, there is humor, there is shorthand. That is about community. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

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

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

Terry Tempest Williams Quotes About Life

Water is nothing if not ingemination, an encore to the tenacity of life. — Terry Tempest Williams

The Japanese have a word - aware - which, in my understanding is, again, that full range - both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

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

I am interested and deeply curious about our need for a spiritual life, a life of greater meaning, and how we come to a more ethical view of life within our communities that is more inclusive than exclusive, one that is extended even beyond our own species. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

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

The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words - without locks, open on my shelves. — Terry Tempest Williams

Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

Terry Tempest Williams Quotes About World

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

What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart. — Terry Tempest Williams

I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. — Terry Tempest Williams

I really do believe if there is hope in the world, then it is to be found within our own communities with our own neighbors, and within our own homes and families. — Terry Tempest Williams

Our correspondences have wings - paper birds that fly from my house to yours - flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

We're human, this is our world, and I think we learn that that which is most personal is most general. And so, in a sense, we disappear into this larger world. — Terry Tempest Williams

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in the world that often appears black and white. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

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

Terry Tempest Williams Quotes About Writing

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

There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private. — Terry Tempest Williams

I appreciate all of the unexpected places, internal and external, that my writing has taken me. — Terry Tempest Williams

The discipline of writing a memoir comes in the editing. This is where I cut, slash, and burn - where my creative mind is transformed into a ruthless one. No word escapes my scrutiny. It is here where I see what boundaries need to be set. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

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

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

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

The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

Terry Tempest Williams Famous Quotes And Sayings

If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found. — Terry Tempest Williams

For me, it always comes back to the land, respecting the land, the wildlife, the plants, the rivers, mountains, and deserts, the absolute essential bedrock of our lives. This is the source of where my power lies, the source of where all our power lies. — Terry Tempest Williams

We are animal. We are Earth. We are water. We are a community of human beings living on this planet together. And we forget that. We become disconnected, we lose our center point of gravity, that stillness that allows us to listen to life on a deeper level and to meet each other in a fully authentic and present way. — 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

I live in a very, very quiet place. I have a sequence to my creative life. In spring and fall, I am above ground and commit to community. In the summer, I'm outside. It is a time for family. And in the winter, I am underground. Home. This is when I do my work as a writer - in hibernation. I write with the bears. — Terry Tempest Williams

There is something very sensual about a letter. The physical contact of pen to paper, the time set aside to focus thoughts, the folding of the paper into the envelope, licking it closed, addressing it, a chosen stamp, and then the release of the letter to the mailbox - are all acts of tenderness. — Terry Tempest Williams

Creativity ignited a spark. In that moment, I saw that art is not peripheral, beauty is not optional, but a strategy for survival. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

To hold silence and to be silenced are two very different experiences. And so another theme emerges, that of light and shadow. When we share our voice, who benefits? When we withhold, who benefits? And what are the consequences and costs of both? — Terry Tempest Williams

When you are with a landscape or a human being where there is no need to speak, but simply to listen, to perceive, to feel. — Terry Tempest Williams

I am not so interested in religion or dogma of any kind. It is too restrictive for me, too organizational, too hierarchical, and too tied up in power and being right. You call it a "rabid evangelism." — Terry Tempest Williams

The sin we commit against each other as women is lack of support. We hurt. We hurt each other. We hide. We project. We become mute or duplicitous, and we fester like boiling water until one day we erupt like a geyser. Do we forget we unravel in grief? — Terry Tempest Williams

A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

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

As children, we had access to all the open space imaginable. We would set up camps in rural Utah where the Tempest Company was at work laying pipe. We spent time around the West in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado. Wild beautiful places. Now, many of these natural places have disappeared under the press of development. — Terry Tempest Williams

Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It’s hard sometimes. — Terry Tempest Williams

...if we allow ourselves contemplative time in nature-whether it's gardening, going for a walk with the dog, or being in the heart of the southern Utah wilderness-then we can hear the voice of our conscience. If we listen to that voice, it asks us to be conscious. And if we become conscious we choose to live lives of consequence. — Terry Tempest Williams

I can only tell where I feel most at home, which is in the erosional landscape of the red rock desert of southern Utah, where the Colorado River cuts through sandstone and the geologic history of the Earth is exposed: our home in Castle Valley. — Terry Tempest Williams

To engage in civil disobedience is to feel the abundance of courage, the gratitude for a democracy that still invites us to speak from our hearts, to act from our conscience and have faith in the consequences of moral action. Abundance is a form of consciousness. — Terry Tempest Williams

Lanscape shapes culture. — Terry Tempest Williams

The act of civil disobedience is the act of taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistance. — Terry Tempest Williams

There is an unraveling, a great unraveling that I believe is occurring. Not without its pain, not without its frustration. Perhaps the fundamentalism we see within America right now is in response to these changes. We fear change, and so we cling to what is known. — Terry Tempest Williams

Blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

I look at Los Angeles and I ask myself, How can this ever be sustainable? And what are we contributing to that? Because we are all complicit. None of us is without blame. It's so difficult and it's so overwhelming and I think we have to make small choices in our own lives that can loom large collectively. — Terry Tempest Williams

I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think, "Ah, yes, evolution." It's there, we just forget. — Terry Tempest Williams

I wonder how, among the Fremont, mothers and daughters shared their world. Did they walk side by side along the lake edge? What stories did they tell while weaving strips of bulrush into baskets? How did daughters bury their mothers and exercise their grief? What were the secret rituals of women? I feel certain they must have been tied to birds. — Terry Tempest Williams

Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision. — Terry Tempest Williams

John Cobb is saying that perhaps we are beginning to see that now as our greed goes completely out of control and everything is seen through money, through corporate power, etc., etc. We know it well. He asked the question, What will be the holocaust that takes us to the next era? - which he describes as "Earthism." — 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 think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

I grew up in a culture in which it was a sin for a woman to speak out. — Terry Tempest Williams

Agitation gives birth to creation. — 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

I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home. — Terry Tempest Williams

My activism is a result of my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse - to try to make sense of the world, to try to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries of what is acceptable. — Terry Tempest Williams

Perhaps the Wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silence that reminds us we live by grace. — Terry Tempest Williams

We mask our needs as the needs of others. — Terry Tempest Williams

Story is a sacred visualization, a way of echoing experience. — 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

To me, we are in the midst of such broad-scale destruction, both psychically and physically, that the only thing that can threaten the grip, loosen the hold, of economism, I believe, is a discussion of the sacred born out of our regard and compassion and intelligence for the earth and the creatures on the earth. — Terry Tempest Williams

My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty. — Terry Tempest Williams

Find something that matters deeply to you and pursue it. Question. Stand. Speak. Act. Make us uncomfortable. Make us think. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

Abundance is an expansion of energy. Abundance is a form of gratitude, a generosity, a modesty, a bow toward others - what we can give, what we can share, rather than what we can take. — Terry Tempest Williams

I write about nuclear tests in Refuge - "The Clan of One-Breasted Women." With so many of the women in my family being diagnosed with breast cancer, mastectomies led to one-breasted women. I believe it is the result of nuclear fallout. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES when we go against our instincts? What are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt? — Terry Tempest Williams

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

I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient. — Terry Tempest Williams

To hear something asks very little of us. To listen places our entire being on notice. — Terry Tempest Williams

I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. 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

Hope radiates outward from the center of our concerns. Hope dares us to stare the miraculous in the eye and have the courage not to look away. — Terry Tempest Williams

It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

An individual doesn't get cancer, a family does. — 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

Storytelling is the oldest form of education. — Terry Tempest Williams

Greed says there is never enough. Abundance says there is more than enough. Greed closes the door behind itself. Abundance opens the door for others. — Terry Tempest Williams

Life Lessons by Terry Tempest Williams

1. Terry Tempest Williams teaches us to be mindful of our environment and to take action to protect it. She encourages us to listen to the stories of the land and to appreciate the beauty of nature.
2. She emphasizes the importance of connecting with our inner selves and the power of the written word in order to make a positive impact on the world.
3. Finally, she reminds us that we are all part of a larger community and that we must work together to create a better future.